Shots in the Dark

I kinda miss Bob Dole. Liddy, not so much.

Anyway, today Dole released a statement attacking Newt Gingrich, and boy, it is juicy reading….

In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads, and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year. Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty ice-bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it.

Apparently the bucket symbolized ice that used to be delivered to Congressional offices.

“If there was any one symbol I wish we could be remembered by,” Gingrich said in 1996, “I believe it should be an ice bucket.”

The Mexican-hating Arizona governor says that she “respects the office of the President,” but doesn’t hesitate to make clear that she doesn’t respect the President himself.

…and hires four of its coaches.

The Globe reports,

Since he took over following the resignation of Tom Williams, [Tony] Reno has hired not one, not two, but three Harvard assistants: wide receivers coach Kris Barber, offensive line coach Joe Conlin, and defensive line coach Dwayne Wilmot.

This is probably a bit of a bummer for Harvard, but seems entirely logical to me, and not unlike what the two universities do with academic departments; if one of them steps it up a level, the other counters. And Harvard has clearly been investing heavily in its athletic programs, altering the rather laid-back dynamic once typical of Ivy League sports. It’s a (throwing) arms race!

The blog Rough Type catches Summers in an embarrassing mistake.

“Before the printing press,” writes Lawrence Summers in the Times’s Education Life section today, “scholars had to memorize ‘The Canterbury Tales’ to have continuing access to them.” That has to be one of the most dunderheaded sentences ever written by a former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary. The bound book was invented more than a thousand years before the printing press came along, and people were writing stuff down - on scrolls, tablets, blocks of wood - long before the book was created. In the 100 or so years between the writing of Chaucer’s masterpiece and the establishment of a printing trade in England, handwritten copies of “The Canterbury Tales” were fairly abundant…..

Interestingly, the version that I look at now says “scholars might have had to memorize ‘The Canterbury Tales’….”

The article has clearly been corrected, but that correction is not noted. Bad New York Times! (One other correction is noted…but you’ll have to read the article to see.)

It’s a funny mistake, but it’s worth pointing it out—and thank you, Rough Type, for doing so—because it’s typical of two characteristics of Summers’ “brilliance.” One, it consists more of the accumulation of facts than any particularly interesting or profound interpretation of them. And two, it is bolstered by Summers’ mode of presentation by certitude, his utter conviction that everything he says is incontestably right.

Even when it isn’t.

By the way, here’s a great Larry Summers story someone told me the other day. This person, an accomplished financier, was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who wanted to major in economics. (This was about 30 years ago.)

This guy was pretty intellectually precocious, so he asked the department advisor—who happened to be Larry Summers’ father, Robert Summers—if he could skip intro econ and proceed right to the intermediate level.

Robert Summers replied, “The only student I know who is smart enough to do that is my son, Larry.”

Which, if you think about it, is a very odd thing to say.

Bloomberg (et al) report that President Obama is considering naming Larry Summers head of the World Bank when Robert Zoellick ends his term later this year.

While a Summers nomination may draw criticism from some Democrats who disagree with his past stances on deregulating the financial industry, he has support inside the administration from top officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and current NEC Director Gene Sperling, said one of the people.

Which is to say that Summers has the support of Goldman Sachs, which has close relationships with and/or invested heavily in those two men.

And why not? Ever since Summers “saved the world” in the currency crises of the 1990s, he has been a strong advocate of putting the interests of creditors ahead of those of working people.

Would Summers make a good head of the World Bank? I doubt it. After all, the lesson of every management situation Summers has ever been in is that he’s a terrible manager. (And Ron Susskind’s book supports the thesis that Summers really didn’t change at all after his disastrous stint as Harvard president.)

As the very good Reuters blogger Felix Salmon writes, management is kinda important at the World Bank.

You also need to be an almost superhuman manager. The World Bank has more than 10,000 employees from over 160 countries, with offices in more than 100 countries around the world. The range of cultural expectations they bring to their jobs is truly enormous, and the amount of political jostling and mutual incomprehension which results is entirely predictable. In order to manage this rabble, you need a very high level of cultural and interpersonal sensitivity.

Sounds like Larry Summers to a T, right?

My concern with Summers has always been that someone would mistake his formidable talents for leadership and place him at the top of an un-democratic organization—the Fed, for instance. Or the World Bank. Putting Summers at the head of an immensely powerful but little understood and not-very-transparent organization is exactly the wrong way to use his skills.

Is Summers confirmable (as he would have to be, by the World Bank’s executive board)?

“Larry is controversial,” said Erskine Bowles, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff. “Anything you appoint Larry to, you know there are going to be some people who are going to take shots at him. But you know he’s a brilliant economist, which I think everybody recognizes.”

That last line is a wonderful example that if you just say something enough, eventually people will believe it. (Sort of the foundation of modern American politics, really.) Because, while that description of Summers as a “brilliant economist” is so liberally used people have come to take it for granted, a survey of Summers’ success in policymaking doesn’t particularly support it. Summers has a very powerful mind, no question about that; I marvel at his ability to absorb and retain and deploy massive amounts of information.

And yet—when one looks at his record, what exactly has that powerful mind been right about over the years? (Hello, repeal of Glass-Steagal…)

And I think you also have to wonder about Summers’ cozy relationship with the financial industry. No one’s watching this now that Summers is a private citizen, but how much buck-raking is he doing these days?

The Susskind book is fascinating on the subject of Summers, and I’ll write about that shortly.

So let’s see if I understand….

Newt Gingrich is (almost?) winning in South Carolina…but he wanted an open marriage with his second wife.

But that isn’t stopping Rick Perry, who was once the conservatives’ favorite, from dropping out and endorsing Gingrich.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum actually won Iowa, it turns out, which might have had a significant impact on his current situation if only he’d won Iowa at the time he won Iowa.

And the ostensible frontrunner, Mitt Romney, makes $375,000 in speaking fees, which he calls not very much, pays about 15% of his income in taxes—which actually isn’t very much—and also probably means that most of his income is from capital gains, which means he’s making a huge amount of money on capital gains (if $370, 000 is not much), which means he’s maybe even richer than we thought. But maybe it’s because he’s been parking his money in the Caymans, a notorious tax haven?

(Here’s what I really love: In the article linked to above, Romney admits that he’s put money in the Caymans. His defense is that his wealth is managed by a blind trust and he doesn’t know what happens with it. So how does he know that some of it is in the Caymans? Crazy stuff.)

Maybe the Republicans should just not nominate anyone at all this year….

In an editorial, the English-language newspaper in Japan says it’s time for the country to stop its pointless slaughter of whales.

Continuing the whale hunts means Japan will continue to pay dearly in international diplomatic costs for its right to maintain a tradition that extends far beyond the borders of the country’s culture yet is no longer central to daily life here at home.

Whether this will make one iota of difference, I don’t know, but it can’t hurt.

Can you think of a worse idea for a television series?

The man whose ringing iPhone led conductor Alan Gilbert to halt a performance of Mahler’s 9th apologizes—anonymously—to the New York Times.

“It was just awful to have any role in something like that, that is so disturbing and disrespectful not only to the conductor but to all the musicians and not least to the audience, which was so into this concert,” he said by telephone.

“I hope the people at that performance and members of the orchestra can certainly forgive me for this whole event. I apologize to the whole audience.”

So, okay, maybe he shouldn’t have been taken out and shot. As apologies go, that one is pretty straight-up—none of that “if anyone was offended” nonsense—and sincere.

The man, whose seat was in the front row, claims that his company had changed his Blackberry for an iPhone the previous day—sign of the times!—and that the alarm was going off; he says that he didn’t even know smart phones had alarms. (Ah, the willful ignorance of the 1 percent! Those technological drones in IT will figure those things out for you!) And so the alarm kept ringing….

Which doesn’t totally explain why he couldn’t, for example, turn the sound down, but never mind. I am warmed by the deeply hostile reaction of the other members of the audience.

Meanwhile, in China, riots broke out as the iPhone 4S went on sale in Beijing.

Don’t the Chinese have more important things to riot about?

It’s a curious world we live in….

One of the reasons I love this city is that you can’t own a gun here and you can’t bring a gun here, and generally 99.99% of the folks who live in New York think that’s a good idea. We recognize that when you cram this many people into a small space, things can get stressful sometimes, and at those moments it’s good not to be able to reach for your weapon.

The problem is that wackos from across the country keep bringing their guns to New York City because they believe that a gun is something you shouldn’t leave home without—and they keep getting arrested.

Like Mark Meckler, the co-founder of the Tea Party, for instance.

What, you’re shocked that the a Tea Party member would be carrying a Glock 27?

Meckler was arrested at the airport for having the gun—for about three hours—and, as the Wall Street Journal reports, had this to say about it:

It was a nightmare that I can scarcely describe to you. Until you have felt the handcuffs on your wrists, and until you have heard that cell door close behind you, it is impossible to understand what it means to actually lose your liberty. And since that day, my liberty has been at stake, and because of that threat, based upon the advice of counsel, I’ve been unable to publicly speak about this case. Today the silence ends.

Now, that totally reassures you that this guy is sane and reasonable and should be allowed to carry a lethal weapon, right?

As Plaxico Burress and lots of other folks have found out, this is a great city to visit…but we can live without your guns.