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Traven
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Jun 12, 2008 09:03 PDT
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Union Critical of Obama’s Top Economics Aide
By
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/u/louis_uchitelle/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
LOUIS UCHITELLE
Acting quickly after securing his party’s presidential nomination,
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Barack Obama picked a well-known representative of
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/robert_e_rubin/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Robert E. Rubin.
Senator Obama, Democrat of Illinois, hired
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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
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Democratic Party,”
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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, 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.
The 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.
“I totally support Obama,” Mr. Rubin said, acknowledging his long
allegiance to
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/hillary_rodham_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
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.”
Mr. Furman, who served as an adviser in
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/john_kerry/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/citigroup_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Citigroup. Mr. Rubin provides financing for the project, along with
other wealthy Democrats.
Of 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.
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. Then, the deficit represented a much bigger percentage of
the nation’s economic activity and deficit reduction was a necessary
priority in his view.
“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.
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.”
Months 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.
Mr. 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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/wal_mart_stores_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Wal-Mart, despite its conflicts with organized labor over pay and
health insurance, was a good business model.
More 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.
Dismissing 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.
Until now, Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_chicago/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
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.
Mr. 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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/lawrence_h_summers/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard economist who succeeded Mr. Rubin as
Treasury secretary.
Others consulted include
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/joseph_e_stiglitz/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate in economics who is critical of
Rubinomics;
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/jared_bernstein/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the labor-oriented
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/economic_policy_institute/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Economic Policy Institute; and James Galbraith, a
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_texas/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
University of Texas economist whose Keynesian approach and preference
for public spending is to the left of Rubinomics.
“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.”
Mr. 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.”
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