The Obama White House
is a “hostile” environment for women even though they occupy many of
the senior positions in the West Wing, according to a new book.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including President Obama, for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President," which will be released Sept. 20.
The
book portrays a White House in which Obama struggled with a divided
group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their
high-profile roles. And top female advisers said they felt left out of
key meetings or overpowered by their male counterparts.
“This
place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House
communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying, according to the
Washington Post, which obtained a copy. “Because it actually fits all
of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to
women.”
Dunn told the newspaper in an interview on Friday that she
told Suskind “point blank” that the White House “was not a hostile
environment.”
“The president is someone who when he goes home at
night he goes home to a house full of very strong women,” she said. “He
values having strong women around him.”
But a top female official blamed Obama for leading a boys’ club.
“The
president has a real woman problem. The idea of the boys’ club being
just Larry and Rahm isn’t fair,” she told Suskind, referring to former
Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council. Obama “was just as responsible himself.”
Christina Romer,
former head of the Council of Economic advisers, described one meeting
for Suskind in which she was “boxed out” by Summers, the Washington Post
reported.
“I felt like a piece of meat,” she said.
The book
also offers accounts of disagreement among advisers over how large a
stimulus was necessary to revive the economy and how aggressively to
deal with financial institutions that had become "too big to fail."
Summers
is quoted as lamenting that he and others felt "home alone" and that
mistakes made under Obama would not have happened under President Clinton,
for whom Summers also served. Interviewed by Suskind, Summers initially
denied making such comments, then acknowledged them, saying he was
frustrated at having "five issues" of major importance to deal with at
once and not "five times as many" officials to handle them.
The
book also states Geithner and the Treasury Department ignored a March
2009 order to consider dissolving banking giant Citigroup while
continuing stress tests on banks, which were burdened with toxic
mortgage assets.
Geithner says in the book that he did not recall
that Obama was mad at him about the Citigroup decision and rejected
allegations contained in White House documents that his department had
been slow to enact the president's plans.
"I don't slow walk the president on anything," Geithner told Suskind.
"The
Citbank incident, and others like it, reflected a more pernicious and
personal dilemma emerging from inside the administration: that the young
president's authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by
his seasoned advisers," Suskind writes.
The book also says Emanuel
was not the president's first choice for the position. According to
Suskind, Emanuel's name was not even on the initial short list, which
included White House aide Pete Rouse.
The White House is downplaying the information in the book.
“Books
like these tend to take the normal day to day activities of governing
and infuse them with drama, palace intrigue and salacious details based
on anonymous accounts,” White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said in a statement to Fox News.
“The
truth is simply and well known: President Obama and his economic team
walked into office during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression
and took bold, decisive action that prevented the collapse of the
financial system, saving millions of jobs and putting the economy back
in a place where it is creating jobs and growing again,” he said.
“The
president made very tough decisions in the most difficult of
circumstances and his team executed those decisions faithfully and
tirelessly,” he added.
An investigative reporter, Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 while working for the Wall Street Journal.
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