On the O-Team.

AuthorHightower, Jim Allen
PositionThe Lowdown - Barack Obama - Viewpoint essay

Tell me who you walk with, goes the old adage, "and I'll tell you who you are." So let's look at who is walking with Obama.

At first glance, you might get worried because, with some exceptions, these are not the policy people you'd expect to see.

Take Jason Furman: Because of his pro-corporate connections and comments, Furman is the guy who most alarms labor, fair trade activists, and other progressives (like me). Obama's top economic aide, this thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-educated academic has found nice things to say about the Wal-Mart business model, has supported the corporate trade agenda, and most recently has headed a policy research outfit founded by Robert Rubin, who throttled the populism out of Bill Clinton.

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Yet, it turns out that Furman is not quite the corporate snake that some would make him out to be. His background also includes an important stint with the highly progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where he churned out hard-hitting policy papers on the rising danger of income inequality, the need to raise the minimum wage, the disaster of Bush's tax cuts, and the necessity of stopping the privatization of Social Security. He's no populist, but neither is he a sneaky Rubinaut. Furman's selection has been warmly endorsed by liberal economist and Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, labor economist Jared Bernstein, and populist economist James Galbraith--all three of whom are also on the Obama team.

Dan Carol is a recent addition and a big plus. This fifty-year-old Oregonian is a longtime progressive strategist, a pioneer in Internet organizing, a proponent of grassroots-based policy development, a believer in the politics of big ideas, and an unabashed advocate of making political action fun. (Disclosure: Carol is a friend of mine.) He has now been brought onto the O-team as "director of content and issues." That's a fuzzy title, but I do know that he'll be pushing one of Obama's signature ideas: a "Green Deal" that would enlist the American people themselves to build a green...

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