Louis Uchitelle on Jason Furman
The odd thing is that Jason Furman has a very strong and very wide reputation as an honest broker and as a consensus builder, which is exactly the kind of thing that you want in the job--as long as you think that truth is on your side, and thus that you are more likely than not to win honest, substantive, evidence-based debates.
It's not right to say thatJason Furman is closely associated with Robert Rubin without also saying that he is closely associated with Joe Stiglitz...
Louis Uchitelle:
Union Critical of Obama’s Top Economics Aide: Acting quickly after securing his party’s presidential nomination, Barack Obama picked a well-known representative of Bill Clinton’s economic policies as his economic policy director and signaled this week that the major players from the Clinton economics team were now in his camp — starting with Robert E. Rubin.
Senator Obama, Democrat of Illinois, hired Jason Furman, a Harvard-trained economist closely associated with Mr. Rubin, a Wall Street insider who served as President Clinton’s Treasury secretary. Labor union leaders criticized the move, and said that “Rubinomics” focused too much on corporate America and not enough on workers. “For years we’ve expressed strong concerns about corporate influence on the Democratic Party,” John J. Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, said Wednesday in a statement implicitly critical of the symbolism of the appointment, no matter Mr. Furman’s economic skills.
The Obama camp has cast Mr. Furman, 37... to tap the expertise of economists representing a broad spectrum of views. “My own views, such as they are, are irrelevant,” Mr. Furman said.... Mr. Furman’s appointment rang some alarm bells that Mr. Obama might be tilting toward the corporate side — a tilt that Mr. Rubin says does not exist. He argued in an interview on Wednesday that his views were essentially in line with Mr. Obama’s already stated policies.... Mr. Furman, who served as an adviser in John Kerry’s 2004 campaign for president, came to his new post suddenly on Monday, moving hastily to Chicago....
In his statement criticizing Mr. Furman’s appointment, Mr. Sweeney said, “The fact that our country’s economic policies have become so dominated by the Wall Street agenda — and that it is causing working families real pain — is a top issue we will be raising with Senator Obama.” The Rubin camp and the group loosely led by union leaders also differ on which should take precedence: balancing the budget or public investment. The Rubin camp gives preference to budget balancing, but Mr. Rubin says the choice is no longer as stark as it was when Bill Clinton came to office in 1993....
Mr. Obama, without regard for which should come first, calls for a balanced budget and, speaking in Raleigh, N.C., on Monday, he called for the creation of “millions of new jobs by rebuilding our schools, roads, bridges and other critical infrastructure.”...
Mr. Furman... “I am not here to tell Senator Obama what to think about Wal-Mart,” he said, “but to help him implement his ideas, and they are ideas I share, like universal health insurance, progressive taxation and not privatizing Social Security.”
