Summers vs. Goolsbee

I actually used to like Goolsbee until I saw that he said this

The fact that we are here to bitch about the economy and about this policy and that and the budget forecasts for GDP growth are 1 percent too low, I’m thrilled, I’m overjoyed that we aren’t all out of our jobs and we prevented the Great Depression. That in itself is an overwhelming accomplishment.

I remember one libertarian supporting Obama based in part on Goolsbee's presence on his team of advisors. That's not exactly working out.

Perhaps David is discounting the article for its romantic reek. I can't take reporting (reportage?) like this seriously:

"The disagreements are only natural, White House officials say. The issues are big, and so are the personalities, as Mr. Obama intended."

and:

“You can’t assemble a group of really brilliant people, and deal with some of the most complex problems in our lifetimes and not have disagreements,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior political strategist who, with the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, plays a big role in mediating among the economic advisers and helps shape the decisions."

The implications here are threefold: 1) Our President and his svengalis are actually capable of mediating between "genuises" of unquantifiable "brilliance," 2) those same geniuses possess the precise amount of talent and know-how to manage a $14 trillion economy and fight back "the most complex problems of our lifetime" 3) painting this kind of treacly, shirtsleeves-rolled-up picture is necessary to placate that portion of the modern statist constituency Will Wilkinson so aptly described as "the politics-as-romance set."

I don't know which is more repugnant: the Obama administration actually considering itself unique amongst all presidential administrations, or the New York Times trying to pass off Camelot-era hagiography as journalism.

Don Boudreaux linked to a couple of YouTube videos of Fred Dent's optimistic take on the future a couple of days ago. I don't share Dent's optimism completely; if our current problems are not necessarily historically unique, there is always ample opportunity for political hubris to stumble around and make them so. The NYT article just seems like evidence of that to me.