Last night, on the "Virtually Speaking" discussion about the media with Jay Rosen of NYU, we talked about the phenomenon of things that everyone in the press corp "knows" but that don't make their way into news stories or broadcasts. One such category involves things that everyone suspects but can't quite prove -- for instance, how involved Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were in the Valerie Plame case. Or, to make it bipartisan, about Bill Clinton's sexual behavior over the years. But another category, which I think is even more important, involves things that everyone "knows" but has stopped noticing. This is very similar to what is called "Village" behavior in the big time media.
An item in this second category has just come up: the decision of Peter Orszag, until recently the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama, to join Citibank in a senior position. Exactly how much it will pay is not clear, but informed guesses are several million dollars per year. Citibank, of course, was one of the institutions most notably dependent on federal help to survive in these past two years.

Objectively this is both damaging and shocking.
- Damaging, in that it epitomizes and personalizes a criticism both left and right have had of the Obama Administration's "bailout" policy: that it's been too protective of the financial system's high-flying leaders, and too reluctant to hold any person or institution accountable. Of course there's a strong counter argument to be made, in the spirit of Obama's recent defense of his tax-cut compromise. (Roughly: that it would have been more satisfying to let Citi and others fail, but the results would have been much more damaging to the economy as a whole.) But it's a harder argument to make when one of your senior officials has moved straight to the (very generous) Citi payroll. Any competent Republican ad-maker is already collecting clips of Orszag for use in the next campaign.