As has long been expected, Peter Orszag’s cowboy boots will not be walking the halls of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building after next month. He is stepping down, to get married and experience life as lived by those who do not spend all day every day on call. An administration official tells me that the White House has been reviewing possible replacements for some time, and an announcement could come shortly. So who will it be?
As is often the case, it is hard to come by a fixed list of candidates. Instead, one hears names oft repeated, and these, by dint of repetition, are cast as favorites. At the top of this list are Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a former national economic adviser to President Bill Clinton who now serves on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Another name is Gene Sperling, another veteran of the Clinton administration who is also already a part of the President’s economic inner circle, as an adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. (He is in the photo above, on the far left, talking to Orszag.) Both candidates are classic economic propeller heads, as President Obama likes to call them. In other words, they know their way around a spreadsheet, and more importantly, the president knows them. (Also in this group: CBPP director Bob Greenstein and Rob Nabors, who now works for Rahm Emanuel in the White House.)
But there is another, considerably less likely, direction the President could go. In the second half of his first term, President Obama will find that his biggest obstacle when it comes to the budget is Congress, which will be challenged to take on the radioactive political issues (social security, tax increases) that come with dealing with a government that is running deficits that the White House believes are unsustainable over the medium and long terms. For this reason, the other group of names that come up include Democratic budget hawks like Rep. Artur Davis, who recently lost the Democratic primary for governor in Alabama. (Consider Davis a long shot; he voted against health care reform, which was Orszag’s major accomplishment.) Another name I heard is Jim Leach, the former Republican congressman from Iowa, who once led the Banking and Financial Services Committee. The latter group would be a far more surprising pool for Obama to pick from, given his known penchant for nerdy economic minds. (See photo above.) But the scuttlebutt persists.
