Does Joe Biden hate Jack Lew?
Timothy P. Carney
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Some are speculating whether President Joe Biden is punishing Jack Lew by naming him as the U.S. ambassador to Israel.
My colleague, Seth Mandel, is making a joke about the undesirability of the job, but if Biden actually meant what he said, he would actually dislike Lew.
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Biden regularly inveighs against lobbyists and Wall Street. The president will “fight the influence of corporations and special interests in our political system,” his campaign spokesman says.
Biden obviously doesn’t mean it because his campaign and his transition team were run by revolving-door lobbyists and his administration is packed tight with Wall Street and K Street types. The president’s latest appointment of Lew, who previously served as the White House chief of staff and the treasury secretary, is yet another example of how, despite Biden’s down-home-populist talk, all of his best friends are Wall Street lobbyist types.
Lew rose to the very top of Capitol Hill’s Democratic staff, and when his boss Tip O’Neill retired from Congress in 1986, Lew cashed out to lobbying firm Van Ness Feldman, where he became partner and specialized “in energy and regulatory law,” the New York Times reported at the time.
Lew was never a registered lobbyist, but during his years at Van Ness Feldman, there was no federal lobbyist registry.
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After his stint in the Clinton administration, Lew eventually cashed out to Wall Street, landing at megabank Citibank in 2006. In January 2008, Lew took the helm of Citi Alternative Investments. Later that year, Citi failed (thanks in part to the sort of proprietary trading that CAI handled) and got bailed out. When Lew left Citi in January 2009, he received a million-dollar payout from the bank that, at the time, was existing on the taxpayer dime.
This revolving-door story of career success doesn’t undermine Lew’s qualification as ambassador to Israel. But it does show, in case you wondered, that Biden has no problem with Wall Street or K Street — otherwise, he would have a problem with Jack Lew.