Larry Summers
President Obama and his administration
continue to push back hard on criticism of possible Federal Reserve chair pick Larry Summers, including an effort to portray the decision-making process as less fixed than previously reported, throwing a third candidate into the mix:
In his meeting on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama stressed that he had not yet made up his mind. People close to the process said the White House is trying to tamp down on the feverish speculation that the race had come down to Mr. Summers and Ms. Yellen and deflect some of the attacks on Mr. Summers.
Summers, his friends and former proteges say, is soooo brilliant that we shouldn't care if he's been
wrong about the biggest issues of his career, and isn't really as much of a bully as people who are not already his friends say he is. Also, advocates of Summers as Fed chair are
really unhappy at the idea that sexism influences their views. Ezra Klein reported that, while most of the Summers advocates he was talking to wouldn't go on the record,
People involved in the White House’s Fed search really, really don’t like the implication that they’re sexists. They see the allegation that gender is playing a role here as absurd and offensive and an effort to back them into making a choice based on political correctness rather than the merits. It’s a bit hard to gauge this, but my sense is the intense anger over the allegations is hardening people’s positions, as they don’t want to submit to a pressure campaign they consider deeply unfair.
This suggests that Klein's sources actually don't understand how sexism works, as Klein himself
delicately implied Thursday and as Noam Scheiber explains
more directly. See, Summers, like many of Obama's economic advisers and appointees, is a former protege of Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and:
The Rubin network is overwhelmingly male, especially at the upper levels. If you look at, say, the former Rubinites who play tennis together and attend tennis camp each year in Florida, they’re all men. If you look at the people who ran the Hamilton Project, the economic think tank Rubin set up in 2006, they too are overwhelmingly male. The people the Rubinites in the Obama campaign reached out to most often when they wanted outside policy advice were also men—namely Larry Summers and Bob Rubin.
This is how discrimination mostly happens these days: Not because someone says "I won't promote a woman," but because overwhelmingly male networks tend to replicate themselves. In addition to that, there's the "gravitas" question, of which Paul Krugman suggests "Sorry, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that gravitas, in this context, mainly means possessing a Y chromosome." President Obama and (most) of the Summers supporters around him are surely not thinking "a man would be preferable to a woman." But if they can't see the ways that gender more subtly makes Larry Summers seem preferable to Janet Yellen, they're fundamentally failing to understand how sexism shapes our world.
Sign our petition urging President Obama not to appoint Larry Summers as Federal Reserve chair.