Summers Eve

I am definitely worried that Lawrence Summers is acting as a kind of mole inside the Obama White House, defining economic policy in the most neoliberal of ways. I think he is mostly responsible for the mix of tax cuts, particularly corporate tax cuts, in the initial pre-compromised stimulus bill. And he's certainly responsible for the terrible "bad bank" idea, which I haven't gotten around to writing about recently, but which would basically hand over maybe trillions in taxpayer money to the very bankers who got us into this mess. Obama is cautious and certainly listens to varying points of view, but my fear is that Summers was winning the arguments, at least until the past couple days, when the President could no longer abide the right-wing attacks and came out in a forcefully partisan manner.

The question is who will be the counterweight to Summers in the White House? Chris Hayes thinks it could be the Vice President.

Summers has already come to dominate the White House economic policy shop. One person close to Obama's economic team told me that on economic policy, "it's looking like it's Larry's show." This leaves a disconcerting vacuum in the White House for a labor-liberal voice equal in stature and clout. Enter, perhaps, Joe Biden.

In December he named Bernstein, formerly of the labor-friendly, stoutly progressive Economic Policy Institute, to be his chief economic adviser, a position with no recent precedent. Bernstein then co-wrote the first economic report released by the transition team, which attempted to quantify the benefits of the president's proposed stimulus. He is one of the people present for the daily economic briefings to the president.

In the weeks before inauguration, Biden reached out to labor leaders, including the AFL-CIO's John Sweeney, confirming that he would be a strong advocate for them in the White House. And he has publicly supported "Buy American" provisions in the stimulus package that would require participating firms to purchase their materials from domestic companies--a measure that Summers pointedly refused to endorse during a recent briefing with reporters.

Biden is "really pushing hard" on "a more progressive populist approach to economic policy," says Mike Lux, the transition's liaison to the progressive movement. "I'm just delighted that there's somebody with his clout that's doing this, otherwise our side would be in a lot worse shape."

Indeed, Biden's appearance yesterday at a Maryland train station was a signal of his growing progressive populism on domestic issues, as is his task force on the middle class. I didn't think Biden would end up being the champion of any of this, but I hope he can keep Summers from dominating.