Has Timothy Geithner Given The GOP An Election Issue?

Now that Timothy Geithner is stepping down from his job as Secretary of the Treasury,  commentators are writing about his legacy.  Simon Johnson has not been one of Geithner's supporters.  He believes that Geithner allowed the "too big to fail" banks to become even bigger.  Moreover, the Obama administration failed to prosecute bankers who committed fraud. 

Johnson suggests that Geithner, and the Obama Justice Department, may have given the GOP an issue that would have lots of public support.  The Wall Street banks are not very popular with the public.  The government has been criticized from the left, and from the right, for its bailout of the big banks.  Sheila Bair, a Republican Chairperson of the FDIC, was very critical of Geithner in her book, and Peggy Noonan, a conservative writer for the WSJ, was very critical of the bailout.  The GOP could have turned this into an issue that would resonate with the public.  The special treatment that government has provided for systemically important banks has given them a competitive advantage over thousands of small banks that cannot borrow money at the same rates as banks that are protected from default by the government.

Unfortunately for the GOP, it has lost  opportunity to take advantage of the administrations favored treatment of the Wall Street bankers.  They successfully weakened efforts to reform the banking system in return for campaign contributions from the banks that went to Romney in the 2012 election.  They have also supported the banking lobby in efforts to weaken the new agency that is supposed to protect consumers from predatory banking practices.