As if Larry Summers wasn’t bad enough. The Obama administration has chosen his replacement to head the National Economic Council and, like Summers, the choice is a former Clinton administration official perhaps best known for being at the forefront of America’s worst policy blunders over the past two decades.

Gene Sperling, will take over as director of the National Economic Council, a position he held over the course of the last four years of the Clinton administration.

Sperling, like incoming Chief of Staff William Daley, has a long and not so storied history when it comes to America’s failed trade policies.

“He supported fundamentals of the Clinton administration policies which were really wrongheaded,” Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, told The Washington Post.

In announcing his appointment to replace Summers, President Barack Obama highlighted Sperling’s previous work on deficit reduction and job creation.

“He helped formulate the policies that contributed to turning deficits to surpluses and a time of prosperity and progress for American families in a sustained way,” Obama said Friday in announcing the appointment.

But Sperling is also at least partially responsible for the failed policies that led to a permanent structural shift in the nation’s economy.

Before becoming the director of the NEC in the 1990s Sperling worked behind the scenes to secure the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The trade pact has cost the country millions of precious manufacturing jobs, led to an increase in illegal immigration and caused the trade deficit to explode while giving outsourcing corporations special rights to challenge American laws and regulations.

Perhaps even worse, NAFTA has become the model on which most of America’s trade policies are now based. For instance, the South Korea free trade agreement is very similar.

By the time Sperling moved up to take over the NEC, he was working on China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, an event which caused additional millions of manufacturing jobs to be permanently lost.

Sperling also played a major role in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking. Many observers credit the act’s repeal with causing the financial crisis that brought the economy to its knees.

In effect, the Obama administration has called on the arsonist to put out his own fire.

“Gene Sperling’s fingerprints are all over the Clinton-era decisions that helped produce America’s recent bubble economy and its devastating collapse – from foolhardy Wall Street-directed financial deregulation to reckless government-backed mortgage lending to outsourcing-focused trade deals like NAFTA and permanent normal trade with China. Handing him the economy’s reins is like picking Tony Hayward to run BP again,” U.S. Business and Industry Council President Kevin L. Kearns said in a statement.

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