Being Tim Geithner

For Tim Geithner, it’s been a difficult week.

“Conservatives agree that as point person, you failed,” Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) told the Treasury secretary yesterday during a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee. “Liberals are growing in that consensus as well. Poll after poll shows that the American public has lost confidence in this president’s ability to handle the economy. For the sake of our jobs, will you step down from your post?”

Geithner, of course, didn’t budge, arguing that it was Congress that left the new administration “an economy falling off the cliff.”

“Almost nothing of what you said represents a fair and accurate perception of where this economy is today,” Geithner told Brady.

And on some counts he’s right. Since Geithner’s swearing-in 10 months ago, the stock market has rebounded and the investment-banking industry has flourished. Yet little of that high-altitude recovery has trickled down to middle-class America, where homeowners continue to sink and unemployment is at a 26-year high.

That discrepancy has led some liberal Democrats to go after the White House recovery strategy as well. Earlier in the week, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) blasted Geithner and others on Obama’s economic team for hoarding unspent Wall Street bailout money instead of allowing Congress to tap some of it for infrastructure projects — a plan that would help shift the recovery to Main Street.

“Unfortunately, the president has an adviser from Wall Street, Larry Summers, and an adviser from Wall Street, Timmy Geithner, who don’t like that idea,” DeFazio told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Wednesday. ”They want to keep the money [because] there may be more needs on Wall Street.”

None of this, of course, should come as any surprise. Geithner headed New York’s Federal Reserve Bank for the five years prior to his appointment atop Treasury, forming entrenched allegiances to Wall Street. So if there’s anything new in these latest episodes, it’s only that Congress is finally discovering where the loyalties of the Treasury secretary actually rest.