Economic Advisor

In naming Stephen Friedman to a key post Thursday, President Bush finished a clean sweep of his bumbling economic team. The question now is: Will it matter? The early signals are unpromising, and that's bad for the administration, the economy and the country. Conservative activists gloat that they exacted a pound of flesh for Friedman's appointment, as well as for Bush's choice of rail executive John W. Snow to replace Paul H. O'Neill as Treasury secretary.

WASHINGTON - One of President Obama's top economic advisors, Alan Krueger, will step down to return to teaching at Princeton University, the White House said. Obama plans to nominate longtime aide Jason Furman as Krueger's replacement, said a Democratic official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the appointment had not been officially announced. Krueger is on leave from his position as an economics and public affairs professor and will return to Princeton in time for the upcoming school year, the White House said Tuesday.

President Obama is expected to name a replacement this week for top economic advisor Lawrence H. Summers, and the top candidates have had ties to the financial industry, which the president has lambasted for its role in precipitating the Great Recession. Summers' last day as director of the National Economic Council was Friday. His deputy, Jason Furman, has taken over the job as the White House finishes a search that began when Summers announced his resignation in September. Candidates to replace Summers include Gene Sperling, a former economic advisor to President Clinton who has done consulting work for investment banker Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Roger Altman, chairman of investment banking firm Evercore Partners and a deputy Treasury secretary under Clinton.

Mark O'Donnell Tony-winning co-writer of 'Hairspray' Mark O'Donnell, 58, the Tony Award-winning writer behind such quirky and clever Broadway shows as "Hairspray and "Cry-Baby," died Monday in New York. His agent, Jack Tantleff, said the writer collapsed in the lobby of his apartment complex on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. O'Donnell won the 2003 Tony for best book of a musical for co-writing "Hairspray" with Thomas Meehan, and the pair earned Tony nominations in 2008 for doing the same for "Cry-Baby.

White House economic advisor R. Glenn Hubbard called a newspaper report saying he will step down and be replaced by Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw "a bit premature." Reacting to a report in the Wall Street Journal that said he would resign as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, Hubbard told reporters, "It's too soon to write my obituary." Hubbard aide Phillip Swagel confirmed that the economist has "no immediate plans" to leave his White House post.

Sir Alan Walters, 82, a top economic advisor to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, died Saturday in England after suffering from Parkinson's disease for seven years. "Alan Walters was the best economic advisor any prime minister ever had -- radical, fearless, consistent and creative," Thatcher said in a statement. "He was a great public servant and, to me personally, he was the truest of friends." Walters persuaded Thatcher to take one of her biggest risks by raising taxes during a recession in 1981.

Republican front-runner George W. Bush has faced accusations lately of being an intellectual lightweight. His chief economic advisor most definitely has not. Lawrence B. Lindsey has all the academic and policy heft (former Harvard associate professor, former senior White House economist, former governor of the Federal Reserve) that any candidate could want. And compared with the candidate's spare frame, he has a substantial amount of physical heft as well.

President Bush on Monday named Indiana businessman and political fundraiser Allan B. Hubbard to be his top economic advisor, filling one of the few remaining vacancies in the White House inner circle. Hubbard, 57, will replace Stephen Friedman as assistant to the president for economic policy and director of the White House National Economic Council, which coordinates economic policy within the administration.

Top White House economic advisor Lawrence Summers defended the Obama administration's economic policies in his final speech before stepping down at year's end. Meantime, the White House, which had hoped to have a successor ready to take over, said a replacement for the key position probably wouldn't be named until the new year. "Had it not been for President Obama's willingness to support a sufficiently aggressive response from the late stage of the presidential campaign to his first days and months in office, I have little doubt that we would be looking at a vastly different world today," Summers told those attending an Economic Policy Institute meeting Monday in Washington.

By announcing major changes in his economic team ahead of the midterm elections, President Obama is hoping to galvanize a listless Democratic base that has been unimpressed with the administration's efforts to ease unemployment and buoy the still-troubled housing market. The two key moves — Lawrence Summers' exit as top economic advisor and Elizabeth Warren's ascendance as a consumer protection czar — are widely viewed as overtures to liberal Democrats, a voting bloc that must turn out in large numbers if the party is to stave off deep losses in the Nov. 2 congressional elections.

In a campaign thus far dominated by 30-second ads and debate sound bites, President Obama's reelection effort is taking a more expansive approach is it begins making its case to voters in earnest. Obama 2012 on Thursday released a two-minute trailer for what is ultimately set to be a 17-minute documentary that advisors say will "put into perspective" the challenges that the president has faced and the difficult choices he has made in an effort to put the American economy back on track.

When asked what posed the greatest challenge to statesmen, Harold Macmillan, the former British prime minister, responded, "Events, my dear boy, events. " That's because events tend to throw everybody off their plan. For example, Hurricane Irene ended President Obama's vacation early. And the hurricane's steady deterioration upset the plans of news producers who anticipated something more dramatic for their wall-to-wall coverage. In a similar fashion, Obama and his advisors predicted the economy would do better — much better — than it has, and those predictions were wrong.

The Perry factor Re "A new dynamic joins GOP race," Aug. 13, and "Perry steals Bachmann's thunder," Aug. 14 A candidate playing the race card is viewed as smarmy. I can only hope that the same rejection comes to politicians playing the God card. The GOP has a whole field of candidates playing the God card because the party itself has been redefined by a fundamentalist Christian base whose adherents believe they are called by God to force their beliefs on others.

As he confronts the threat of another recession and turmoil in the financial markets, President Obama is being advised by an economic team that is noticeably short on big-name players - potentially hurting his ability to find solutions and sell them to Wall Street, Congress and the American public. "When you ask about the economic team, it's kind of like, 'What economic team?'" said Edward Mills, a financial policy analyst with FBR Capital Markets. "They are very thin at a very critical time.

After Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency changed. As he put it in 1943, "Dr. New Deal" had to be replaced by "Dr. Win the War. " It was a colossal policy switch, but it wasn't an extreme makeover politically. He was still the same FDR, and the public understood the need for change. And it saved his presidency. As President Obama's former economic advisor Larry Summers said recently, "Never forget ? that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15% and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.

Austan Goolsbee is stepping down as chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, the White House announced Monday night, shaking up the economic team just as the recovery is sputtering. Goolsbee, one of the administration's primary spokesmen on the economy, will return to his position as an economics professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, the announcement said. A White House official said the president would have "loved" for Goolsbee to stay.

Beryl W. Sprinkel Economic advisor to Reagan Beryl W. Sprinkel, 85, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Reagan administration and who helped guide the administration's response to the October 1987 stock market crash, died Aug. 22 at a nursing home in Beecher, Ill. He had Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome, a rare neuromuscular disease. Sprinkel, protege of conservative economics guru Milton Friedman, taught economics at the University of Chicago and was executive vice president and economic advisor at the Harris Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago for nearly 30 years.

Oops, it seems that many on President Obama's team, including those seeking to save the American automobile industry, do not actually drive vehicles from the American automobile industry. According to a study by the Detroit News and a White House parking lot survey by Politico.com, neither do Obama's White House staffers. Before leaving for Europe (where the Secret Service had pre-placed Obama's new armored Cadillac), the president dished out rhetorical tough love to U.S. automakers.

In his State of the Union call to revitalize the economy, President Obama suggested that Americans today face a new "Sputnik moment" ? the challenge of another foreign superpower bent on domination. Just as a complacent America was jolted into action when the Soviet Union launched the first Earth-orbiting satellite in the 1950s, Obama warned, today the nation must rise to the challenge of an economically expansionist China. It was a potentially powerful appeal, aimed at both pride and fear: China, not the long-dominant U.S., has the fastest computer and the fastest trains.

President Obama has recast his White House team for the second half of his term, giving top jobs to a pair of Clinton-era veterans in a signal to business leaders and independent voters that he is resolved to steer a more centrist course after two years of intense partisan clashes. Obama announced Thursday that he was installing William Daley as chief of staff, entrusting the White House operation and perhaps the future of his presidency to a former Commerce secretary who has warned that pressing a liberal agenda risks scaring away an all-important bloc of moderate voters.