Word: neill
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dick Cheney, a friend from their days together in the trenches of the Ford Administration, who lured Paul O'Neill from the executive suite at Alcoa and persuaded him to become George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan loved the choice, the Vice President boasted in private two Decembers ago--and surely what made Greenspan happy would tickle the markets too. Except it didn't work out that way. A respected executive whose blunt talk the President at first found refreshing, O'Neill never emerged as a persuasive advocate for the Administration's economic policy...
...Commission chairman Harvey Pitt resigned on election night. Though the abruptness of last week's moves was startling--not least to the two men ousted--it wasn't entirely surprising. Bush's economic team has long been viewed as the weak link in a popular Administration, and both O'Neill and Lindsey were prone to gaffes that embarrassed the boss. "They lack the ability to conceive, the ability to execute and the ability to sell economic policy," said an Administration official. And that pretty much sums up both their job descriptions...
...didn't help that long-simmering policy feuds between O'Neill and Lindsey--at bottom reflecting the mutual distrust between a corporate honcho and an intellectual--were getting increasingly personal. Lindsey was fingered for leaking damaging criticism of O'Neill and Hubbard. At strategy sessions with Bush, O'Neill frequently interrupted Lindsey to disagree with him. "There was no creative tension," says a senior aide, "just tension." After the bloodletting last week, staff members for each man blamed the other for their boss's misfortune. For a White House that prides itself on unity and order, it was an exceptional...
Better sandbox skills are all the more critical as the economy keeps producing nasty surprises such as last week's report that 40,000 more Americans were out of work (not counting O'Neill and Lindsey) and that the unemployment rate had risen to 6%, up from 5.7% the previous month. With the next presidential election less than two years away, "we recognize that we can no longer blame this on our predecessor," says a senior White House adviser. Nor can the Administration afford to prolong domestic turmoil as it seeks to rally public support for a possible war with...
Whatever the final shape of the package, the White House is looking to put together a new team that is camera ready. O'Neill and Lindsey not only were unskilled at presenting the President's plan but often made news with wayward public comments. Lindsey once called the Enron debacle a "tribute to American capitalism." He speculated on the cost of going into battle with Iraq when the rest of the Administration was downplaying war talk and the President was preaching fiscal discipline. O'Neill repeatedly made pronouncements that were far too candid for the markets' delicate constitution...