Barack Obama’s campaign today announced the appointment of a new economic policy director: Jason L. Furman, a 37-year-old economist who played a similar role in John Kerry’s 2004 effort.
Furman directs The Hamilton Project, a domestic policy center at the Brookings Institution. (He will take a leave of absence from Brookings for the duration of the campaign.) He is also a visiting scholar at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service.
In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Furman emphasized that his appointment does not represent a demotion for Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist and Obama adviser who came under fire in March for allegedly telling Canadian officials that Obama was insincere in his public criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement. (Goolsbee has insisted that his remarks were misreported. Three weeks ago, the Canadian prime minister’s chief of staff resigned amid accusations that he had improperly leaked a memo about Goolsbee.)
“This is part of the campaign’s staffing up and adding people for the general election,” Furman wrote. “Austan Goolsbee and Dan Tarullo are still playing central roles as senior economic advisers.”
“Senator Obama personally asked me to help him get advice from a broad range of economic thinkers,” Furman continued, citing the fiscal hawk Paul Volcker, the labor-left economist Jared Bernstein, and Robert Reich and Christina Romer of the University of California at Berkeley.
In some respects, Furman himself is on the centrist end of the center-left spectrum. He has, for example, defended Wal-Mart as a “progressive success story.” In the Wal-Mart paper and elsewhere, Furman has advocated an expansion of the earned income tax credit, which was one of the Clinton administration’s favorite anti-poverty policies.
Furman has also left a trail of opinions about health-insurance reform, fiscal policy, and climate change.
As the Democrats licked their wounds after the 2004 election, Furman wrote in Slate that the Kerry campaign should have released more detailed policy plans and found better ways to talk about them. Stay tuned to see if Obama ’08 chooses to heed that advice.
