It isn’t hard to see a host of reasons why President Obama picked Jacob (Jack) Lew to be his next budget director. Here are the obvious ones:
- He has a spectacular resume – Harvard undergraduate and law degree from Georgetown; a former top budget aide to House Speaker Tip O’Neill; a former White House budget director under Bill Clinton; chief operating officer for New York University. The list goes on.
- He has already been confirmed by the Senate for his current post as deputy secretary of State under Hillary Clinton. That doesn’t guarantee easy approval, but it helps.
- He has literally done this job before, so he can hit the ground running. And because he already holds a Senate-confirmed post, he is even allowed to jump in as acting budget director while he awaits Senate approval for this job.
- Many of the most respected fiscal experts in Washington sing his praises, saying Lew’s low-key temperament, technical expertise and political experience make him an ideal choice.
But there may have been a more subtle reason for settling on Lew: he is a less high-wattage political figure than some of the other candidates said to be in the running.
Peter R. Orszag, who plans to step down as budget director on July 30, was an architect of Obama’s health care reform effort as well as a prominent and much-published economic scholar on topics ranging from long-term deficits to overhauling Social Security.
Lew, by contrast, is better known as a master of process and operations. He has also been a crucial figure in grueling negotiations between Republicans and Democrats. He helped Tip O’Neill hammer out a bipartisan agreement in 1983 to shore up the funding for Social Security. In 1997, as a deputy budget director in the Clinton White House, he played a central role in reaching a bipartisan budget agreement with Republican leaders.
At least two people who are widely believed to have been top contenders for budget director were more overtly political. One is Gene Sperling, a top advisor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and a former top economic advisor to President Clinton. Though highly regarded for his expertise, Sperling has also been a long-time Democratic strategist. Laura Tyson, another top former economic adviser to President Clinton, has been less visible but has also been a prominent champion of Democratic goals.
Lew is the kind of “no drama’’ expert who might be able to soothe both liberal Democrats, some of whom complain that Obama compromised too much on issues like health care, and Republicans who have tried to block Obama on all of his big initiatives.
“He’s experienced, he’s thoughtful and he’s very wise,’’ says William Gale of the Brookings Institution, a veteran budget analyst. Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, calls Lew a “terrific choice’’ who has both the technical expertise and the patient demeanor to bridge the deep ideological and partisan fissures in Washington.
“I first worked with Jack years ago when he was working for Tip O’Neill,” said Rep. John Spratt, Democrat of South Carolina and chairman of the House Budget Committee. “He knows the Congress extremely well, he knows executive branch extremely well. You couldn’t find anyone more conversant in the budget itself . . . I don’t think the president could have come up with a better choice.”
But is this the right time for a patient, diligent and perhaps phlegmatic operative?
Lew will face two excruciatingly tough challenges. He will need to build bridges with House and Senate Republicans on reining in federal deficits, even though Republicans have vowed to fight any tax increases –a position that most fiscal experts say makes real progress impossible.
At the same time, Lew and the rest of Obama’s economic team have to grapple with the brutal question of how quickly and how hard to tighten fiscal policy.
In many ways, Reischauer said, those judgments will be more difficult and more prone to internal White House fight than the financial crisis that Obama and his advisers faced upon taking over the White House.
“We’re at a juncture where we’re going to have shift gears from fast forward to reverse, and that’s going to both technically and politically extremely difficult to do,’’ Reischauer said.
Lew’s strength, according to those who have worked with him over the past 20 years, is his ability to think clearly, navigate around all the traps and build trust.
But in a capital dominated by strong egos and round-the-clock partisan warfare, much of it broadcast on television, are those the qualities that can carry the day?
