Larry Summers Gets 'Full-Throated Defense' From Obama In Capitol Hill Meeting, Lawmaker Says
Source: The Huffington Post
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama gave a "full-throated defense" of Larry Summers in a closed meeting with House Democrats Wednesday, according to a lawmaker in the room, but said he’s nowhere near making a decision on who will be the next Federal Reserve chairman.
Summers, along with Janet Yellen, are reportedly the top contenders for the Fed post. White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Wednesday that no decision will be made until the fall, but that hasn’t stopped people from speculating about the frontrunner.
During Wednesday’s meeting, one Democratic lawmaker, who requested anonymity, said the president became agitated and rose to Summers’ defense in response to Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) walking up to the microphone and simply saying, "Larry Summers. Bad Choice."
In paraphrasing Obama's response, the lawmaker said the president replied, "Hey, don't talk sh*t about him because he's actually a pretty good guy. And then he said, 'If somebody talked sh*t about you like that, I'd defend you too."' (The lawmaker added that Obama didn't use the expletive.)
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/31/larry-summers-obama_n_3682908.html
I hope that he doesn't choose Summers.
= new reply since forum marked as read
You know they don't like it when you point out facts.
I'm too old to care 
Or, "We can't have the Republicans win, now can we?"
To me, looks like Republicans won in 2008 and 2012.
You think the President would have stopped riding the fence if Binden didn't push him off to support same sex marriage?
A man who sticks up for his other party members!!
<--- He's saying "Go Obama!!"
I think about his folksy speeches, and then I think about this kind of behavior (his constant sticking up for the worst banksters), and it's obvious that he doesn't give a damn about us, and those folksy speeches are just offensive lying charades. He thinks we're stupid, but he also hates our guts to even consider sticking us with Summers as head of the Fed, and all the damage that most certainly will do.
Those speeches and backing Summers simply don't go together in the same brain. I can't watch him anymore, because incidents like this are all I can think of when I see the folksy schtick. The looks of concern. The caring I'm-one-of-you joking around. I don't buy it anymore.
so right! 
I especially loved: those folksy speeches are just offensive lying charades And for that reason as well, I can no longer stand to hear BHO's voice, much less listen to one of his speeches. Bush was actually better because you knew where you stood and you knew you were being screwed, but BHO is shows so many sociopathic traits (glibness, superficial charm, shallow emotions, manipulation, lying), I have started thinking... if the shoe fits....
We, the majority of the people, were surely conned. But then again, look at fucking choices we had in 2008 and 2012. Sadly, the lesser of two evils is still EVIL!
as well, from what I'm hearing here. What's not to love? 
worth defending?! Puhleeze
His risky ways were evident at Harvard, too. He gambled with the university’s operating fund, placing billions of dollars in an aggressive mix of investments. He would have heated debates with Jack Meyer, then the revered head of the endowment, who advocated for a more conservative approach.
During the good times, it was a lucrative strategy, and the cash from the operating account more than doubled under Summers. The windfall allowed Harvard to fuel his ambitious plan to expand its campus into Allston. But when the market crashed in 2008, Harvard lost $1.8 billion, prompting layoffs, tighter budgets, and an abrupt pullback of the Allston plans. Summers was long gone by then.
Last edited Sat Aug 3, 2013, 09:52 AM - Edit history (1)
Summers clashed with fellow members of the Obama team. Noam Scheiber, in his book The Escape Artists, reported that he sidelined Christina Romer, then the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, when she tried to persuade the president to pursue a larger stimulus package. Meanwhile, Sheila Bair, the former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair who had warned of trouble in the subprime lending market, was left out of most major financial policy decisions.
"The attitude was that they already had all the answers and were talking to us only because the president wanted them to," Bair wrote in her recent book regarding Obama's top economic advisers. "Larry and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner didn't seem to care about the political beating the president took on the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at the big-banks bailouts and AIG bonuses, but ... I don't think helping homeowners was ever a priority for them."
That it was two prominent women with whom Summers clashed has not gone unnoticed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/larry-summers-janet-yellen_n_3691052.html
"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.
Useful only when needed to win an election. Progressives are good at grassroots campaigning, raising money, knocking on doors, making phone calls, etc. When the campaign is over, then they are supposed to go back into the woodwork and keep their mouths shut.
Let's just hope that Summers is not the chosen one.
