Bossman BK is right here, but so is Leonhardt. Leonhardt says that the economic skirmishes between liberals and centrists have largely been suspended. He's right. Eight years in the opposition party and Bob Rubin and Bob Reich don't have that much to fight about. But Kuttner is right to suggest that many of those battles will erupt back into the open if Obama is elected president. Given his public statements and hiring decisions, however, it's pretty clear that Obama will side decisively with the centrists, who for their part will be somewhat less focused on deficit reduction and somewhat more interested in social investment than they were in 1992. Kuttner worries that "the scale [of the public spending] the campaign has proposed to date is too puny to generate a real recovery, or to fundamentally alter the trajectory of economic insecurity and inequality," but given that the campaign operation is more interested in appealing to liberals than the administration is likely to be, my sense is that liberals who think Obama is too far right now don't have a whole lot to be optimistic about.
