Obama Picks a Progressive Lawyer for Top Economist

[Geee]

American Thinker:




On January 11, President Obama chose Gene Sperling to replace Lawrence Summers as his Director of the National Economic Council. Sperling's educational background is in law with a degree from Yale. He owes his reputation as an economic policy expert to the fact that he served on Pres. Clinton's National Economic Council and chaired the Council during Clinton's second term. We decided to read his 2005 book, The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2005) to learn more about him. The book is very revealing of Sperling's thought processes, qualities and defects.

As the title of his book indicates, he would like to be known as a pro-growth progressive. He believes the left should favor economic growth rather than simply concentrate on achieving additional benefits for the lower economic classes and disadvantaged. He apparently does not follow through on whether, in fact, the lower economic classes and disadvantaged have benefited from the earlier policies that he advocated. Take his trade policies, for example.

Trade Policies

During Clinton's second term, Sperling, Robert Cassidy, and others negotiated China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Cassidy later regretted the result, but not Sperling. In the June 2008 issue of Foreign Policy in Focus (The Failed Expectations of U.S. Trade Policy), Cassidy wrote:

As the principal negotiator for the landmark market access agreement that led to China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), I have reflected on whether the agreements we negotiated really lived up to our expectations. A sober reflection has led me to conclude that those trade agreements did not....