Here’s a prediction I’m willing to put some money on: Within the next few months, Noam Scheiber of the New Republic will sign a book deal to write about President Obama’s economic team—Inside the White House as Barack Obama, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner Try to Save America, or something like that.

Because there’s just no way that Scheiber could have written the magazine’s deeply fellatory profile of Summers if he weren’t trying to convince Summers to cooperate with him on a book.

Scheiber’s argument: The president is making a mistake by not giving Summers near-total power over economic policy. No, for real. For example: …in this moment of global crisis, when indecision could be disastrous and a wrong decision even worse, shouldn’t we want to unleash our hard-charging geniuses and get out of their way? That would be Summers whom Scheiber wants to unleash.

Or this: Still, the question arises [Blogger: It does?]: If the Obama administration fails to revive the economy, will it be because Summers is too influential over economic policy, or not influential enough?

That first quote is pretty near the beginning of Scheiber’s article; the second is pretty near the end. In between, Scheiber gushes like a broken sewer pipe.

We learn what a great debater Summers was at MIT…

Summers’ audacity succeeded far more often than not…

What a great mind he was…

Several of the papers he wrote as a Harvard graduate student redefined whole swatcs of the discipline…

[Blogger: No.]

That Summers is associated with so few big ideas because he has promoted so many….

Summers was most comfortable thinking up big ideas, then partnering with capable students and colleagues to execute them…

That Summers went into government not because he wanted power, or because academia was starting to bore him, or because he simply wasn’t the mind that his uncles Paul Samuelson and Ken Arrow were and he knew it—no, he did so to maximize his intellectual influence.

In the end, Summers left the academy for the same reason he decided not to pursue theoretical physics: because he wanted his ideas to have broad reach.

Here’s what Scheiber says about Summers’ years as Harvard president:

When Summers emerged as a leading candidate to be Obama’s Treasury secretary, the biggest obstacles were lingering questions from his searing experience at Harvard. Summers’s remarks about the underrepresentation of women among scientists received most of the headlines. But it was his constant warring with the faculty over an ambitious reform agenda that probably did him in. (His rapport with the students, on the other hand, remained exceptional throughout. Even after he resigned, Summers would stop by pizza parties and dorm gatherings, according to the Times.)

Okay. Let’s pause for a moment here to consider this, and particularly the phrase “his constant warring with the faculty over an ambitious reform agenda.”

That phrase suggests that Summers wanted to “reform” Harvard, and the faculty, so easily caricatured as inert and lazy and self-interested, did not. As we all know, the truth is more complicated.

And one thing that just drives me nuts: It does not matter that Harvard students liked Larry Summers.

Here’s why.

Harvard students are so neglected by people with power at the university, or at least they feel this way so deeply, that they will be your friend for life if you buy them a pizza. (Which Summers often did, thus disproving Scheiber’s notion, expressed below, that he was completely unskilled in the art of campus politics.)

While students’ approval of Summers—which was far from universal, by the way—isn’t totally irrelevant, it is massively fallacious to say that students’ pro-Summers feeling was informed by any deep knowledge of what goes on at Harvard; most Harvard students pay no attention to what the president does, and they’ll tell you such if you ask them (which, unlike Scheiber, I did).

In fact, you will notice that the only time anyone ever talks about the importance of student opinion at Harvard university is when they use it to say that Larry Summers was really popular there after all—if it weren’t for that darned faculty!

And it is more fallacious to say that student sentiment in this instance is equivalent in standing to what the faculty and staff felt. The 18-22-year-olds whom Summers bought pizza for, and paid more attention to than Neil Rudenstine did, liked him. (He signed their dollar bills!)

Many of the people with whom Summers had to work closely thought he was an untrustworthy liar.

These two things are not of equivalent import.

And yet, journalist after journalist writes, “Oh, but the students loved him.” So that makes everything all right then.

Scheiber goes on:

As it happens, Summers’ problem at Harvard wasn’t his lack of political skill per se. It’s that he’d misunderstood the kind of institution he was running. Summers had assumed Harvard was a pure meritocracy-where ideas win out on the basis of their strength and little else. His own experience as a professor there had taught him as much. When he proposed, say, revising the undergraduate curriculum to focus more on basic knowledge than on the latest intellectual fashions, he was prepared to defend the logic of the plan, not sweet-talk professors who felt threatened by it. But, as Summers told ProPublica’s Paul Steiger early last year, “I just didn’t fully appreciate the extent to which the university … was a political kind of institution.“

Summers as vulnerable naif who thinks that Harvard is a “pure meritocracy”? Sweet. But stupid. (I mean, come on—who thinks that Harvard is a pure meritocracy? Summers grew up in academia, for chrissake. He’s spoken in the past of how his uncle, Ken Arrow I think it was, didn’t get tenure at Harvard due to anti-Semitism. So…Summers clearly didn’t think that Harvard is a pure meritocracy.)

Summers didn’t misunderstand the university; he just didn’t give a crap. He knew Harvard well; he’d spent a lot of time there. He just felt contempt for substantial parts of it, and he made no attempt to hide his feelings.And, of course, Summers’ plan to reform the curriculum was lousy, and he gave up on it well before women in science came along.

Scheiber says Summers wasn’t political enough. Yet this is the man who brought with him to the presidency a personal press secretary and a chief of staff—two things Harvard had never had before.

I could go on to discuss all that is not to be found in Scheiber’s piece. No mention of Summers’ Russia problem; nothing about Jack Meyer’s departure and interest-rate swaps; nothing about how Summers falsely accused Cornel West of sexual harassment; nothing about Summers’ aggressive (and successful) attempts to block the regulation of Wall Street during the Clinton years. No serious consideration of the way that he and Bob Rubin bailed out Wall Street during the currency crises of the late ’90s. Not one quote from someone who has anything negative to say about Summers. I mean, think about that.

That takes some work.

As I’ve said before when considering Larry Summers-related journalism, I’m not trying to criticize Summers. My own views about him are mixed, and not as negative as you might think given what I write above, and we all hope he does a bang-up job in his current position.

But sloppy journalism—journalism intended to serve the writer rather than the reader—now, that’s irritating. There are dozens of mistakes and inaccuracies in this piece of “reporting,” and Larry Summers is too powerful a man not to point that out.