Larry Summers emerges as the unlikeliest Democratic hero
Larry Summers emerges as the unlikeliest Democratic hero
Summers’ deep involvement in White House economic planning is remarkable since he has been among the sharpest critics of Biden’s spending policies.
Larry Summers’ quiet but deep involvement in White House economic planning is remarkable since he has been among the sharpest critics of President Joe Biden’s spending policies almost from the beginning. | Rob Kim/Getty Images
By BEN WHITE
08/15/2022 04:30 AM EDT
When the White House sought help crafting crucial tax-raising portions of the health care, climate and tax bill, one man was often on the other end of the phone line and email chains: Larry Summers.
When Democratic lawmakers needed a final push to convince Sen. Joe Manchin that the Inflation Reduction Act would in fact reduce inflation, they also turned to Summers. And when administration aides worry about how TV pundits will view their economic plans, the first person they think of is usually the former Treasury secretary.
Summers’ quiet but deep involvement in White House economic planning is remarkable since he has been among the sharpest critics of President Joe Biden’s spending policies almost from the beginning — a position that has earned him praise from Republicans and scorn from progressives. Yet Democrats’ eagerness to gain his support for Biden’s latest massive legislation is a testament to how they cannot ignore him.
“I remember walking the tunnels back to the Hart building and saying to Larry, who was in Brazil at some conference at the time, ‘You gotta call Joe Manchin and you gotta do it right now and convince him this is all cool, that this will work,’” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, recalled in an interview about the final, frenetic days before the vote on the legislation. “And he did that, he made the call.”
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It’s an extraordinary turnabout for the voluble former top Obama adviser who has made White House officials bristle over his complaints that their past multitrillion-dollar spending schemes have helped stoke the highest inflation in four decades.
It’s far too much to say that Summers is now suddenly beloved.
Many on the left still loathe him for what they view as his corporate-friendly leanings and warlike stance on inflation. (He recently said Americans needed to face “meaningful economic distress” from higher interest rates to kill inflation, prompting Sen. Elizabeth Warren to blast him as “someone who has never worried about where his next paycheck will come from.”)
Republicans now say he is two-faced on inflation risks, opposing some big spending plans but not others. And pretty much everyone agrees that Summers can be challenging to deal with given his bold views, blunt demeanor and certainty about his own correctness. But for the moment at least, Democrats say he was the right guy at the right time for a party in desperate need of a win.
Summers’ story – a long-running, behind-the-scenes Washington drama that began when he joined the Clinton administration in 1993 – in many ways tracks large fissures in the Democratic Party between left and more moderate figures that have only grown more pronounced as progressives assert more dominance.
For some progressives, the mere invocation of Summers’ name elicits disgust and dismissal of anything he has to say. Summers almost became Federal Reserve chair under President Barack Obama in 2013 before a coalition of progressives convinced Obama to drop his nomination in favor of Janet Yellen.
Opponents cited Summers’ connections to corporate America and Wall Street, his moderate views, and controversial remarks he made about women’s aptitude for science when he previously served as president of Harvard University.
His current renaissance began with the prescient call on the potential for runaway inflation that he made last year when most pundits – and the Fed – viewed rising prices as transitory. He opposed the American Rescue Plan, Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-relief proposal, saying it was way too much money to be pouring into an economy that was already emerging from the pandemic.
