No, he can't.

The NYT's reporting that Jacob Lew may be tapped for an Obama administration job. There are many reasons why those of us who care about workers' rights, economic justice, and the future of higher education, among other things, should oppose this.

• Lew is a Clintonite neoliberal significantly to the right of where Obama ran during both the primary and the general campaign. He's one of those people Obama made a very good case for not entrusting another four or eight years to, because his fiscal policies aren't very progressive at all.
• After leaving NYU, Lew went to Citigroup's Alternative Investments division, which manages private equity, hedge funds, and real estate investments - in other words, very risky, un- or underregulated high yield investments. This doesn't speak well of his interest in or ability to help people feeling the weight of the credit crisis, given his involvement in the industries that created it. And finally:
• As executive vice president of New York University, Jacob Lew played a major role in carrying out the campaign to crush GSOC-UAW Local 2110. Thousands of workers were subject to threats and intimidation, dozens were blacklisted and fired, and Lew was instrumental in refusing to negotiate and in the vicious rhetoric and tactics the University Leadership Team employed. Some accounts have Lew even more invested than president Sexton in breaking the union. In the last eight years we've seen the state once again bend over backwards to fight attempts by workers to build power on the job and assert a voice in their work and in the direction of the country. We don't need more union-busters in office, particularly not in the administration of a president who owes much to the labor movement and on whose support for the Employee Free Choice Act and the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act many of us have placed our hopes for change.
  

This isn't someone progressives and leftists want managing the federal budget or advising the president on domestic policy.