The Clever Mr. Summers and Eleventh-Level-Chess Obama

I've just finished reading Ron Suskind's 2011 book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President. The book could probably be called reportage, or even history, but there are several wisdom/truth themes in it that ring deeply for me.

Ron Suskind

One of these themes is the truth that smarts – intellectual quickness, rapid memory retrieval, debate-winning, assertiveness, extensive information, cleverness – is not the same thing as wisdom.

The confusion between the two allows all sorts of mischief in education, business, finance, politics and just every aspect of social and personal life. Suskind gets to that in the case of “the clever Mr. Summers” (Paul Volcker's phrase):

p. 349: [Quoting Summers:] “I can win any argument. I can win arguing either side.”

p. 118: That was [Summers'] feat, an illusionist's trick calling for a certain true genius: he could will into being the confidence that eluded others – those less self-assured and, maybe, on humbler terms with the complexities of the world.

p.84: It all boils down to the classic Larry Summers problem: he can frame arguments with such force and conviction that people think he knows more than he does. Instead of looking at a record pockmarked with bad decisions, people see his extemporaneous brilliance and let themselves be dazzled. Summers' long career has come to look, more and more, like one long demonstration of the difference between wisdom and smarts.”

President Obama also has smarts like this and I think that is why he is so very fond and faithful to Summers despite countless, mystified attempts of good people to indicate to Obama that something is wrong. We saw this early on when Obama appointed Summers, Geithner and Rahm Emanuel:

p. 164: “At a meeting in December 2008, Byron Dorgan...'You've picked the wrong people,' he said to Obama, citing Geithner and Summers, both of whom Dorgan knew. 'I don't understand how you could do this. You've picked the wrong people!'”

Paul Volcker

p.288: “[Paul Volcker] told all this to Obama, in various ways. 'I think Obama understands everything intellectually, very easily, near as I can see. What we don't know is whether or not he has the courage to follow through.”

Barack Obama is obviously, like Larry Summers, very bright, quick, informed and articulate. He is also very good at handling people, including children, and a master politician, whereas Summers is not. No one doubts that he is immensely talented. So why is it that he doesn't follow through, “leads from behind,” is nowhere to be found at the crucial moments, doesn't use the bully pulpit, finds backbone more often against people who wish him well than against his true enemies, is such a disappointment to us, and lets escape so many opportunities to make a real, fundamental difference?

One specific example cited by Suskind, p. 339, that brings to mind the phrase, “an illusionist's trick;”

“The public face of the administration was as gender-progressive as any in history...[But, Geithner said in private,] 'The perception is that women have real power, yet they all feel like shit.'"

I think think that the answer to this mystifying problem is that Obama and Summers are both very smart people who were able to get what they wanted because they were bright. Summers, Rahm, Geithner are all clever people who complement and supplement each other – and thus the seemingly mystifying bond Obama has with them. He is ultimately one of them. To quote Volcker once again:

p. 343: “He seems to feel he has all he needs in the clever Mr. Summers. Together they're both so very confident.”

Obama and Summers

Now, I grew up in a town that had an unusually large number of punks and I never imagined that one day I would be grateful for having had that horrifying experience, which enabled me later to understand this. These guys were physically strong and able; bright; their meanness unacknowledged by officials. They got away with everything. They knew when to suck up, when to be defiant. But they nonetheless were violent, thieving, destructive, merciless punks. I moved out of that hell-hole and spent many years around high-class places like Harvard only to discover that the fundamental reality was every bit the same there as in the small town. One was far more sophisticated, clever, informed, than the other, but underneath they were basically the same.

There is one other wisdom theme in Suskind's book that I would like to bring out in a future article but is so pertinent to what I've written here that I will just mention it now. And that is his insight that “going along with it” is a big thing. He speaks of ordinary clients going along with and patronizing “Goldman or JPMorgan or any number of large hedge funds not in spite of the threat that those firms will act beyond the edge of propriety, but because of it. They are counting on it.”

Here, let him describe the attitude and the consequence:

p. 404: “Let them do whatever they want, just as long as I, as a valued customer, get a piece of it. And if I can help in any way, I will.” This is, of course, the way criminal syndicates rise up. It's an issue of might...If it's not going to change, then why not be part of it? If they didn't sign on, their competitor would.

Elizabeth Warren and Christina Romer

Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren first met Christina Romer just before Romer left Washington. They talked of the need for regulating the financial services industry and I would have loved to have been there when Romer said to Warren:

Christina Romer

“Why is it always the women? Why are we the only ones with balls around here?”

I say the names of Sheila Bair and Brooksley Born.

Romer said to Obama: “If you give power to Rahm or Larry, you're responsible for their actions.”

I just absolutely love it. 

Sheila Bair

Just love it.

Obama, Rahm, Summers, Geithner didn't like it.

Here is, just for the pleasure of it, a photo of Lilly Ledbetter, who did so much to fight for equal pay for women.

Lilly Ledbetter

Respectable Grown-Ups

When I am grown to man's estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.  
- from Robert L. Stevenson's “A Child's Garden of Verses”

Robert Louis Stevenson

You may well have trouble believing this, but I saw it happen right before my eyes after midnight on a cold, snowy January night in the relatively wealthy, respectable town of Concord, Massachusetts.

This short street on which I lived was a cul-de-sac and I am looking out my window at these magnificent big snow flakes coming down under the streetlight and I see my two neighbors out in the middle of the turnaround, arguing with each other. Both are multi-millionaires. One of them is the 65-year old wife of the founder of a giant electronics company. The other is a recently-retired president of a large bank in Boston.

The lady has a wheelbarrow and has been shovelling snow into the wheelbarrow and carrying it across the street from her property and dumping it onto the bank president's property. You see, it isn't fair that the snowplow pushes all the snow down the street onto her property, but doesn't push much snow onto the bank president's property when it turns around. It isn't fair that they push more snow onto her property than his.

The bank president comes out to put a stop to this, but the electronics executive's wife knows that she has been wronged and is not going to accept it and let him get away with it.

Now, I've often thought about that incident in the fifty years since it happened, and it has served as a relatively clear example to me of how wealthy, “successful,” respected people who are favored beyond 99% of the people who have ever lived on earth or will ever live on earth, can feel such contempt and hatred for the rest of us: it's about the fact that they themselves never grew up, never broke through to what is truly important. How quick they are to accuse us of feeling like victims and of being childish and having a sense of grievance – for they are talking about themselves. Those two wealthy, “successful” people out in the snow after midnight fighting about the snowplow's unfairness could have been five years old, or even younger, in real terms.

A friend tells me that Alcoholics Anonymous says that you have to resume your development by going back, as it were, to the age at which you started drinking. These people imbibed the money and respectability and “success” poison early, and needed to go way, way back to when they were five years old and admit that they had not only been wrong and wasted their lives, but admit to the contempt and harm they inflicted upon the rest of us who saw through all that. Impossible.

I can still see them out there in the cold and storm, late at night, arguing over a wheelbarrow full of snow.

That Song: Over the River and through the Wood

The original title was “A New-England Boy's Song about Thanksgiving Day” but it has become known as "Over the River and through the Wood” because that resonant phrase, repeated in every verse of the song, is symbolic, the language of dreams and myth and “fairy tale.”

The image of crossing the river to the other side has such associations as to the promised land, the world of spirit, the unknown depths. We know, for example, that vampires can not catch you if you can get across running water. And the woods, dark and deep, like the unconscious mind, is full of things that we have to learn, to discover. Children get it - grandfather's house, the animals, and joy and all that - and have sung the song continually since Maria Child wrote it in 1844.

It upsets me greatly that I knew nothing about Maria Child until I was over the age of seventy. I first read a couple of sentences in her introduction to one of her books on women and I immediately knew that here was a priceless jewel, right from my own background, of whom I knew nothing at all. 

...there really is such a thing as constant, disinterested love, which failure cannot intimidate or time diminish...mistaken votary of ambition...prevent one young heart from becoming selfish and world-worn...
 

I could tell immediately that here was a person after my own soul. She was born in “Meffed,” that is to say, Medford, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life in the neighborhood of Boston, and then when I saw that she was well into Swedenborg by the time she was twenty although she was Unitarian, I knew why all the bells rang. She personally knew the New England literati of that era like Margaret Fuller, Whittier, and the Concord people like Emerson, and wrote for the The Dial.

Lydia Maria Child

Then there were her books, articles, letters and talks on slavery and the spirit of collusion with it. She wrote the first book in the USA against slavery, “An appeal in favor of that class of Americans called Africans.” She pulled together and edited Harriet Jacobs' “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.” The Jacobs book, which I had also not known, is absolutely harrowing – having one's children sold, for instance – and you see that the USA was fundamentally the same, spiritually speaking, prior to 1860, as it is today.

You read the travel accounts by Charles Dickens or by Harriet Martineau of their visits to the USA during Child's era, and are struck by how embarrassed they felt when being waited upon by slaves. It's the same feeling of embarrassment and anguish that I feel today when ever I am waited upon by someone at Macdonald's or Burger King or WalMart or any of those stores over there in the Mall of Dayton.

I hear her cry against such things as not being allowed to vote, not being able to vote on the issue of slavery or anything else, even as it was in my own mother's lifetime, or not being able to open a bank account in one's own name. She saw the essence of the USA early on, suffered, endured, flourished, and wrote many things (most of them available online), among them the words to that New England boy's Thanksgiving Day song.

Here are a few quotes that have struck me from my reading of Maria Child thus far:

“[The aristocracy], unable to act openly, disguises itself and sends its poison from under a mask. What is the root of the difficulty on the great question of abolition? It is not with the farmers, it is not with the mechanics..No, no! It is not those who are to blame for the persecution suffered by abolitionists. Manufacturers who supply the South, merchants who trade with the South, ministers settled at the South, and editors patronized by the South, are the ones who really promote mobs.”

“True wisdom consists in being satisfied with the pleasures we can derive from the common and simple things of life.”

“The United States is not a beacon, not a light of freedom. She is a warning, rather than an example to the world.”

“Nothing on earth has such effect on the popular heart as songs...”

Competition

Competition is one of those basic questions on which I come out with just such outside answers that I simply can not grasp the common view. This position causes me to wonder where I might be wrong, to doubt myself, and to go through it all again. I've done it hundreds of times and always come back with the answer that, no, I'm right.

An immediate instance of this that comes to mind is in schools where competition for test grades, grade-point averages, marks, prizes, and such abound. Competitive sports – an oxymoron, since sport connotes the rejection of competition – are a big deal. The “winners” are consider heroes, get their names in the paper, are held up as examples to emulate and the competition itself is considered a preparation for and metaphor for life itself.

The idea of it is enshrined in survival-of-the-fittest biological theory that is mistakenly applied to human group life, contrary to every religious teaching about doing unto others what you would have them do to you. Wouldn't it be funny if they found that Christ, for example, said something like “whosoever would be first, shall be last” or asked his disciples to compete with each other to determine “who is the greatest among them” and offered bribes to encourage such competition among them?!

Competition brings out moral fault because getting ahead of, beating, trouncing, annihilating, destroying – common vocabulary in politics, economics, “sports,” the academy – involve hurting others.

I thought a lot about Franklin Roosevelt's statement:

“Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”

That seemed like a sensible statement to me, at first. I think of Watson and Crick's competitive approach as recounted in “The Double Helix” and how it propelled a revolution in molecular biology that has led to all sorts of useful things. Still, I think that their discovery is not good or bad in itself but depends on the use to which we put it.

We in the USA have had decades of dedicated self-aggrandizement and programmatic selfishness since the late 1970's, touted as the highest level of human civilization in the history of the world. The fundamental current struggle in USA politics and cultural life is, I believe, to defeat the competitive world-view.

Maxwell Perkins has a classic statement on it in “A Letter to Van Wyck Brooks” where he says, among many other good things:

“The qualities of competition are selfish, brutal, beast-like qualities as compared with the softer, generous qualities whose presence in a man handicaps him under the competitive regime...”

I can not reproduce the whole letter here, but it can be found in his book, “Editor to Author, The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins,” or reproduced in “TheBitch-Goddess Success.”

This latter book, “The Bitch-Goddess Success: Variations on an American Theme by Alexis de Tocqueville, Washington Allston, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, William James, Louis Sullivan, Charles Ives, Vachel Lindsay, Maxwell E. Perkins, W.H. Auden, John F. Kennedy, George F. Kennan,” is, by the way, just an absolute jewel of a book. I have given away more copies of that book than any other over the course of my life. I even had a clergyman steal one my copies.

You see, that's another inherent fault in competition. It's a “bitch-goddess” in that you can never “win” it. There is always going to be someone ahead of, in front of, better than, having more money, smarter, greater, than you! Here is what they say these days: “Good luck with that.”

Larry Summers and The Best and Brightest

The latest episode in my long history of grappling with the problem of cleverness

is my current reading of Herman Melville's “The Confidence Man.” It's a catalogue of clever ways in which people manipulate and use others. The question goes through my mind: “How did Melville know Ohio so well?"
 

Another recent episode was an article by Robert Scheer about Larry Summers' current effort to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
 

The substance of the article struck me as being accurate but I thought a lot about his reference to Summers as “stupid.” I can see why Scheer says it. It's true in a fundamental sense, in that Summers misses obvious, fundamental, realities despite being brilliant. Just consider his proposal to use poor countries as dumps or his remarks on women's minds while president of Harvard or his remarks promoting financial derivatives speculation by touting the maturity, sophistication and sense of Wall Streeters. You wonder how he could be so stupid as to believe such things or where has he been all his life – on what planet - how it is possible. He is astonishingly stupid in that sense, I suppose, but I see it more as a case of being astonishingly clever.

Larry Summers and Bob Rubin

The Viet-Nam War now seems quite “stupid” yet it was given to us by “The Best and the Brightest,” as Halberstam put it. Perle and Wolfowitz and Rice and Cheney and Powell and many other very bright people gave us what is now called the Iraq "blunder."

I think it has something to do with the fact that very clever people - bright, quick, highly intelligent people - are able to escape having to deal with realities that the rest of us have to face, to know, or we die.

True Facts

That guy with half a face who lives across the back alley is in jail again tonight. One of my friends who lives in that building was over here this morning telling me that it's 'Bye Bye Half Face.'

I never learned for sure why he has only a half a face. Some people tell me that it was due to his having had a stroke, and others say he got shot in the face. He seems too young to me to have had a stroke, but I don't actually know.

My next door neighbor, that lady who feeds feral cats, was complaining about Half Face earlier this week because he had stolen the gate to her iron link fence. She confronted him about it, and he said he only got about a buck for it at the scrapper and that he would give her that buck.

Anyway, there was a lot of noise last night over at his house across the alley. There are about three people who live there in addition to that fat guy who just sits on the back porch all day and who have various substance-abuse problems. It seems that one of the women who hang around over there is upset with Half Face for non-delivery of dope. So they argue and scream about it late at night, and she is not going to be treated this way, so she she steals his cellphone and goes home to her own apartment.

Half Face goes there with his Pit-Bull to get his cellphone back and is making banging noises and yelling and swearing and the girl is screaming and the Pit-Bull is barking. People gather and the dog bites some kid on the arm and Half Face is threatening the girl. The cops arrive and take Half Face to jail and impound his Pit-Bull. They charge him with some offense against the girl and something else, and set bail at $13,000.

My friend who is telling me the details this morning is especially worried about the dog. He thinks the dog may have to be put down, since it is untrained, undisciplined. People around here worry more about animals than about human beings. When that kid broke into the flat behind the dry-cleaner's last year, and killed a guy and his dog, my neighbors were more upset about the dog than the guy. And we have two cat ladies on this block who would go to jail themselves before they would stop feeding feral cats. The city told them that they would be fined over $100 per offense if they caught them doing it, and that was over a year ago but they're still doing it.