A onetime engineer turned Goldman Sachs executive, Mr. Kashkari never had strong partisan instincts. Instead, following his boss Henry M. Paulson Jr. to Mr. Bush’s Treasury, he took along Wall Street’s disdain for the culture of Washington.

Image Neel T. Kashkari, a former Treasury official, credits the Wall Street bailout with preventing a worse situation. Credit... Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

As the crisis in an over-leveraged financial system crested last year, that skepticism led him to question the wisdom of seeking bailout money from Congress; he feared that lawmakers would say no and trigger a catastrophic loss of confidence. But lawmakers surprised him, as did the civil servants at Treasury and the Federal Reserve that he calls “patriots” for their frantic efforts to avert disaster.

Mr. Kashkari himself become a target over Treasury’s shifting TARP strategy; one Democratic House member wondered aloud at a hearing whether he was “a chump.” He acknowledges Treasury’s failures in underestimating dangers to the economy and communicating about its policy response.

But in the signs of turnaround that President Obama now points to, Mr. Kashkari sees evidence that those policies have worked. In Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary and former president of the New York Fed, central players that Mr. Kashkari and Mr. Paulson teamed up with remain in place.

Notwithstanding partisan gibes, Mr. Kashkari said that a Republican administration would have followed the same course had Mr. McCain won the presidential election  albeit with less populist rhetoric.

“The way a Democratic administration talks about certain issues is probably a little different,” he said. “But the substance of the actions, I think, are very consistent.”

A Good Start

Mr. Kashkari embraces the Obama administration’s financial regulation proposal as a good first step. But he said policy makers needed more time to determine rules that could temper risk while preserving financial dynamism and innovation.