This report seems to confirm the view that Tim Geithner is not up to his job:

Just days before Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner was scheduled to lay out his much-anticipated plan to deal with the toxic assets imperiling the financial system, he and his team made a sudden about-face. According to several sources involved in the deliberations, Geithner had come to the conclusion that the strategies he and his team had spent weeks working on were too expensive, too complex and too risky for taxpayers.

So they belatedly realized the plan was a nonstarter and in essence tried to fake their way through the rollout, offering only the barest outline of a plan for which they’d have to fill in the blanks later. (Sort of like when you didn’t read the right book and had to fake your way through the book report in class.)

Now, remember we had to look the other way and ignore Geithner’s tax cheating because he was the only guy in America who could do this job. But this sounds like amateur hour:

Public acceptance of the plan suffered from several missteps, said sources involved in the decision-making or in close contact with those who were.

The Obama administration, they said, failed to rein in the grand expectations built for the plan on Wall Street and in Washington, concluding that they would rather disappoint the markets with vagueness than lay out a lot of details they might have to change later — a failing they saw in the Bush administration’s handling of the crisis.

Meanwhile, the sources said, Obama’s senior economic advisers were hobbled in crafting the plan by a shortage of personnel. . . .Moreover, the department made a strategic decision to limit input from the financial industry and other outsiders, aiming to prevent leaks and avoid a perception they were designing the plan for the benefit of big banks.  . .

At the center of the deliberations with Geithner were Lawrence H. Summers, chief White House economic adviser; Lee Sachs, a Clinton administration official likely to be named undersecretary for domestic finance; and Gene Sperling, another former Clinton aide. The debates among them were long and vigorous as they thrashed countless proposals and variations. Sometimes, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila C. Bair and Comptroller of the Currency John C. Dugan joined in.

So to review: they raised expectations, they had insufficient personnel to do the real work and too many uber-cooks stirring the pot, they didn’t get input they needed and they went ahead with the roll out anyway. Oh, and Geithner had really been thinking about this for nineteen months. And this is what he came up with.

You have to question the executive skills of both the Treasury Secretary and his boss (who is ultimately responsible for Geithner and the disastrous roll out). And next time someone explains that he has been too sloppy, inattentive and distracted to abide by simple rules in governing his own life, it’s probably a clue we shouldn’t put him in a job with huge responsibilities demanding astute judgment and keen executive leadership skills.