Most sensationally, Summers is said to be tainted by his time as President of Harvard.    Too much has already been said about this.   But I will make just a couple of observations.    First, although Summers may not be Mr. Personality, and he will never be elected to high office nor chosen to head offices for women’s rights or the environment, he has all the most important qualities for the Treasury job.   Despite a tendency to say what he thinks, I don’t think he committed any true faux pas or became involved in any mini-scandals during 8 years in the government — no easy feat.   (The closest he came to a faux pas, or what counts for one in the media, was a statement that the argument that was then being made for abolition of the estate tax was based on greed alone rather than efficiency.   He quickly retracted the statement without bothering to try to explain what he had meant, having already by then become familiar with the rules of political brouhahas.)    In his time in Washington, he learned how to get along with politicians across the spectrum, from socialists to the far right.   It’s true that he wasn’t able subsequently to get along with the full range of faculty in the Harvard English Department, but that is a tougher task.  

Finally, I continue to be surprised at how the press describes Summers’ ill-fated and ill-considered (but “off the record”) remarks regarding explanations for the lack of women in academic science departments.  He is most often reported as having suggested that women generally have less aptitude for science than men.   Memories of these remarks in some quarters probably accounts for the recent decline of Summers in the betting odds, though he also has defenders among women with whom he has worked.   I link to the text of what he actually said here,  and urge readers to make up their minds for themselves.   But I don’t read his speculative remarks about the various hypotheses quite the way most people have assumed.   To me the most outrageous line in the remarks was, rather, the suggestion (made to illustrate the penalities for being out of the academic workforce for a couple of years) “that no economist who had gone to work at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers for two years had done highly important academic work after they returned” !  

A panel on Supply Side Economics in Washington, September 12, included statistics on the superior performance of the American economy under President Clinton compared to his Republican successor. (The graph to the right, from Ettlinger & Irons, shows the first term of each administration.  The growth gap during the second terms was even wider.)  Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers gave some statistics that included Democratic versus Republican presidents throughout the postwar period.   As others have also pointed out, the Democratic record dominates to a surprising extent.   (The event was jointly sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Economic Policy Institute.)

 By coincidence, in a column in that day’s Wall Street Journal, Donald Luskins sought to “get something settled once and for all. Have the stock markets and the economy historically done better under Democrats or Republicans?”