"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” declares Trinculo in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” and that adage proved to be prescient as Lawrence H. Summers weathered the storm touched off by his January remarks on gender differences.

Amidst the ensuing uproar, many of Summers’ most vocal defenders—on and off campus—came from the right wing of the political spectrum. That marked a startling turnaround from a decade ago, when Summers, then a top official at the Clinton Treasury Department, was a favorite punching bag for conservative pundits.

But in the continuing evolution of Summers’ political persona, the University president has lost the support of many of his unlikely right-wing allies, who have expressed displeasure with his recent support for a $50 million package to bolster the status of women and minorities at Harvard.

The University president’s brief stint as an improbable conservative icon may be coming to a close.

WHIPPING POST TO POSTER BOY

As an economist, Summers has always been an unabashed free-marketer. But in the 1980s, he put forth proposals that placed him squarely on the left side of the political divide.

For instance, in 1985, he wrote in the New York Times that “the need for a tax increase has never been greater.” And during the 1988 presidential race, Summers served as a “kitchen cabinet” adviser to Michael S. Dukakis, the liberal Massachusetts governor. On behalf of the Dukakis campaign, Summers launched a series of scathing attacks on the first President Bush’s economic agenda, arguing that Democrats are “better for business.”

When Bill Clinton captured the White House four years later, Summers joined the administration as under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs. Never one to mince his words, Summers (in)famously accused Republicans who opposed the estate tax of “selfishness.” Reflecting on that remark, Summers says, “that was neither my first nor my last infelicitous statement.”

Summers quickly became a frequent whipping post for right-leaning writers like the Wall Street Journal’s Paul A. Gigot, who was perhaps Summers’ most caustic critic. While his columns mostly blasted Summers’ policy stances, Gigot also skewered Summers for his perceived arrogance. “Larry Summers is to modesty what Madonna is to chastity,” Gigot wrote in 1995.

That year, Summers served as Clinton’s point-man on a controversial effort to bail out the heavily indebted Mexican government. The Clinton administration bypassed the Republican-controlled Congress in the face of vehement GOP opposition to the bailout plan—a maneuver that didn’t endear Summers to Republicans on the Hill or their allies in the press corps.

Two years later, Gigot lambasted Summers for failing to anticipate the currency crisis that rocked East Asian economies. “Mr. Summers...helped to kill an all-Asia rescue that might have been an early firebreak,” Gigot wrote. “But this would have prevented Mr. Summers from playing the role of a modern ‘Gen. Douglas MacArthur’ in Asia...though this is unfair to MacArthur, who had a smaller ego.”

Asked by The Crimson last month about the origin of his vendetta against Summers, Gigot responded: “You’re making this seem like it’s personal, and it’s not...I think there’s probably thousands of people who would say that my descriptions are merely statements of fact.”

In the fall of 2001, when Gigot became chair of the Journal’s editorial page, he seemed to come around to join the Summers camp. Gigot’s change-of-tune foreshadowed a broader rapprochement between Summers and the right.

The pivotal moment came just over a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Summers, speaking at a Kennedy School of Government (KSG) awards ceremony for public service, criticized the event organizers’ failure to include members of the armed forces among the honorees.

“[I]t takes guts to get up in front of a crowd at the Kennedy School and tell them that ‘patriotism’ is a word ‘used too infrequently in communities such as this,’” the Journal opined.