The Times' front-page story on Larry Summers has something of a "Larry bites man" quality to it: Summers developed a reputation for belittling and ridiculing professors at Harvard before he was sacked as president, so his refusal to play nice with others isn't exactly news.
Furthermore, the fact that top Administration officials are unwilling to give anything but "it's all in good fun" on-the-record quotes about Obama's closest economic adviser, is equally unsurprising. This all seems like a less scandalous version of the McCain affair piece the Times ran last year. We have a man with a reputation for doing certain things, possibly some damning off-the-record conversations intimating that he is still doing those certain things, and a story with innuendo and a few pretty blase anecdotes. Is this really worth a spot on the front page?
It would be more illuminating to put Summers' abrasiveness in broader context. Summers -- much like Geithner -- is a Rubinite who made some pretty poor economic policy decisions in the not-so-distant past, and developed less regulation-friendly positions at what one might call a politically opportune time (ie the rise of Obama and the collapse of the financial markets).
The real story here is not whether Summers hurt Romer or Orszag's feelings. It's whether he's paying lip service to the idea of real reform and regulation in the banking industry while undermining the actual voices in the Administration who are calling for those things. The real story is that while a year ago liberals worried that Austan Goolsbee was too moderate and conventional an economist to be in Obama's inner circle, he's now the advisor trying to pull policy leftward.
In a nutshell, since we know Summers is a jerk, I'd like to see more on what that has to do with the price of eggs (literally). Mark Penn was such a jerk that Clinton's campaign devolved into civil war and public backstabbing (oxymoron alert!) even before her electoral chances disappeared.
Clearly, Summers is not that type of jerk. But the only evidence the Times offers that he's doing a good job are his efforts to join the "populist" side in a few losing arguments, vague indicators that the economy is bouncing back, and the standard line from anyone asked that Summers is a hardass, but brilliant. An excellent excuse to work in some insidery tidbits about birthday cupcakes and fly-swatting, but I'd like to see more meat in an article about a guy with a good deal of control over our economic future.
6 years ago
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