"Summers protected the big banks from being taken over when they were insolvent, and he has been a consistent foe of any serious effort to rework the financial industry," said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center on Economic and Policy Research. For good measure, Baker noted that Summers earned millions from financial sector interests, including bailed-out Citigroup, around his stints in the public sector.
But here too, Summers defenders argue that these critics are omitting key facts. Summers was more resistant to immediate deficit reduction in 2009 and 2010 than other Obama advisers, they say, and he made the argument at the time that additional stimulus was needed. As for his divisiveness, Brad DeLong, a University of California, Berkeley economist and Summers supporter, had three explanations.
"A byproduct of his personality, a habit -- learned in graduate school, and before -- of overstating points in order to provoke in the belief that he is going to be judged on the smartest thing he says, and most important, an American left that does not understand who Obama is," DeLong said.
"The Democratic Party -- the left especially -- chooses somebody without a national political reputation, projects their hopes and their fantasies onto them as a blank canvas, enthusiastically supports their run for president, is then bitterly disappointed, and blames evil advisors who force Obama to listen to Jamie Dimon rather than Elizabeth Warren," he explained.
As DeLong sees it, Summers became a convenient bogeyman for Democrats disaffected with the president's performance. Obama himself told House Democrats on Wednesday that progressives were treating his former adviser as a "whipping boy." He urged them to not believe everything they read, singling out articles from this website in particular.
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