Charlie Rose

REMant  01/07/2011 12:29 PM Report

Well, Reich said yesterday not to attach importance to connections, because the chief of staff has nothing to do with policy. But that's not apparently what Obama believes. Ken Duberstein, Dan Balz writes, touted him precisely for them. I'm fairly well convinced tho that he could not really understand how to either "grow" the economy, or jobs, and is probably part of what I sense is a turn to monetarism and dependence on Wall St. Daley is the person who piloted NAFTA through Congress. Like many other such appointments he has traded on his ties and ideology. He was appointed to his first job by Carter, worked with Rostenkowski, and on the campaigns of Mondale, Biden, Clinton, and Gore, being rewarded with jobs and directorships in-between. Like Democrats historically, he has little trust in virtue. MoveOn.org, too, protested. IMHO this administration is running scared and clinging to the hope, like FDR developed, that a tidal wave of money can salvage its "progressive" agenda and maintain it in office. I don't know how Lincoln could have won the Civil War without the Greenbacks, nor Wilson WWI without the income tax and Federal Reserve. In any case, I'm sure the president knows that if employment doesn't radically diminish in the next 18 mos, he may not even get nominated, much less re-elected. On deficit reduction, I'm from Missouri.

As for Sperling, we find a similar story. The Post's Who Runs Gov website says: "A native son of Ann Arbor, Mich., Sperling went to Minnesota University [should be U of M] as an undergraduate [a poli sci major], captaining the tennis team in 1981 before heading to Yale Law School. Yale classmates noticed even then Sperling's work ethic and almost obsessive ability to study public policy.

'He basically never left his library cubicle,' said Christian Merkling, a Sperling classmate. 'He was obsessed with policy to an extent that made it difficult for even those of us interested in policy to talk to him. He was so wound up in the maze of whatever he was involved with.'

While in law school, Sperling worked summers under Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, when Reich lectured at Harvard.

He also joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund and the National Abortion Rights Action League. Only a few months after graduating from Yale in 1985, Sperling helped defend a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing for a Michigan school district's affirmative action policies against the Justice Department during the Reagan administration. Sperling spent some time at the Wharton School of Business, but he left to join Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential campaign before he could finish his MBA studies.

After Dukakis' defeat, Sperling went to work for Harvard law Professor Laurence Tribe and in 1990 joined New York Governor Mario Cuomo's office hoping to work on a presidential campaign in 1992, as Cuomo was considered a possible candidate. But Cuomo didn't run.

While working for Dukakis, Sperling had worked closely with economic gurus Reich, Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin. They recommended him to Bill Clinton, who brought him aboard his 1992 presidential campaign as director of economic policy. When Clinton won, Sperling joined the White House as the deputy director of the National Economic Council (NEC). Three years later, he jumped to NEC director after his boss, Rubin, moved to the Treasury.

Sperling was one of the few administration officials who lasted all eight years of the Clinton administration. After George W. Bush took office in 2000, Sperling left for various think-tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations. He also wrote a book and spent some time as a consultant and writer on the television drama 'The West Wing.'"

It appears from this, too, that Sperling has little or no economic credentials, which I'd think, somewhat surprising for an economic advisor. He had the right idea in his 2006 book "The Pro-Growth Progressive" about the "hollowing out" of the middle class, but as a self-styled Tom Friedman-style globalizer, his knowledge of history is flat out wrong. He believes jobs did not go from the North to the South, nor from the US to Japan (and presumably elsewhere in the Far East), nor to Mexico. Like his mentors he is really an imperialist, not a free trader - another Wanniski. He believes that financial "growth" can motivate middle-class growth, and that growth helps the melting pot melt, which reciprocally furthers growth. This is the hackneyed notion that growth is demand-led. What it grows besides a pyramid scheme, is never mentioned. However, the growth of poverty is always evidence that more of the same needs to be done. At the same time tho he says he believes in a balanced budget, apparently not seeing that either the chicken or the egg must come first. Like Hubert Humphrey, the Clintons, Robert Reich, et al, he appears self-centered and tends to run off at the mouth. I suspect he believes this entitles him to be paid more than a garbage collector, for he nevertheless believes higher wage jobs, like those at Google, (where he was invited to speak to a colloquium of their brain-trust, a video of which remains online), are not just a function of monetary and fiscal coercion. But I'm just damned glad I don't have to spend my life in freezing weather and 90 degree heat shifting trash cans. Silicon Valley seems to be a copy of Wall St, the nation's capital and other places where easy money is to be had. Perhaps he has learned something in the past four years, but I fear this is another purely "political" appointment.