Dystopos

Top Obama economic aide wrote "Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story"

Way back in the primary, Wal-Mart was a bogeyman. Barack Obama, you may hazily recall, even attacked Hillary Clinton for sitting on its board.

So there's quite a lot of grumbling in labor circles today about his bringing on Jason Furman as his chief economic policy advisor, because Furman wrote a key, 2005 defense (.pdf) of Wal-Mart from the left, titled, unironically, "Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story."

The piece makes two arguments. The first is that Wal-Mart lowers prices, so low-income people (and others) can buy more. The second is that Wal-Mart's low-wage jobs are consistent with the Clintonite philosophy of making work pay, and that the right fix is to have government subsidize the low-wage workers' salaries and help provide them healthcare. He denies that Wal-Mart lowers local wages.

His only criticism of Wal-Mart is for, in its lobbying, not supporting those progressive policies.

Furman signaled that he was reaching out to the left when his hire became public today.

"Senator Obama personally asked me to help him get advice from a broad range of economic thinkers. People like Robert Reich, Paul Volcker, Jared Bernstein and Christy Romer," he wrote in an email to our Avi Zenilman. The inclusion of Reich -- the Clinton Labor Secretary who lost to Robert Rubin's deficit hawks -- and Bernstein in particular are signs that he's reaching out to the left.

Indeed, the Economic Policy Institute's Bernstein has made an anti-Wal-Mart case aimed at rebutting some of the key data Furman uses.

Furman's arrival is one more mark of the transition to a general election in which labor may grumble, but really has nowhere else to go, and in which virtually all major unions backed his rivals in the primary -- . giving them seriously diminished clout on his campaign.

But is the hire reflective more broadly that Obama's more a Clinton-style centrist than a man of labor? The case has been made that that's a false distinction, but there's not much evidence (aside from a couple of weeks in Ohio) for Obama as an economic populist.

Indeed Austan Goolsbee, another economist and key Obama advisor, also seems capable of mentioning Wal-Mart without spitting. He wrote in his Times column last year, in making the case that American workers are more productive htan others, that "companies like Wal-Mart seem to be more adept at translating technology into productivity than anyone else."