Obama Moves To The Center
Thomas B. Edsall
The Huffington Post
Barack Obama faces the difficult task of shifting his message away from the primary electorate to general election voters, while avoiding angering the more liberal primary voters who gave him the presidential nomination.
Obama appears at the close of this week to have overcome one of his first hurdles -- a furor among labor and activist leaders over his choice of a campaign director of economic policy.
On another potentially dangerous front -- building a general election foreign policy team -- there is less danger of hostile reaction to the integration of Hillary Clinton advisers into the Obama organization.
Obama's most provocative move in terms of economic policy has been to hire Jason Furman, who runs the relatively centrist Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution as his staff director for economic policy.
Furman brings with him, as an unpaid adviser, his mentor and the founder of the Hamilton Project, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as well as former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Both men have advocated pro-business policies and balanced budgets, and have been criticized by liberals who seek more government spending.
At the same time that the economy flourished during Rubin's and Summers' tenure (1995-2000) -- per capita income rose from $22,153 to $25,469 in inflation-adjusted dollars; median family income rose from $53,349 to $59,398; and unemployment fell from 5.6 to 4.0 percent -- both Treasury secretaries were accused of acceding to Wall Street pressure to eliminate deficit spending at the expense of the poor and unemployed.
(Continued here.)
The Huffington Post
Barack Obama faces the difficult task of shifting his message away from the primary electorate to general election voters, while avoiding angering the more liberal primary voters who gave him the presidential nomination.
Obama appears at the close of this week to have overcome one of his first hurdles -- a furor among labor and activist leaders over his choice of a campaign director of economic policy.
On another potentially dangerous front -- building a general election foreign policy team -- there is less danger of hostile reaction to the integration of Hillary Clinton advisers into the Obama organization.
Obama's most provocative move in terms of economic policy has been to hire Jason Furman, who runs the relatively centrist Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution as his staff director for economic policy.
Furman brings with him, as an unpaid adviser, his mentor and the founder of the Hamilton Project, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as well as former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Both men have advocated pro-business policies and balanced budgets, and have been criticized by liberals who seek more government spending.
At the same time that the economy flourished during Rubin's and Summers' tenure (1995-2000) -- per capita income rose from $22,153 to $25,469 in inflation-adjusted dollars; median family income rose from $53,349 to $59,398; and unemployment fell from 5.6 to 4.0 percent -- both Treasury secretaries were accused of acceding to Wall Street pressure to eliminate deficit spending at the expense of the poor and unemployed.
(Continued here.)
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