George Bush had his Colin Powell, and now Barak Obama has his Larry Summers.
Colin Powell sacrificed his integrity to give an eloquent speech at the UN, assuring the world of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapon’s of mass destruction. He of course had lots of doubts about it even as he spoke.
And now Larry Summers has told has said President Obama is a defender of free markets.
President Barack Obama’s chief economist on Friday defended White House economic policies against criticism that they amounted to “a kind of back-door socialism.”
In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers said Mr. Obama’s interventions “will go with, rather than against, the grain of the market system.”
This of course is complete crap and he knows it, but just as with George Bush, the president needs his people to say things like that.
Summers is now going to have to live with this blot on his record just as Colin Powell has had to live with the one on his.
(I must admit that I was slightly swayed by Powell’s speech at the time. I am not in the least swayed by Summer’s speech. Neither of these men is among my favorite politicians, but I respect both of them enough to be saddened by what they had to do.)