It’s hard to envision a president more sharply divergent from his predecessor than Barack Obama is from George W. Bush. But Obama seems to share at least one personality trait with Bush — the propensity to bestow nicknames on his advisers.
In its profile today of White House economic counselor Larry Summers, the New York Times notes that Obama jokingly refers to the former Harvard University president as “Professor” and occasionally addresses his economic aides as “propeller-heads” (likely not a reference to the British pop-music act).
And Obama’s team has embraced the nickname, according to the Times, with budget director Peter Orszag distributing “propeller-head hats” during a recent fiscal policy meeting. Aside from that piece of color, the profile is notable for the contentious questions it did not tackle: Summers was not asked about his reported shouting match with a senior House Democrat over infrastructure funding, nor about his efforts to remove stringent executive pay limits from the stimulus bill.
