Summers vs Volcker

I didn’t like the idea of appointing Larry Summers to be Treasury secretary, largely because he’s bad at politics. And given his jealous and petty spat with Paul Volcker now that he’s running the National Economic Council, the decision to deny Summers the Treasury job looks even better:

Volcker, 81, blames Obama’s National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers for slowing down the effort to organize the panel of outside advisers, the people said. Summers isn’t regularly inviting Volcker to White House meetings and hasn’t shown interest in collaborating on policy or sharing potential solutions to the economic crisis, they said.

Are we already running into a too-many-cooks problem in the Obama economic team? Having lots of smart people on board is only going to work if they can play nice with each other, and be, well, collegial. The former president of Harvard should be able to work that one out.