Blogging for Portfolio, Felix Salmon makes some smart points about Noam Scheiber’s wretched profile of Larry Summers in the New Republic.

In particular, Salmon challenges Scheiber’s argument that Summers has insufficient power; that we should get out of the way and let him work his magic.

But in fact there’s precious little evidence that when it comes to policy prescriptions, Summers has any particular special ability to alight upon exactly the right course of action at any given time. He’s good at asking pointed questions, but I don’t see many people standing around right now and saying “if only we’d listened more to Larry.”

And Salmon echoes something I’ve written (and he probably has before as well): the idea that Summers’ columns in the FT were, essentially, meaningless pap. (Is that redundant?)

Although Scheiber picks on one particular FT column of Larry’s as indicating that he might be more inclined towards bank nationalization than Tim Geithner is, the real lesson of Summers’s tenure as an FT columnist is that most of his policy prescriptions tend to be carefully-hedged conventional wisdom, the kind of thing that most left-leaning economists would be hard pressed to disagree with. I was econoblogging for the entire time that Summers spent at the FT, and I almost never found anything worth blogging in his columns: they struck me as being made up mostly of hot air and self-importance, with very little of actual substance.

Carefully-hedged conventional wisdom is exactly right; the other point to make about them is that they manifest what seems like a calculated move to the left, calibrated, perhaps, in order to appeal to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They are columns written not to provide insight, but to serve as a job application.

How Obama handles Summers is going to be an interesting and important test of the man. If he’s smart enough to understand how to use Summers well while at the same time keeping him under control, that would suggest a level of confidence, intelligence and insight that could make Obama a great president.

If he’s one of those people who sits back in awe of Summers’ great brain, we are in trouble.