All civil servants can look at Geithner's resume and realize that if they work hard, they, too, can rule at least part of the world.
At the same time, these civil servants can examine Geithner's biography and realize that it also helps to make a few good friends along the way to power.
An apprenticeship with Henry Kissinger doesn't hurt. Be sure, too, to get to know a few secretaries of the Treasury and a few Wall Street CEOs.
As a young man, Geithner spent many years living abroad, primarily in Japan and India, moving around because his father was a program officer with the Ford Foundation.
He graduated from Dartmouth College and John Hopkins University with an emphasis in international studies rather than economics.
"Since college, he has pretty much gone straight up the ladder," Gary Weiss writes in Portfolio. "No detours, no backpacking around Europe, no internship fetching coffee."
Geithner's first job was with Kissinger Associates, where he worked with the former secretary of state.
From there, he went to the U.S. Treasury Department, where he rose to become an aide to Lawrence Summers and Robin Rubin, treasury secretaries under Bill Clinton.
He assisted these leaders in putting together bailouts, not of companies but of nations, including Mexico and Indonesia.
During the late 1990s, Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve, also noticed Geithner.
"That whole period was one long crisis," Greenspan told Portfolio. "(Geithner showed) a general understanding of the nature of what the problems were and what was required to right the system."
Geithner's circle of advisers and mentors was expanded in 2003 when he became head of the New York Fed, the most powerful of the government's 12 regional banks.
When Bear Stearns, an investment bank, began to bleed money earlier this year as a result of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage industry, the New York Fed took on damage-control duties.
Geithner served as the point man in the talks that led to the Federal Reserve's loan of $29 billion to assist J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in its buyout of the assets of Bear Sterns.
Whether or not the Fed did the right thing is reflected in the title of Weiss' profile of Geithner, "The Man Who Saved (or Got Suckered by) Wall Street."
That profile and profiles in other publications depict Geithner as extraordinary well-connected.
His informal group of advisers includes E. Gerald Corrigan, a managing director of Goldman Sachs and a former New York Fed president; Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.; John Thain, the CEO of Merrill Lynch; Paul A. Volcker, the former Fed chairman; and Peter G. Peterson, the former U.S. secretary of commerce.
James "Jamie" L. Dimon, the CEO and chairman of J.P. Morgan Chase, is a Geithner ally and a member of the board of the New York Fed.
This connection has raised some eyebrows, for it meant that in solving the Bear Stearns mess Geithner approved a $29 billion loan to a company run by a member of his board.
But Geithner argued that J.P. Morgan met the Fed's criteria, as it was "a sound institution" that could pay back the money. Bear Stearns did not meet this test.
Except for the last two paragraphs - not too shabby. Let's see if he bails out any other friends and then wait for the DR left response - if there is any.
