Send In The Rocket Scientist
Watched the U.S. presidential debate last night and neither could explain their position on this $700 billion bailout/rescue. Seems their economic talking points haven’t changed much in six months (Main Street, middle class, tax the rich). We need Madison Avenue to start selling these leading candidates.
Now we’ve got an interesting angle, as far as we’re concerned and way to go, NPR! They called it before we did in today’s Morning Edition piece on Neel Kashkari, the new Interim Assistant-secretary for Financial Stability: "Ex-Rocket Scientist To Oversee Financial Bailout." He worked on NASA’s Jame Webb Space Telescope at TRW. Click here to listen:
Back in the 1990s, Tom Dautel worked on a team led by Kashkari to design a solar car called the Photon Torpedo at the University of Illinois. He says Kashkari worked like a slave, often even on projects he wasn’t directly overseeing.
"He meant business. He wanted to get the job done. He was very focused, and it doesn’t surprise me he ended up where he is," Dautel says.
Poorni Bid says Kashkari’s intensity made the man she and other classmates called Rocket Scientist seem wise and competent beyond his years.
"He stood out in just his focus and just his intensity," she says. "And you’d think everyone in MBA school would be like that, but there was a different quality about him."
The Independent (U.K.) gives us some background:
Before he became one of the "masters of the universe", as the ambitious bankers of Wall Street are known, Mr Kashkari was headed towards becoming a master of the cosmos, doing important work for Nasa’s space program. Banking is not in his blood. Science is. His father, Chapman, is a retired professor of engineering, and his mother Sheila is a pathologist. It was to science that the young Neel Kashkari originally hewed, taking a bachelor’s and a master’s in engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his home state’s flagship public university. His first major career was as a research and development investigator at a company called TRW in Redondo Beach, California, which had an illustrious history as a contractor to Nasa, creating several of its deep space satellites. At TRW, Mr Kashkari helped develop technology for new space science missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which is due for launch in 2013 as a successor to the ageing Hubble telescope and which will go searching for light from the first stars formed after the Big Bang.
The sheer complexity of this situation will take a rocket scientist to fix, but it’s already affecting the presidential race:
Within the poll numbers, Obama appears to have been helped by a number of factors. For one, voters generally tend to say they believe Democrats are better at handling the economy than Republicans, and that appears to have happened here. A new Hotline poll shows that over the last week the percentage of respondents who feel McCain is better prepared than Obama to handle the economy fell five percentage points, from 43 to 38 percent.
McCain’s personal performance, from his attempt to cancel the initial presidential debate to his silence in presidential meetings on the bailout, did not gain him new votes, at least in the short term. A USA Today/Gallup poll taken before the bailout failed to pass the House on Monday showed that 53 percent of respondents judged his actions unfavorably.
