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An old friend has Obama’s ear on economic issues
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Perhaps no economist is more closely aligned with his candidate than Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist who is working with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
While Goolsbee is part of a team that includes both academics and financial experts, his association with Obama, a Democrat, extends back to the days when the senator was teaching constitutional law at the university.
“We were colleagues then, and later, as a result of that, I worked with him on his senate campaign in ’04,” Goolsbee said.
“Now, that was a totally different experience than this campaign, mainly because back then nobody had ever heard of him,” the economist recalled. “Given that he was running for the
U.S. Senate, there were national issues in the campaign, like tax reform and tax fairness, but it was a shoestring operation.
“Today the headquarters where I’m sitting right now is an operation comprised of nearly 200 people and it takes up an entire floor of an office building. There’s an economics staff, a very large policy staff, a policy director and a whole lot of things going on at once.”
Indeed, building a presidential campaign is no simple undertaking.
When Obama decided he wanted to roll out his health care plan in Iowa in June, he had a general idea of what he wanted, thanks to a prolonged “listening tour” he held across the country, Goolsbee said.
“Now we needed to work out the details of what the plan would entail,” he said.
“We started working through the issues that we believed would come up—what about prescription prices? What role will insurance companies play under the plan? We worked through each of the issues, all the while continually talking not just to the policy people, but the campaign’s strategy people as well.”
The strategy people wanted to know that the plan is consistent with Obama’s message, and they wanted to ensure that his message wasn’t drowned out by all the details, Goolsbee said.
“You know, it’s kind of a heady atmosphere for an academic to be in,” he said.
Once the Obama health care plan took form, the next step in the process was making the plan clear enough for anyone to understand.
“Let’s get the details right, then get it into a format that people can read,” Goolsbee said, describing how the gears change in the policy-making process. “You have to step back and translate your position into a form that means something to people.”
Behind all this is an ongoing effort to bring the senator in contact with leading experts on economic issues and market matters.
“(Obama) is a back-and-forth kind of guy and he’s comfortable with who he is,” Goolsbee said. “He doesn’t want a memo. The way he works out a position is by questioning and debating. He wants to get into a give-and-take about the issues and to be exposed to different points of view.”
Such sessions take place nearly every week, and are conducted via conference call when Obama’s campaign schedule prevents him from getting back to Chicago.
“What’s funny when you bring in these outside experts who have never met him is they often leave these sessions saying they wished they’d done more homework and been better prepared for the discussion,” Goolsbee said.
“In some respects, they expect him to be a law professor, kind of making his way into uncharted territory, but he’s well past the point of needing some kind of boot camp on the economic issues we can throw at him. At this point in the campaign what he’s really digging into in these discussions are the details.”
When Goolsbee’s wife asked one night what the previous afternoon’s session had been like, he immediately described Obama as the dream candidate.
“And by that I meant when you talk to him about economic and business-related issues he gets it the first time and it’s totally clear he understands you because he’s asking questions that get right into the heart of the issue,” Goolsbee said.
Although Goolsbee professes to be surprised at the paucity of economic and business-related questions that have been asked of the presidential candidates at events like the recent CNN-YouTube Democratic presidential candidate debate in Charleston, he expects more such questions to arise as the campaigning continues, he said.
“Economics, monetary policy, globalization and global trade, all of those things start to get more and more important as the primaries draw nearer,” he said. “Certainly pocketbook issues will growing in importance as we approach Election Day, because that’s when people start thinking through the issues in a very personal way.
“As for the underlying theme in everything we do, I think the positions Obama’s taken to date show he’s looking for a new way, a different way. In terms of social issues, for instance, he’s consistently said ‘Let’s get beyond the acrimonious debates of the ’60s, ’80s or ’90s and work on these problems without that baggage.’ I think that characterizes his economic thought too.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
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