Obama to Tap Goolsbee as Chair of Council of Economic Advisers
September 09, 2010 9:56 PM
Administration sources tell ABC News that at the start of his press conference Friday morning, President Obama will formally announced that he is appointing University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee to be chair of his Council of Economic Advisers.
Goolsbee, 41, has already been confirmed by the Senate to serve as one of the three economists on the CEA; President Obama has the prerogative to appoint the chair. The former chair, Christina Romer, departed last week, returning to teach at the University of California at Berkeley. Goolsbee is also chief economist for the Presidential Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
The 1991 Yale grad is popular in the administration and appreciated for his communications skills, evidenced by his frequent cable TV bookings, his former hosting of a show on the History Channel, his former column in the New York Times and his award as Funniest Celebrity in Washington in 2009.
In a 2007 column, conservative George F. Will wrote, “Goolsbee no doubt has lots of dubious ideas -- he is, after all, a Democrat -- about how government can creatively fiddle with the market's allocation of wealth and opportunity. But he seems to be the sort of person -- amiable, empirical and reasonable -- you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be.”
Goolsbee’s appointment will mean that all of the president’s top economic advisers -- Goolsbee, National Economic Council director Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner -- are white men who graduated from Ivy League schools. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/09/obama-to-tap-goolsbee-as-chair-of-council-of-economic-advisers.html
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