"POST-PARTISAN" ECONOMICS?
Barack Obama spent 12 years at the University of Chicago, mostly as a senior lecturer on constitutional law. It happened to place him inside what is arguably the intellectual center of modern American economic conservatism, the home of Milton Friedman and the laissez-faire philosophy known as the Chicago School of economics. Obama didn’t spend much time with Friedman’s disciples at the law school. Instead, he became friendly with another crowd: liberals who had come to think that Friedman was right about a lot, just not everything. Some of the confusion about Obama's economic policies stems from his presentation as a postpartisan figure. But, invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate might actually behave as president. Obama does have an economic ideology. It’s just not a completely familiar one. Depending on how you look at it, he is both more left-wing and more right-wing than many people realize.
(Suggested by DOUG PERRYMAN)
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