Everyone is recommending Noam Scheiber's piece on Barack Obama's policy shop of pragmatists, and they're right, it's good. But I'm not sure I agree with it. In the economics section, for instance, Scheiber is sort of caught between wanting to make the larger claim, as David Leonhardt has, that Obama's domestic policy advisers are behavioral economists, and not really having the policy juice to back that judgment up. He mentions opt-in 401(k)s, but it's hard to give Obama's team too much credit there given that they were prominently featured in Clinton adviser Gene Sperling's book, The Pro-Growth Progressive, and later adopted by the Center for American Progress. In other words: It's a mainstream Democratic idea, not one that points towards a new approach. Elsewhere, Scheiber writes, "One typical Goolsbee brainchild is something called an automatic tax return. The idea is that, if you had no tax deductions or freelance income the previous year, the IRS would send you a tax return that was already filled out. As long as you accepted the government's accounting, you could just sign it and mail it back." But that's not a Goolsbee brainchild: Wesley Clark had it in 2004, and this cycle, John Edwards proposed it before Obama. Which gets to the larger point: Obama's team may be hardheaded empiricists, but they are also decidedly conventional. Whatever else you want to say about the health plan David Cutler wrote for Obama, it's not the perfect world proposal you'd come up with from a long, hard look at the data. It's not even what you'd come up with from David Cutler's look at the data. It's just a conventional, mainstream, Democratic health care plan that looks a bit cautious in light of Edwards and Clinton's proposals, and would've looked more solidly ambitious if it had come out in 2004. But it doesn't bespeak any unique approach on the part of Obama's team. Rather, it's verging on generic.
