When you think about it, the resurgence of Larry Summers is remarkable, and says something commendable about him and something unfortunate about the way higher education is generally perceived and something kind of depressing about the short-memory times we live in.

Eight years ago, Summers couldn’t have been appointed dogcatcher. He resigned from Harvard a massively unpopular figure on campus (although to be fair, many students liked him, since he was something of a celebrity and he bought them pizza; students at Harvard are desperately grateful when any authority figure notices them). Summers was despised by women who knew virtually nothing about him except that they thought he thought they were genetically ill-equipped at science and math. He was despised by the faculty from which he had begun his rise to stardom. He was distrusted by African-Americans for his shameful treatment of Cornel West. (What did Cornel West ever do that Larry Summers has not since done in multiples?) And he had lost the most prestigious job in higher education in a short—but felt much longer—five year period.

Eight years later, Summers is, according to some reports, President Obama’s leading choice to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve.

The current buzz about this story really began yesterday, with a Washington Post piece by the respected DC-reporter Ezra Klein.

All else being equal, President Obama would like to choose Larry Summers, Klein and co-author Evan Soltas wrote.

On the merits, they think the preference many on the left have for Janet Yellen is a bit puzzling. Yellen and Summers are both strongly committed to reducing unemployment. They’re both committed to implementing Dodd-Frank — as much as the left mistrusts Summers on financial regulation for his actions in the 1990s, the White House believes that he, like many others, is strongly committed to regulating Wall Street now. They see a lot of the opposition to Summers is based on bad or outdated information.

And here’s something that I found particularly interesting:

…The White House is running a very insular process. People I would’ve thought are being heavily consulted report that they’ve had little or no contact with the White House. People who have been consulted are surprised at the superficiality of the discussions. If the president is making any calls to ask for advice himself, he is making very, very few of them. This is a dynamic, of course, that favors a candidate like Summers who knows the inside players extremely well ….

Klein and Soltas’ post set off a flurry of econ-blogging from people who think Summers would be a terrible choice.

A couple examples:

Felix Salmon:

The choice of Summers would also be the clearest signal yet that Obama feels that he did what needed to be done to deal with the financial crisis, and that financial reform is, for the rest of his presidency, going to be a very low priority. Summers is a deregulator in his bones; he didn’t like the consumer-friendly parts of Dodd-Frank, and his actions have nearly always erred on the side of being far too friendly to Wall Street. He considers monetary policy to be largely irrelevant in a zero interest rate environment, and there is no chance whatsoever that he would take a robust leadership role with respect to the Fed’s other big job, which is regulation. If you want to repeat all of the Clinton-era mistakes of financial regulation, you can’t do better than appointing Clinton’s very own Treasury secretary.

Janet Yellen has all the makings of an excellent and prescient Fed chair — but she’s a White House outsider, and a woman. If Obama allows Yellen to be thusly disqualified, he deserves all the outraged dismay that will surely follow any Summers nomination.

HuffPo:

Leading Democrats are struggling with the idea that President Barack Obama may actually nominate economist Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve. If he does, he’d pass over Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen, who saw the warning signs of the 2008 financial collapse, for Summers, whose deregulatory advocacy as treasury secretary contributed to it.

Salon:

After contributing to the crisis, and then losing $1.8 billion for Harvard by investing most of their cash reserves in an endowment stuffed with risky trades, Summers denied the existence of the housing bubble. At the Federal Reserve annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 2005, right before the crash, economist Raghuram Rajan warned of the imminent catastrophe in a formal paper, arguing that excessive risk-taking had surged, and that the banking system faced a “full-blown financial crisis” from the sliver of toxic securities on their own books. Larry Summers was the first to stand up and attack Rajan, bellowing that he found “the basic, slightly lead-eyed premise of [Mr. Rajan’s] paper to be misguided.” Incidentally, Janet Yellen spoke publicly about the risks of the housing bubble around this same time.

In short, if we wanted to pin the crisis on one person, Summers would be a viable candidate.

Following this day of Summers storms, the Times joins in this morning with a piece about the gender subtext of choosing Larry Summers over Janet Yellen. Yellen, the Times points out, is one of a small group of female economists who have managed to break into the Obama administration’s inner circle. (Christie Romer, to whom Drew Faust denied tenure, is another.)

Summers, on the other hand, has the support of several White House insiders, like Jack Lew, Gene Sperling and Jason Furman, and some Wall Streeters, like Bob Rubin, and Sheryl Sandberg, whose career Summers boosted when he secretly gave her the okay to digitize Harvard’s libraries for Google.

The Times plays up the gender angle:

…the choice also is roiling Washington because it is reviving longstanding and sensitive questions about the insularity of the Obama White House and the dearth of women in its top economic policy positions. Even as three different women have served as secretary of state under various presidents and growing numbers have taken other high-ranking government jobs, there has been little diversity among Mr. Obama’s top economic advisers.

“Are we moving forward? It’s hard to see it,” said Ms. Romer…

To me, the idea that anyone would appoint Larry Summers to a hugely powerful, highly un-democratic position seems the height of folly—an invitation for him to abandon all his attempts at human decency and revert to his overbearing, egoistic, bullying persona.

So to find out what’s going on, I had a long talk with someone who knows all the players and is considerably better informed on the situation than I am.

The choice of Summers is indeed the way the White House—read: Obama—is leaning, this person said. That’s why you’re seeing all this stuff in the press; the White House is putting it out there, vetting the reaction to a Summers pick. Why? Well, the argument that Summers was an architect of deregulation and is therefore partly to blame for the financial crisis doesn’t cut with Obama; deregulation happened in the mid-to-late ’90s, the economic crisis happened a decade and change later, and the real villain, the president believes, was leverage. Instead, Obama is influenced by the economic advisors with whom he talks daily: Jack Lew, Gene Sperling, Jason Furman, probably Tim Geithner—all of whom are graduates of the Bob Rubin/Larry Summers school of influence. Moreover, said this source, Obama has always been infatuated with Summers’ “genius”—this was said with some skepticism—and Summers has always been very assiduous about sucking up to the president. Finally, because the overall economic news is good, Summers will get some credit for the economy’s positive momentum.

This may be why you see Yellen supporters raising the gender issue—because it’s the last, best card they’ve got.

I said at the beginning of this post that Summers’ rise from the ashes said something commendable about him, unfortunate about higher education and kind-of depressing about the short-memory times we live in. Let me elaborate. I think you have to commend Summers’ persistence; he does not give up. But part of his rebirth is due to the fact that so many outsiders have such a disdainful view of academia that, when Summers lost his job, he actually gained support in certain quarters of the populace whose inhabitants think of professors as liberal eggheads who don’t know a thing about the real world. And as for the sort memory issue—I do think that Summers’ anti-regulation stances are relevant, and so are his close ties with Wall Street, which has paid him millions of dollars in a not very long time and for a not very large amount of work. He was wrong on the merits of, say, deregulating derivatives. He was wrong on the importance of preserving creditors’ rights at the expense of ordinary people during the financial crises of the early ’90s. He was wrong on women in science. He was not only wrong about Andrei Shleifer, he lied about it. He was wrong on Zayed Yasin. He has repeatedly been vile in discussing the Winklevoss twins—this bit of video is one of the most appalling scenes of smugness and bad judgment you will ever watch.

Larry Summers has been wrong on many, many things, and he should not be trusted with power, especially the immense and un-democratic power of the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, and he would be the wrong choice to chair that organization.