Noam Scheiber has a very able defense of his article on the Obama wonks, and I don't disagree with much of it. Most of Obama's people really are first rate, and it's useful to introduce them to readers. But what I was getting at in my response is that the question isn't merely how do the wonks think, but how do they, or how does the campaign, mediate their conclusions? Given the similarity between the domestic platform of Obama and the domestic platforms of Clinton and Edwards, you have to conclude either that his thinkers either aren't taking a wildly original approach, or are seeing their policies put through a political sieve before they're released into the wild. To some degree, the answer is a bit of both. His wonks are looking at the same problems as everyone else, sounding out the same universe of policy experts and think tankers as the other campaigns (though the Obama campaign does less reaching out for policy help and advice, according to everyone I've spoken to), and converging on similar answers. That's exactly as you'd expect. And on the other hand, the campaign has been very loathe to step out front on domestic policy questions. This has led to some degradation of the evidence-based approach Noam lauds. They have proposed a major tax cut (popular!), but not a major tax reform (unpopular!), and Austen Goolsbee, a tax economist with a healthy loathing for our inane and complex system, knows that the latter would be a boon. They have proposed a major expansion in health care access (popular!), but not reformed the system to cut down on utilization or more efficiently judge care options (unpopular!), even though David Cutler's past work has explicitly stated the need for both. This is not a criticism of Obama's wonks. It's not even really a criticism of his campaign. But at the end of the day, what's come out of Obama's domestic policy shop looks more like "Generic Democratic Campaign" than a whole new approach to policy. There are, to be sure, a few exceptions. The campaign was legitimately courageous in proposing a full carbon auction and their technology and government transparency proposals are far-reaching. But in general, it's pretty clear that the domestic policy shop has, till now, kept their head down, and that suggests that politics is playing a hefty role in their thinking, or in the mediation of their thinking.
