Whoops! He Did It Again! (Again)
Larry Summers
has released a transcript of remarks he made at a September 2004 conference on Native American studies at Harvard. Those remarks became an issue when the Washington Post profile of Summers (mentioned below) quoted scholars who'd been present saying they were offended by the president's remarks at the event. At the time, the Crimson had heard rumors that Summers had angered attendees, but—shock!—his ever-helpful press secretary, Lucie McNeil, had refused to release a transcript. Perhaps the remarks were off the record.
Here's a key quote from the Crimson write-up:
"Even seven months after the conference, several scholars who attended the event are still incensed by the president’s remarks.
Michael Yellow Bird, director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas, said that Summers’ remarks were “really, really insulting.”
Tara Browner, associate professor of ethnomusicology and American Indian studies at UCLA, wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson Sunday that she and several other attendees were “appalled” by Summers’ statements."
But the Crimson's reportage of the transcript actually makes things out to be more complicated. It doesn't seem that Summers said anything factually incorrect. He said that more Native Americans died from diseases carried by Europeans than in combat, and there was no conscious plan to commit genocide. Some of the scholars present thought Summers was presenting a whitewashed view of history, apologizing for colonialism.
What's really going on here? It's the difference, I think, between the way Summers' words read on paper, and how they sound when he delivers them. It's a question of style. When Summers speaks in public, he often comes across as arrogant, patronizing, impatient, dismissive. Even if what he's saying is, on paper, factually correct and largely unobjectionable.
I've seen Summers stride into a conference, surrounded by worshipful aides. running late as usual, and instantly start telling all the scholars in the field what the real truth is, and what they should be working on. (I wasn't at the NBER conference in January, but that's exactly what happened then too.)
Summers' body language, his tone of voice, the way he breezes in and out—everything reads wrong. Even when what he says is essentially smart or even sympathetic. He's an arrogant man. And that's not going to change. The question is whether it helps his presidency more than it hurts it.
