Summers Did the Right Thing. Now It's Obama's Turn.

L'affaire de Larry Summers is over. And thank goodness. The grand circus of leaks, posturing and trial balloons was no way to select the next leader of the Federal Reserve. Summers deserves credit for withdrawinghis name from consideration.

The 58-year-old former Treasury secretary and Harvard president was too polarizing and too sympathetic to Wall Street to have the confidence of the country, or even a lot of Senate Democrats. (Advice to future contenders: For starters, cut your consulting work for Citigroup Inc. before you begin seeking the post, not after.) President Barack Obama had pegged Summers as his favoriteto take the Fed post when Ben Bernanke's term ends in January, if we're to believe what we've been reading in the papers the past few months. The other two candidates Obama had mentioned were Janet Yellen, 66, the current Fed vice chairman, and Donald Kohn, 70, a former Fed vice chairman, although few people seem to have taken Kohn's candidacy very seriously.