A new Barack Obama aide draws fire from labor, liberals
Having Hillary Clinton get behind his presidential candidacy may have been the easy part for Barack Obama, as he now moves to both buttress his campaign's brainpower and unite the notoriously fractious Democratic Party.
The two tasks aren't necessarily complementary, as Obama discovered Tuesday when labor leaders and others expressed surprise and chagrin over his choice of Jason Furman as his chief economic advisor.
For the presumptive presidential nominee, Furman's selection is part of a process of tapping into heavyweights who weren't part of his initial band of loyalists but whose talents he can now call upon. Furman, 37, served a similar advisory role for the party's 2004 White House nominee, Sen. John Kerry, and has worked closely in recent years with Robert Rubin, the guiding force behind President Bill Clinton's economic agenda.
There's the rub, for the union officials and some liberal activists.
As The Times' Tom Hamburger reports, criticism of Furman includes the charge that, as a promoter of the benefits of economic globization, he overlooks the trend's negative effects.
Marco Trbovich, a top aide to the head of the Steelworkers Union, told Hamburger: "We are very much taken aback that Furman has been put at the head of this team. ... He is a very bright fellow but he is an unalloyed cheerleader for the trade policies that have been very destructive to manufacturing jobs in this country."
That's not exactly ...
... the type of reaction that is going to help Obama improve his standing with the large pockets of working-class white voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere that he needs to win over.
A spokesman for Obama, Hari Sevugan, stressed that it will be the candidate, not the advisor, calling the shots.
"Staff who work for Sen. Obama implement his ideas and his vision, regardless of their own," Sevugan said.
Hamburger's story on the dispute can be read here.
-- Don Frederick
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
Subscribe to this Blog
"Staff who work for Sen. Obama implement his ideas and his vision, regardless of their own," Sevugan said.
Cheney, Rove, Brownie, on and on and on............same fertilizer, different flies.
Posted by: keith | June 11, 2008 at 12:24 AM