In the Washington Post yesterday, Drew Faust published what strikes me as the first truly political/powerful/public argument she’s made since becoming president of Harvard. Is she finally starting to feel comfortable using her bully pulpit?

Faust’s op-ed, intended to mark the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, talks about how things could have been different when the South seceded from the Union; a president other than Lincoln might have lacked the vision and the oratory to articulate a case for the Civil War, and the enormous (and mostly voluntary) sacrifice of human life on which the war was won might never happened. She traces how his explanation of the war’s justification evolved from a preservation of the union to the creation of a better, more perfect nation that would spy on inspire the world.

But, she says, have we fulfilled Lincoln’s dream, or disappointed it?

After beginning a new fiscal year by shutting down the government, we are far from modeling to the world why our — or any — democracy should be viewed as the “best hope” for humankind. The world sees in the United States the rapid growth of inequality; the erosion of educational opportunity and social mobility that “afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life”; the weakening of voting rights hard-won over a century of post-Reconstruction struggle.

Meanwhile, at the IMF Research Conference, Larry Summers gave a speech about our economic situation that is being widely praised—even by one of his fiercer critics, Paul Krugman.

The speech discusses the fact that, even with interest rates at zero and huge sums of money being pumped into the economy by the Fed, economic growth has been slow and inflation virtually non-existent. In other words, the Fed is using the most powerful tools at its disposal and they’re barely working. What if this is a chronic state of affairs? And what tools does that leave the Fed if another economic crisis hits?

I think that [what the] world has under-internalized is that it is not over until it is over, and that is surely not right now and cannot be judged relative to the extent of financial panic, and that we may well need in the years ahead to think about how we manage an economy in which the zero nominal interest rate is a chronic and systemic inhibitor of economic activities, holding our economies back below their potential.

Summers is so much more interesting, and to my mind, important, when he is freed from the restrictions of an office and can speak his mind. Yes, he’s wrong sometimes. But he’s never boring, and is sometimes important. A Larry Summers who made up his mind that he doesn’t really give a damn whether he ever becomes Fed chair or not would be a very interesting person to watch.