FORTUNE -- I interviewed Jacob Lew, President Obama's second Treasury Secretary, last Thursday. A few nights earlier I asked a roomful of businesspeople if anyone could name the man who runs fiscal policy for the world's only superpower. No one could. And so I embarked on a week of study to bone up a little bit on the man and more on the challenges he faces.
Lew is a lawyer who has spent most of his career in government, with stints in the Clinton and Obama administrations. He was director of the Office of Management and Budget initially, then the president's chief of staff, and he succeeded Timothy Geithner earlier this year. He's currently heading up three main initiatives for the administration: regulatory reform (a.k.a. implementing the Dodd-Frank legislation enacted three years ago); keeping the government funded, including facing down House Republicans on their whack-job refusal to authorize raising the government's borrowing limit; and the president's economic policy initiatives, a grab-bag of small-bore proposals that sound good but aren't likely to have much of an impact.
It's a tough job, and the No. 1 thing I learned from Lew is that to be in that job one must excel at not answering questions. It's practically a pre-requisite.
I asked Lew how the government could have missed more than 60% of its deadlines in implementing Dodd-Frank, according to a well publicized study by the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. He waved off that study as having unspecified accuracy issues. Dodd-Frank is complex, he said, and needs to be done right. No argument there, but it's mystifying how blasé government officials can be about missing their deadlines, and I'm annoyed with myself for not pushing him harder on that point.
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