An Ex-New-York-Knife-Juggler To Hone Obama's Econ Policy By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun
As the new economic policy director on Senator Obama's presidential bid, Jason Furman will have to juggle the competing demands of labor leaders, corporate titans, scoop-seeking reporters, and erudite academics. His experience as a White House adviser and aide to a Nobel-winning economist will surely come in handy, but in the maelstrom of a fast-moving campaign he may draw more on the skills he honed two decades ago juggling torches, knives, and bowling balls for tourists on the streets of New York.
"It was mostly in Washington Square Park and on Columbus Avenue," Mr. Furman, 37, said in an interview, taking care not to exaggerate the abilities he showcased as a high school student. "Sometimes it was a bowling ball and egg and an apple. I never did three bowling balls. Just one."
When his appointment was announced last week, the knives started flying quickly. Mr. Furman immediately had to parry criticism from labor unions and antiglobalization activists that he was a stalking horse for champions of free trade and corporate interests in the Democratic Party, such as a former treasury secretary who is now a top executive at Citigroup, Robert Rubin.
A particular flash point for criticism is a 2005 paper Mr. Furman wrote arguing that Wal-Mart, the bane of unions and many liberals, is a boon to poor people because its prices are so low. Asked about the issue, he struck a conciliatory tone.
"I think it's completely understandable that folks would be concerned with what I've written about Wal-Mart," Mr. Furman told The New York Sun. He said some people failed to recognize that the paper argues for aggressive, direct government help to the working poor. "The Wal- Mart paper was as much about implementing the earned income tax credit as it was about Wal-Mart."
Mr. Furman also stressed that his new role involves gathering advice for Mr. Obama, not generating it himself. "I don't think this has anything to do with my own personal views," he told reporters on a conference call last week. "They're not relevant for a staff person on a campaign."
The fears that Mr. Furman is a front for Mr. Rubin are driven by Mr. Furman's appointment in 2006 to oversee the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, an economic policy research shop set up by Mr. Rubin and other former Clinton aides. However, colleagues said Mr. Furman's true mentor is a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, Joseph Stiglitz, who has been critical of so-called Rubinomics and whose latest book estimates the cost of the Iraq war at $3 trillion.
In 1996, while chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, Mr. Stiglitz hired Mr. Furman, then a graduate student in economics at Harvard University, for a one-year assignment. "In a group of people who were very good, he turned out to be one of the best," the Columbia professor said. "People in economic policy often grasp the big picture but the details of modeling statistics is not their strength. Jason is unusual in being able to do both of those."
Mr. Stiglitz took Mr. Furman to the World Bank the next year. He eventually returned to Harvard, before being wooed back to the White House by Mr. Clinton's economic policy tsar, Gene Sperling. Mr. Furman eventually joined Vice President Gore's campaign as an economic adviser. It was only then that the young economist met Mr. Rubin for the first time. "I never interacted with him when he was treasury secretary," the aide said.
Mr. Furman said adjusting to Harvard again after Mr. Gore's loss was tough. "It was a hard transition from the fast-paced life and very practical life of Washington," the adviser said. "It definitely took longer to get back into the swing of it."
In 2003, Mr. Furman joined the presidential campaign of General Wesley Clark. "I thought he was really, really smart," the economist said. Mr. Furman's wife, Eve Gerber, who has written for Slate and others, signed on as a speechwriter.
When Mr. Clark's campaign folded, Mr. Furman threw in with the Democratic nominee, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts. After that there were stints as a visiting scholar teaching public finance and economics at New York University, before he took on the Hamilton Project.
Mr. Sperling praised Mr. Furman and complained that he has not gotten credit for the key role he played in torpedoing President Bush's Social Security overhaul in 2005. "A lot of people forget that Jason Furman was the behind-the-scenes hero of the defeat of George Bush's privatization plan," Mr. Sperling said. "The White House did an entire press briefing at one point just to refute his criticisms of Social Security privatization."
Mr. Furman also wins praise from a former treasury secretary, Harvard professor, and former Harvard president who was another Hamilton Project backer, Lawrence Summers. "I know of no policy-oriented economist under 40 who exceeds him in either the analytical or the political dimension," Mr. Summers told the Sun in an e-mail message from a trip abroad. "He is a very rare combination of a first-rate economist — more analytical ability than the vast majority of academics who become involve in economic policy — and a person with a keen political sense."
An economist regarded as an oracle by many on the left, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, has also rallied to Mr. Furman's defense, calling him "a solid progressive" and urging critics to "lay off."
Mr. Krugman, who all but endorsed Senator Clinton in the primary, suggested that some of those irritated by the appointment may be suffering subconsciously from a kind of buyer's remorse toward Mr. Obama. "My sense is Jason Furman has become a proxy target for some Obama supporters who, now that the Great Satanness has been defeated, are starting to have the queasy feeling that their hero might be a bit of a ... centrist," Mr. Krugman wrote on his Web log. "I'm tempted to say I told you so."
Mr. Furman, a Harry Potter aficionado who bears a passing resemblance to the protagonist in the movie adaptations of the book series, couples the schoolboy look with a political veteran's ability to skewer his opponents.
"People sometimes describe John McCain as a third term of George Bush," the aide said on a recent conference call with reporters. "I think when it comes to tax policy, that's actually unfair to President Bush. John McCain's tax policy is far more radical."
Mr. Furman said that while he sometimes felt young on other campaigns, that is not the case at Mr. Obama's headquarters. "Everybody else is about the same age — and I'm eight years older," he said with a hearty laugh.
Mr. Furman's pragmatism, his political acumen, and his support for the Clintons go back a long way. As a senior at Harvard in 1992, he passed over the local favorite, Paul Tsongas, and the choice of many liberals, Edmund Brown Jr., to vote for the then-governor of Arkansas, William Clinton, in the Massachusetts primary. "He's much more electable than other Democratic candidates," Mr. Furman told the Harvard Crimson.
Asked by the Sun why he did not sign on with Senator Clinton's presidential bid last year, Mr. Furman said, "I didn't think I wanted to do another political campaign." He also cited a young child born last year and another in April.
In the only cagey moment in a lengthy interview, Mr. Furman declined to say whom he voted for in the Democratic primary in February. "As a public figure, I was neutral," he said. A New York City elections spokesman confirmed that Mr. Furman did vote. In addition to an apartment in the West Village, Mr. Furman's family also has a home in Georgetown. Mr. Furman said he is staying at a friend's place in Chicago while he mulls the possibility of his family joining him.
Mr. Furman may have been hinting at other reasons for passing up the Clinton campaign when he said the atmosphere in the Obama camp is better than any he has encountered before. "The esprit de corps is so much better, the way people work together," he said. "People are not overly into position or territorial. I think it's impressive."
At the Obama campaign, Mr. Furman faces something of a difficult task, joining an existing team that includes a University of Chicago economist, Austan Goolsbee. Mr. Goolsbee, who is a year older than Mr. Furman, ran into trouble in the primaries over an ill-advised meeting that prompted skepticism about Mr. Obama's trade policies.
Mr. Furman's family has strong ties to New York. Mr. Furman is a graduate of the Dalton School. His father, Jay Furman, is an attorney who owns a shopping-center development firm, RD Management LLC, and is a member of the board at New York University, where an academic building, Furman Hall, commemorates the more than $20 million he has given to his alma mater.
Jason Furman's mother, Gail, is a renowned child psychologist and a donor to Democratic candidates and causes. Mr. Furman serves as secretary of a family foundation headed by his mother that supports mostly left-leaning nonprofit groups. Federal filings shows that the foundation's largest grants in 2006 went to a leadership-development group affiliated with the San Francisco-based Tides Center, the Council on American Life; the Auburn Theological Seminary in Manhattan; and a Washington-based organization aimed at ferreting out conservative bias in the press, Media Matters for America.
Mr. Furman's brother, Jesse, is a federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, and a former law clerk to Justice Souter and Attorney General Mukasey.