"Larry Summers has weathered the storm. He will be president of Harvard for a very long time," a celebrity professor who runs a major center there told me in 2005, as the Harvard Corporation upheld Summers against faculty outraged by his ham-handedness.

Even after new revelations forced Summers' resignation, his defenders insisted he'd been martyred on the altar of political correctness by professorial mandarins who'd hyped up his gross manners, his dressing-down of the African-American scholar Cornel West, and his suggestion that some kind of bell curve favors men over women in the sciences.

But Summers endangered more than political correctness (some of which deserved what he gave it). Dean Baker has explained here better than I ever can how republics falter under Summers' kind of hyper-neo-liberalism. But let me say a bit more about what Barack Obama should know of Summers' civic liabilities before he considers making him Treasury Secretary, a post he held briefly under Bill Clinton.

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It's well known by now that Barack Obama learns from his mistakes and tries hard not to make them twice. So should those of us who supported him. Even here, on what we fancy is the right side of history, we can look at our own mistakes candidly in order to learn from them, painful though that may be.

My "we" is purely rhetorical and imperial, since my own performance as a commentator was flawless. But, seriously, folks: Obama has a lot to teach about managing anger and about how to subordinate righteous moralism to strategic generosity in order to win truly moral gains.

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Even as we lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as "Barack Hussein Obama."

During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes and others of Obama's detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he's won, you'd have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one -- not in Baghdad, but in Washington.

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