The Media sucks at covering Larry

A friend of mine (Lisa X) shared this article from the New York Times on Larry Summers’s appointment to Obama’s economic team. I was originally going to just leave a comment on my Google shared list , but my list of comments got so long I felt I needed to actually make a blog post on it.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Barack thinks with his mind open,” said Charles Ogletree, a law professor at Harvard. “Larry thinks with his mouth open.”

Aides to President-elect Obama say a top administration role for Mr. Summers once would have seemed to be a remote possibility because of his controversial tenure at Harvard, during which he angered women and members of the faculty.

From the moment he stepped down, Mr. Summers, advised by powerful supporters who said he had been unfairly maligned, worked hard at repairing his reputation. He defended his time at Harvard but admitted mistakes; wrote a column that repositioned him politically and predicted the coming trauma; helped build a research group that supplied Mr. Obama with economic ideas and aides; and strengthened ties to women who helped dispel the accusation — stemming from a 2005 talk in which Mr. Summers wondered out loud about a relative lack of women in top academic science and engineering posts — that he thought poorly of their scientific abilities. He helped practically anyone who asked for advice, like undergraduates, economists and candidates.

But it was the financial crisis, or a series of phone calls about it, that almost instantly resuscitated Mr. Summers’s career. 

And some predict that Mr. Obama’s style could mellow that of Mr. Summers. 

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said Mr. Obama’s “affability and inclusiveness might help nurture those same qualities in Larry, even though those haven’t been among Larry’s notable strengths.” 

And, some thoughts on this article’s sheer ridiculousness in hyping meaningless trivialities to the verge of lying:

• Everyone seems to re-use this picture — Larry, why would you look so evil while the whole world is watching you get nominated to join Barack “Jesus Christ” Obama’s superstar economic team?
• The media really loves to hype up everything. It’s nowhere near that dramatic:

• Summers never said he felt that women were stupider — he was commenting on the standard deviation of standardized test scores being higher for men rather than women as a hypothetical thought exercise on why there were more male faculty. Doesn’t mean the analysis was right, nor does it justify the president of a national university saying such a controversial thing, but get the facts straight.
• Larry Summers does not just walk around spewing forth prejudices and judgment, as is charaterized here. At least, not around me — think about it, he held senior positions at the World Bank, in the Treasury Department, and was a top professor — you learn a little tact after all of that.
• Larry Summers has always been incredibly helpful and reachable to undergrads, economists, think tanks, etc. This wasn’t a sudden change inspired by some desire to get back in the public’s good graces.
• Summer’s career did not need “resuscitating” — he was making a ton of cash at D.E. Shaw, doing a lot of good by joining the board for Teach for America, and getting a great deal of popularity while writing for the Financial Times … the phone call from Obama? Definitely kicked his career up a notch — if you define “career” solely from a Washington DC perspective.
• Summers has not suddenly “moved to the left”. He’s always been center-left, and I fail to see how his new role has suddenly made him a bleeding heart as characterized in this paper?
• I liked Larry. But, seriously — its not like I had pizza with him every week (and my year was the year when he did that). I gave him a standing ovation at commencement, yes, but unless my memory fails me, my class gave standing ovations to lots of people… this doesn’t make him uniquely popular/suited to undergrads.
• “poor at reading others” — the only people who say that are Harvard faculty who care more for their ego than for meaningful reform. Greg Mankiw (who sits on the opposite side of the political spectrum) thinks very highly of Summers. There’s a reason, President Faust hasn’t really changed any of Summers’s agenda…
• Obama is awesome — and yes, he may just be Jesus or Superman or whoever, but Summers doesn’t need “mellowing” and I highly doubt that a career politician will suddenly make Summers into something he’s not — he survived the Clinton years and the World Bank years after all…

(Image Credit )