President Barack Obama as a candidate seemed to possess the potential of a transformational leader, a man called by destiny who could be equal to the seemingly insurmountable challenges bequeathed by George W. Bush.

I tried to be patient while he found his way in the biggest job there is, imagining a day he would be ready to fight to deliver the change he promised so eloquently on the campaign trail.

Well short of his first anniversary in the Oval Office I felt a numb gnawing in the pit of my stomach at the way his administration seems beholden to or seduced by the very bankers who wrecked our economy.

Even before he took office it was hard not to notice that the progressives at his side in his masterful historic journey to the White House seemed exiled upon arrival.

One that sticks in my mind is University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee. A chief campaign adviser, Goolsbee aggressively ripped Wall Street and said AIG honchos should receive a Nobel Prize – “for evil.”

Goolsbee was banished from the inner circle on Nov. 5, 2008 – a whole day after the election.

Goolsbee went to something called the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
In March 2008, Former Fed chief Paul Volcker helped write a speech declaring that the deregulation of the 1980s and ’90s “excused and even embraced an ethic of greed, corner-cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system.”

Volcker also went to PERAB.

Along comes Rolling Stone’s eight-page Dec. 10 package on “Obama’s big sellout,” largely written by Matt Taibbi, which connects enough new dots to set my head reeling again.

I noticed that the president packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway.

TARP giveaways resuscitated Wall Street – not reformed it.

But it’s even worse than I realized. Instead of a Lincolnesque team of rivals, we have a “team of Rubins,” as in Bob, Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration (1993-1999).

“What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history,” Taibbi writes. “Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street.

“Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is? … some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street’s political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer’s role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry.

“At one point in the debate, Obama’s top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval – and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals … It started just moments after the election – and almost nobody noticed.”

The search for the president’s new economic team was led by Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive.

Froman served as Rubin’s chief of staff at Citigroup, the financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves Rubin pushed through.

Rubin joined Citigroup in 1999 after repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to enable the Citigroup megamerger and deregulating the derivatives market.

Rubin also ran Goldman Sachs (1990-1992).

Citigroup’s $306 billion bailout was complete last Nov. 23.

Let’s not forget that then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had been head of Goldman Sachs.

His successor, New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, served under Rubin in the Clinton White House.

Even Budget Director Peter Orszag is tied to Rubin through a think tank.
In that colorful Hunter Thompson style, Taibbi wants Geithner fired as the “living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration.”

“The point is,” Taibbi writes, “an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaires has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place.”

Remember NAFTA, which hastened the shipping of blue-collar jobs to other countries?
Candidate Obama said, “NAFTA’s shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them.”

So where was the big news from the April conference call when U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk quietly let it be know that options “can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement.”

So much for Obama’s populist posturing in the Midwest.

Where is the senator who worked with Barney Frank on a bill targeting executive compensation?

So much for comparisons to FDR, who instituted stringent rules during the Great Depression to curb financial abuses.

He’s certainly no trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt.

The Obama administration is scarily institutionalizing the Bush-Cheney mantra of a few rich plutocrats plundering everyone else, who are left with crumbs and a big bill for bailing out their bad bets.

Congress is too busy watering down real reform of any kind to seriously consider dismantling”too-big-to-fail” banks.

Goldman, Citi, Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America control 95 percent of the $290 trillion derivatives market.

In the consumer-lending arena, Citi, Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo issue every other mortgage and two of every three credit cards.

One thing I don’t get is why Rubin hasn’t rubbed off on Obama with former opposition to deficit spending that was central to Rubin’s thinking.

Quips, quotes and qulunkers: “Bob Rubin, these guys, they’re classic limousine liberals. These are basically people who have made (lots) of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they’re willing to give a little more to the poor. That’s the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else.”

— former Democratic strategist David Sirota. An inspector general charged with overseeing TARP estimates the total tab for the Wall Street bailouts could eventually reach $23.7 TRILLION. And you’re worried about the cost of health care?

John Eby is Daily News managing editor. E-mail him at john.eby @leaderpub.com.