I’m sorry, but it’s true. The magazine publishes a profile of Summers this week that is astonishing in its sycophancy and embarrassing in its lack of depth. It’s the kind of piece that makes you think, Well, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if TIme goes bust. Bloggers do it better anyway.

(Thanks to the commenter below who pointed this article out, by the way.)

Granted, it’s standard operating procedure to run a puff piece of an incoming administration official—that way you gain access for the next four or eight years. But still…this one is egregious.

It’s called “Can Larry Summers Save the Economy?,” a probably unwitting rewrite of the 1999 Time headline regarding Summers, Bob Rubin and Alan Greenspan, “The Committee to Save the World.”

[Blogger: That coincidence alone should suggest some caution to Time’s reporters, given the contributions all three of those men have made to the current economic situation.]

The article begins with a journalism cliche so hoary it should be banned:

By 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 27, Lawrence H. Summers has already been working for about nine hours….

Yes. We know. People work hard in Washington. If you work in the White House, it’s really not that big a deal to get up at 5:45. Go to bed at 12 and you get more sleep than most parents with young children.

Herewith, a few more lines in which Time puckers up:

The litany of crises would give an army of economists the shakes, but it doesn’t seem to faze the 54-year-old Summers.

Summers starts speaking with an almost poetic clarity, in those perfectly formed sentences that have made him an in-house economist for three of the past five Presidents.

(Blogger: Three of the past five? Hmmm…..)

“Quite frankly, I’m not sure we would have gotten him but for the fact that we have a crisis that is equal to his talents,” [David] Axelrod says.

Yes. Because Summers clearly had no interest in returning to Washington and would happily have maintained his busy teaching schedule at Harvard.

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, refers to him in briefings as “Dr. Summers,” with a deference that suggests Summers has powers out of science fiction.

“His solutions tend to be government-led, progressive structuring of the market for what he perceives as the greater social good,” explains the new Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, who was an Under Secretary for Summers during the Clinton Administration. “But he is also a firm believer in letting market forces lead the way.”

[Blogger: So Summers believes in government-led structuring of the market, except when he believes in letting market forces lead the way. That is, arguably, one way of saying that Summers doesn’t believe in anything.]

“To have an argument with Larry Summers is a little like being run over by a tank with a Lotus engine and to find the experience educational,” says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution.

[Blogger: Apparently Time doesn’t know that Talbott has been using that line for the better part of a decade. Here it is from his book, The Russia Hand, which came out seven years ago.

“Larry’s brain was like a tank powered by a Lotus engine: it purred as it rolled over anything in its way,” Talbott writes. “Over the next eight years, I was flattened more than once, but I usually found the experience educational.“]

And on other counts, Time is just plain wrong:

As chief economist at the World Bank, he penned a memo explaining the “impeccable” economic logic of dumping toxic waste in developing countries, igniting a firestorm despite his protests that he was being sarcastic.

As I reported in Harvard Rules, it wasn’t Summers who wrote that memo, but an aide. Summers just signed off on it. And Summers never said he was being sarcastic; he said he wanted to encourage free thinking.

Time hangs on every word Summers has said or written as if they were new commandments:

In a column about the crisis published in September, shortly after he joined the campaign team, Summers laid out the fundamental thesis on which the Obama White House now operates. “For the near term,” Summers wrote in the Financial Times, “government should do more, not less.”

Yes. We agree. President Barack Hoover Obama would not be the way to go right now. Why does anyone think the banal statement above is brilliant? Summers is not exactly the first economist to advocate government spending during a recession.

And probably worst of all, Time lets Summers off the hook when it comes to a serious critique of the stimulus bill.

“No $825 billion bill is going to not have some projects that any individual disagrees with,” Summers says.

[Blogger: Ah, the “poetic clarity” of the double negative.]

But particular disagreements aren’t really the point, are they? The question is whether the stimulus bill is well-designed and whether it will work, and a lot of people have raised pretty fundamental questions to that effect, none of which are addressed in Time.

And there are some interesting tidbits for Harvardians:

He has already fallen into a steady routine, waking before sunrise at his northwest-Washington apartment, from which his wife Elisa New plans to commute to her job as an English professor at Harvard.

[Blogger: In the interest of non-poetic clarity, at the moment, “before sunrise” means anything before 7 AM. Qhuelle horreur!]

I wonder if that is the same apartment Harvard paid for during Summers’ tenure as president (and after?). Also, in a time of budgetary pressure, will the Harvard English department underwrite Lisa New’s travel expenses?

I don’t write these things to criticize Larry Summers—nice ink if you can get it—but to point out what a terrible piece of journalism Time has concocted. For Larry Summers, life these days is like a box of chocolates, and they’re all being handed to him by the mainstream media.