Money Talks.(planning the economic policy)

A few weeks ago, Peter Orszag, President Obama's trim, apple-cheeked budget director, stretched out in the green room of what has become, in recent years, the locus of reliably liberal sensibility in this country--the midtown studios where Jon Stewart tapes "The Daily Show." Orszag's day had been a reflection of the Obama Administration's frenetic attempts to stave off worldwide economic disaster--urgent phone calls, BlackBerry messages, meetings with the editorial boards of the Times and the Wall Street Journal, lunch with Mayor Bloomberg, constant communications about wavering members of Congress preparing to vote for (or against) Obama's budget--yet Orszag remained well pressed, in a dark pin-striped suit and black cowboy boots. After a while, he spotted a gift bag on the coffee table nearby. Orszag's girlfriend, Claire Milonas, and his communications director, Kenneth Baer, joked about whether the free hat and Irish liqueur inside complied with White House ethics rules banning gifts that cost more than twenty dollars. "I bet this only retails for twelve," Baer said, pointing to a "Daily Show" T-shirt.

Stewart appeared in the doorway, and Orszag sprang from his chair to greet him. Stewart had been reviewing his guest's bulletproof resume: Exeter, Princeton, the London School of Economics, the Clinton White House, the Congressional Budget Office, Obama's Cabinet. He craned his neck as if searching for hawks in a redwood. Orszag is six-two. Stewart is not.

"You're way taller than you're supposed to be," Stewart said. "I've been reading all these articles about you. They're making me feel like shit. The doctorate in economics, and the jogging, and you're six years younger than me, and now you're fucking taller, too. I don't care for this. It is not right."

Orszag is also way younger than he should be. He turned forty in December--making him the youngest member of a young Cabinet. As director of the Office of Management and Budget, he is occupied with conceiving, drafting, selling, and passing the President's budget. And he is doing this while his colleagues Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, the Treasury Secretary and the director of the National Economic Council, are charged with rescuing the national banking system and the automobile industry.

Aides who thought that they were coming to Washington to achieve universal health insurance, rescue inner-city schools, or save the planet from global warming tend to view the Administration's work on the financial system as a black hole threatening to swallow the real Obama agenda, with all its Rooseveltian ambition--an agenda crafted in the pre-crisis innocence of the early Presidential campaign. This agenda is stubbornly expressed in exquisite detail in the President's budget, which Orszag released on February 26th. Unlike buying toxic assets, bailing out insurance and automobile companies, and the rest of the economic-crisis management that has dominated the first months of the new Administration, the budget is a reminder of why Obama ran for President. That makes Peter Orszag more than just the budget director. He is the unlikely guardian of Obamaism itself.

In the green room, Orszag was trying to get this message across to Stewart, who kept up his routine while feigning stupidity, all the while sneaking in well-informed questions.

"This has nothing to do with the budget--it's this thing that I can't get out of my head," Stewart said. "With all that bailout stuff, why are they bailing out the banks?" Why not the borrowers? He went on, "These mortgages went bad, and then they were securitized, and blah blah blah. So that's all there." He held up a hand to represent mortgages. "So why not fix the mortgages, not the securities?" He made a circle in the air to represent securitized loans.