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.þþSenator 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. þþ“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.þþThe Obama camp has cast Mr. Furman, 37, as an experienced operator in Democratic election campaigns, whose task is to tap the expertise of economists representing a broad spectrum of views. “My own views, such as they are, are irrelevant,” Mr. Furman said. þþThe Democratic Party often struggles to balance the conflicting demands of corporations and labor, and 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.þþ“I totally support Obama,” Mr. Rubin said, acknowledging his long allegiance to Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I was not going to leave Hillary until she pulled out,” he said, adding: “I think Barack Obama is very well equipped to provide the presidential leadership that the country very badly needs in a rapidly changing world.”þþMr. 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, where Mr. Obama has his headquarters. Until Friday, he was director of the Hamilton Project, a policy research operation founded by Mr. Rubin, who is now chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup. Mr. Rubin provides financing for the project, along with other wealthy Democrats. þþOf particular concern to labor is the Hamilton approach to trade. While labor wants restrictions that would preserve jobs, the Rubin camp wants free trade that might cost jobs but would be offset by a broader safety net channeling more income support and job training to the job losers. Mr. Obama talks of “fair” trade agreements that include labor and environmental standards, a position that falls short of what Mr. Sweeney has in mind. þþIn 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.” þþThe 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. Then, the deficit represented a much bigger percentage of the nation’s economic activity and deficit reduction was a necessary priority in his view. þþ“We need today a multiyear path to a sound fiscal position, but in that context you need to make room for critical public investment,” Mr. Rubin said, arguing in effect that public spending could be increased in the current circumstances before the budget was brought into balance.þþMr. 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.”þþMonths ago, Mr. Rubin had said that while he favored Mrs. Clinton as the better candidate, he could easily support Mr. Obama, if he won in the long primary process. He said, for example, that a passage on the impact of globalization in Mr. Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” came out of a conversation the two men had. “Without question, the pressure on wages and incomes have become greater and we need to focus on those issues,” Mr. Rubin said, citing himself as a source for that point.þþMr. Furman, who served for a while as a special economic adviser in the Clinton administration, has taken some controversial positions. He argued in 2005, for example, that Wal-Mart, despite its conflicts with organized labor over pay and health insurance, was a good business model. þþMore recently, he argued that while the typical worker suffers from inadequate income, that worker’s living standards, broadly measured, are higher today than those of their counterparts 30 years ago — an argument in dispute among economists.þþDismissing such concerns, the Obama camp and Mr. Rubin say that there are few people with Mr. Furman’s skill and experience in running economic policy in a fast-moving election campaign. “He is very well respected by professional economists, and he also knows how to navigate in the world of policy and politics,” Mr. Rubin said. “This is not the time to run a training school” for economic policy directors.þþUntil now, Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago, had been Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser. He remains an unpaid adviser. He said he was not a candidate for Mr. Furman’s full-time job because of his university duties. þþMr. Obama’s campaign aides, among them Bill Burton, the press secretary, emphasize that Mr. Furman has already consulted a range of experts, from Mr. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard economist who succeeded Mr. Rubin as Treasury secretary. þþOthers consulted include Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate in economics who is critical of Rubinomics; Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute; and James Galbraith, a University of Texas economist whose Keynesian approach and preference for public spending is to the left of Rubinomics.þþ“Of course, I’m part of it,” Mr. Galbraith said. “Jason is a guy I know, a professional I respect. If he wants my views, I’m quite happy to be giving them to him. The task before us is to develop practical steps for the problems before us now.”þþMr. Furman emphatically agreed. “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.”þþ
Source: NY Times
