Larry Summers may be an airhead (there are strong indications) but he is the chief adviser on our economy. Dana Milbank shakes his head in dismay. Europe's economy may collapse, millions of us are out of work but -- according to Larry Summers -- we're merely experiencing a "fluctuation."
Even if it's true (when viewed as a graphic on some economist's desk), it's a damn dumb thing to say if you're the lead economic adviser and, hey!, at least you have a job and some power. Milbank writes:
Maybe he's correct, in an academic sense, that this era will come to be known not as a period of economic misery and human suffering but as the time when the Group of 20 large economies came to replace the Group of Seven (G-8, actually). Still, is that the message the White House wants to be putting out now?
Summers is a bit of a political disaster even if he's largely right in his handling of the economy. So is Obama's leadership a disaster when it comes to the economy?
No, not hardly. Obama is no airhead.
Obama has a problem. There's building evidence that he's pursuing the right economic policy, but his administration isn't very good at explaining it. He needs urgently to convince Americans that recovery is at hand, but that message is losing to those on the other side who are screaming about socialism.
In part this is because Obama lacks a credible economic spokesman to deliver the message...
One important aspect of Obama's presidency is completely at odds with what most of us expected. Taking a cue from the man's impressive and substantive campaign speeches, we expected him to be very clear about what he was doing when elected: clear about his goals, clear about his strategies. Boy, were we wrong! He leaves us under-informed and embarrassed. Larry Summers, that smart, cold bastard, is just another symptom of Obama's decreasingly attractive "cool."
