Janet Yellen and the Left's Federal Reserve Gender Debate

Seems to me the relevant question should be "Is this woman the most qualified economist for the job?"

But it's never about that nowadays, in our quota drenched, PC gender-obsessed leftist culture.

Idiot leftist Greg Sargent has a piece up now at Memeorandum, "Senate Dems push White House to appoint Janet Yellen (and not Larry Summers) to the Fed."

And that reminded me of this morning's New York Times, "In Tug of War Over New Fed Leader, Some Gender Undertones":

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s choice of a replacement for the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, is coming down to a battle between the California girls and the Rubin boys.

Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s vice chairwoman, is one of three female friends, all former or current professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who have broken into the male-dominated business of advising presidents on economic policy. Her career has been intertwined with those of Christina D. Romer, who led Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers at the beginning of his first term, and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who held the same job under President Clinton and later served as the director of the White House economic policy committee. But no woman has climbed to the very top of the hierarchy to serve as Fed chairwoman or Treasury secretary.

Ms. Yellen’s chief rival for Mr. Bernanke’s job, Lawrence H. Summers, is a member of a close-knit group of men, protégés of the former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who have dominated economic policy-making in both the Clinton and the Obama administrations. Those men, including the former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Gene B. Sperling, the president’s chief economic policy adviser, are said to be quietly pressing Mr. Obama to nominate Mr. Summers.

The choice of a Fed chair is perhaps the single most important economic policy decision that Mr. Obama will make in his second term. Mr. Bernanke’s successor must lead the Fed’s fractious policy-making committee in deciding how much longer and how much harder it should push to stimulate growth and seek to drive down the unemployment rate.

Ms. Yellen’s selection would be a vote for continuity: she is an architect of the Fed’s stimulus campaign and shares with Mr. Bernanke a low-key, collaborative style. Mr. Summers, by contrast, has said that he doubts the effectiveness of some of the Fed’s efforts, and his self-assured leadership style has more in common with past chairmen like Alan Greenspan and Paul A. Volcker.

But the choice also is roiling Washington because it is reviving longstanding and sensitive questions about the insularity of the Obama White House and the dearth of women in its top economic policy positions. Even as three different women have served as secretary of state under various presidents and growing numbers have taken other high-ranking government jobs, there has been little diversity among Mr. Obama’s top economic advisers.

“Are we moving forward? It’s hard to see it,” said Ms. Romer, herself a late addition to Mr. Obama’s original economic team, chosen partly because the president wanted a woman.

Continue reading.

President Obama runs an extremely sexist "good old boys" White House. He's leaning toward appointing Lawrence Summers, an interesting choice, considering he left Harvard's presidency after inflaming the radical left's gender grievance academic correct-think reeducation commissars.

But like I said, the job should go to the best candidate, and that's Yellen, according to none other than renowned monetary policy economist Amanda Marcotte, "The Best Candidate for Fed Chair Is a Woman, so Why Consider Larry Summers?":

On Tuesday [Ezra] Klein wrote a new column, this time saying that, to his utter disbelief, Larry Summers is the frontrunner for the Fed chair. And I've been told that the Summers camp is using the whisper campaign against Yellen to bolster their man's chances with Obama. Yes, the same Larry Summers who condescendingly told a roomful of people who had lived their adult lives as female scientists that women lack the innate abilities to do science. Yes, the same Larry Summers who, unlike Yellen, played an instrumental role in the economic collapse in the first place by consistently backing deregulation schemes that led to the housing bubble and its collapse. If this is the male candidate Obama needs to exhaust before he deigns to consider a female one, well, he should consider Summers exhausted.

The best minds have spoken!

Renowned monetary policy economist Amanda Marcotte cites renowned Washington juice box policy analyst Ezra Klein, with the added bonus of smacking down those sexist anti-Yellen whisper campaigns.

I'm torn, I'm torn!

Yellen? Summers?

Yellen? Summers?

Oh forget it!

I'm refuse to weigh in until I hear what Sandra Fluke has to say!