E.J. "Ankles" Dionne of the Washington Post is doing Obama no favors with his worshipful piece on Obama advisors Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, making them sound like miracle workers.

Some who know Summers, a man with a large personality, were surprised that he would take the job as inside-the-White-House economic adviser and accept the appointment of Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Treasury secretary.

But Obama's aides are making clear that Summers is being assigned a large role in shaping the administration's overall economic policy, and his White House post will free him from the day-to-day responsibilities of running the Treasury Department -- duties well suited for Geithner, widely seen as a good manager and also as an economic diplomat likely to broker international cooperation in stemming the downturn. The fact that Summers and Geithner have a long history of working together should ease potential conflicts.

The senior Obama adviser said the president-elect benefited from Summers's desire to be at the center of the action during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. "If ever there was a time to want to be involved, it's now," said the adviser, who added that Obama, in turn, sees Summers as "brilliant."

Some economists simply think that there are other, equally gifted, economists who are getting far less attention. "Summers is advising Lithuania. Taylor, a really good conservative economist, is advising the United States," said Robert E. Lucas Jr., chairman of the University of Chicago economics department, referring to John Taylor, until recenly a member of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors [and later Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs from 2001 to 2005]. "That's about the right division of labor between those two guys."

I only have one expectation from the left-wing illuminati, and that is to fail horribly. I have faith they'll do it.