WSJ Article About Larry

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By Monica Langley of the WSJ.

WASHINGTON — An hour after the release of Friday’s grim jobs report, Lawrence Summers was in the Oval Office, giving President Barack Obama his daily economic briefing. After analyzing the bad news, the chief White House economic adviser gave his assessment of the roughly $800 billion stimulus bill getting hashed out in the Senate, and told his boss with econometric precision that there was approximately an 80% chance — “in the low 80s” — that it would create as many jobs as Mr. Obama’s original proposal.

Is that “83% or 84%?” the president asked, poking fun at Mr. Summers’s tendency to quantify an event’s chances and shun the usual briefer’s hedges of “likely” and “unlikely.”

It was a rare bit of a humor, recounted by Mr. Summers later in the day, in a continuing bleak dialogue between the two men as they try to figure out how to correct the nation’s worsening economy. In an interview in his spartan White House office with only a few papers and Diet Coke on his desk, Mr. Summers said: “It’s a grave situation that I never envisioned. I thought these crises would stay in the history books.”

Andrew Councill For The Wall Street Journal

Lawrence Summers, head of the White House’s National Economic Council, is broadening his role beyond shaping the Obama administration’s plans on the economic stimulus, bank bailouts and financial regulation.As he helps to write the new history of economic policy from his perch running the National Economic Council, Mr. Summers is instrumental in shaping the Obama administration’s plans on economic stimulus, bank bailouts, budget deficits and financial regulation. But the scope of his influence is broader — getting into the policy and politics of health-care reform, green jobs and Detroit auto makers. “The real challenge is to do things to jolt the economy back to its potential,” he said.

He faces a personal challenge as well, one that has existed throughout his professional life: to control his tendency to say exactly what he thinks, which has gotten him into trouble. No one argues that Mr. Summers isn’t innovative in finding economic solutions — they just find his style sometimes abrasive.

In these early days of the Obama administration, Mr. Summers, 54 years old, has already tussled with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the bank-bailout plan, environment czar Carol Browner on the effect of green changes on the economy, and pushed some staff members hard on their economic-policy proposals, said people who have been in the meetings. One person who has been on the receiving end of his forceful personality, head of the Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer, said a tough public debate with Mr. Summers is “the ultimate sign of respect.”

Mr. Summers’s stance highlights an underlying tension in how Washington is dealing with the economic meltdown. It requires immediate action from him and other officials with a deep understanding of the financial system, but also a need to build camaraderie and consensus to craft a complex, multifaceted package, ranging from new spending and tax cuts to rewriting the rules for how America’s financial system works in the 21st century.

The son of economists, Mr. Summers has been a star economist since early in his career. He served as the chief economist for the World Bank and then as a Treasury official in the Clinton administration, succeeding Robert Rubin to become Treasury secretary.

From 2001-2006, he was president of Harvard University, ultimately resigning under pressure for remarks some women interpreted as a suggestion that women aren’t as adept in science and math as men. In recent years, while teaching at Harvard, Mr. Summers has become a favorite economist for Democrats, helping the Democratic leadership in Congress, according to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, head of the congressional Joint Economic Committee.

Mr. Summers is widely seen as having ambitions beyond his current job. He originally wanted to be Treasury secretary, several Democrats say. He has long been described as a possible chairman of the Federal Reserve — a job that could come open as soon as 2010, if Mr. Obama chose not to reappoint Ben Bernanke when his term runs out.

Mr. Summers dismisses those questions as “hypotheticals,” saying “there are enough really hard actual questions” for him to focus on.

With the gloomy prospects on the economy, Mr. Summers has already cancelled his summer plans for tennis camp — which he usually attends with Mr. Geithner and other Clinton administration economic alumni: Lee Sachs, expected to be Mr. Geithner’s undersecretary for domestic policy, and Gene Sperling, a Geithner advisor who held the NEC job Mr. Summers now has.

The group decided they couldn’t leave en masse this year. “We’re all seeing plenty of each other these days,” Mr. Summers said of his usual campmates.

As part of his current job, Mr. Summers runs daily economic briefings for President Obama — an innovation of the new White House, modeled on the daily intelligence briefings long given to presidents by the director of national intelligence. Mr. Summers tries to come up with a “topic of the day,” and always brings in different administration experts.

At a briefing last week, Mr. Summers provided Mr. Obama with a 30-page book outlining options to beef up financial regulation. He asked former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker — an Obama adviser during the campaign who Friday unveiled his new economic-recovery panel of advisers — to lead the discussion. Other briefings have included health-care, particularly on changes that can be made in the economic-stimulus and budget plans in anticipation of a health-care overhaul.

The former Harvard economist is constantly doing his own first-person research. At the Alfalfa Club dinner this past Saturday night, Mr. Summers worked the room with a mission — gathering evidence on how the president’s economic-stimulus package could work. When he saw an auto-industry official, he pushed for information on car sales to gauge the state of consumer demand.

As NEC director, Mr. Summers’s is also supposed to be Mr. Obama’s honest broker, mediating disputes over economic policy from disparate parts of the administration. He did that earlier this week, as officials were finalizing plans for a Wednesday announcement setting new limits on executive pay for financial firms receiving federal funds. Mr. Summers mediated between Mr. Geithner, who wanted some flexibility for Wall Street firms to attract top talent, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who wanted a “hard-hitting crackdown” on exorbitant pay packages, said one participant.

But some rivals see Mr. Summers as using his West Wing office and proximity to the president to sometimes promote his own his agenda, not always to sift through those of others. Mr. Summers will “do business in the White House corridors,” said one Democratic adviser. “If he sees the president or Rahm, he’ll plunge ahead. Larry isn’t wired to be a policy coordinator and bring in all points of view.”

Regarding his tendency to push people, Mr. Summers said “the pushing is not really because I have an agenda — in most cases it’s because I want to help the arguments be as strong as they can possibly be.”

Write to Monica Langley at monica.langley@wsj.com