NYT: New Role for Bob Rubin: Policy Guru

[DeepModem Mom]

New Role for Rubin: Policy Guru
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
Published: September 8, 2006


(Evan Vucci/Associated Press)
Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, started a small research group aimed at generating policy ideas.

Does Robert E. Rubin still matter?

Many would probably say yes. In Washington, Mr. Rubin, who was President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, has started a small research group aimed at generating policy ideas for Democratic presidential candidates, as well as elevating the next generation of Democrat-supporting financiers.

On Wall Street, Mr. Rubin, from his perch on the board of Citigroup, has become an influential public defender of its chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, who is feeling the lash from investors over the stock’s long stagnant run....

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as Democrats hope to take over control of the House from Republicans and as an aspiring presidential class of 2008 becomes more assertive, the Hamilton Project, named after the founding father and onetime Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, is arguably Mr. Rubin’s most overt political act since he stepped down from the Treasury in 1999. Mr. Rubin, naturally, denies any such crass intent.

Housed in the Brookings Institution, the initiative embraces a number of mainstream economic prescriptions — like the necessity of equitable international trade agreements, the virtues of a balanced budget, and making economic growth more broad-based — that capture Mr. Rubin’s eat-your-spinach approach to policy making.

But by addressing issues like the costs to the economy of excessive litigation and regulation, Mr. Rubin intends to make the project a laboratory for the type of pragmatic, ideology-free policies that appeal to the project’s Wall Street advisers while also hoping to lure Democratic presidential candidates away from populist economic positions. And with Mr. Rubin and his successor and friend Lawrence H. Summers on board, it will also be a training ground for the next crop of financiers with ambitions to shape policy in a Democratic administration....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/business/08wall.html