A reader hears about Barack Obama meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and wonders if there is precedent. “If he wants to better inform his views on the economy, that’s what his (salaried) economic advisers are for. This strikes me as extremely presumptuous, but then again, it might be just me.”
I’m looking at Alan Greenspan’s autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, page 206:
My first meeting with President-elect Bush took place on December 18, 2000, less than a week after the Supreme Court decision that enabled him to claim his election victory… This was his first trip to Washingon as president-elect; we’d met a few times over the years but had spoken at length only once before, on the dais at a banquet that spring.
Working backwards, we turn to page 143:
I’d met Clinton in early December, when he was president-elect.
Page 118:
I would see President Bush every six or seven weeks, usually in the context of meeting with others but sometimes one-on-one. We had known each other since the Ford years. He’d even had me over to Langley for lunch when he was director of Central Intelligence in 1976.
So there’s no direct precedent for a candidate to meet with the Federal Reserve Chairman during the campaign, at least not recently. Yet in the cases of both Bushes, Greenspan had had discussions, if not formal briefings, with them before they took office, and it’s not unreasonable for a candidate to want to get as much information about the economy as possible. And it sounds like it’s just a briefing:
“He wants an update on where the economy is and where it’s going,” the Obama adviser said. “He’s not there to tell Bernanke how to do his job.”
If the Great Seal of Obamaland was an “8″ on the presumptuousness scale, this is about a 2 or 3.