The White House Looks for Work

At the center was Summers, a larger-than-life figure who by many accounts was ill suited to run a bureaucratic process. To some of his colleagues, Summers was an eye-rolling intellectual bully. “He’s much better at telling you why you’re stupid than creating a system that can produce usable policy solutions,” said one Obama adviser, who, like others, did not want to be named criticizing Summers. At meetings, colleagues with differing viewpoints felt the full force of his capacity for finding flaws in their reasoning.

By Peter Baker, New York Times