But the guy he mentored who’s the NY Fed chair is probably a good pick, too.

I’ll accept that I don’t have a clear view on this guy given the source on much of my information, but it seems to me that this might be one Clintonite he might do well to take a pass on, given the hard feelings some people harbor about the sexism of the primaries.

The comments on men and women in faculty… I read the speech after he gave it, and the stuff that came out then, and I just re-read it now, and I don’t find it a persuasively anti-feminist or anti-woman speech. He offers three hypotheses, all drawn from papers on presentation at the conference he was attending, and he says he’s going to try and provoke the audience, and then that’s exactly what he does. But along the way, he recognizes first that what he thinks is the most important hypothesis — the one that should be studied and dealt with most immediately — is whether our society as a whole had played a role in making it possible and preferable for men to be able to choose to have a family while working 80 hours a week while women are hardly ever offered the same opportunity. Which… seems fairly reasonable to me. The intrinsic aptitude part of the speech — yeah, it’s provocative, but he takes pains to say he’s sure he’s wrong, he’s being unsubtle, etc., throughout the whole stretch. (And the leading commentary on the speech in the article you cite is from a woman who walked out of the session and so probably didn’t hear the entirety of the argument).

Everything I’ve read about Summers (check thislong form profile from when he was new to the job in 2004) makes him seem like a guy who has some big problems with political interaction but not as someone with bad intent in any of the areas that matter most to me. In fact, he seems sort of like… well, like someone Obama would pick, in the Emanuel vein of hard-charging super-smart folks who can get stuff done.

But maybe I’m missing something. I would like to know, because I’ve felt hesitant to engage in any of this debate so far, because I feel like I’m missing a big piece.