At TNR, Noam Scheiber casts Barack Obama’s policy advisors as non-ideological:

Despite Obama’s reputation for grandiose rhetoric and utopian hope-mongering, the Obamanauts aren’t radicals–far from it. They’re pragmatists–people who, when an existing paradigm clashes with reality, opt to tweak that paradigm rather than replace it wholesale.

But Scheiber’s claim does not hold up very well under scrutiny.

The first part of Schieber’s article, “The Audacity of Data,” concerns Richard Thaler, professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.  Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, which attempts to address situations where people do not act out of pure rationality or self-interest, as posited by neoclassical economic theory.  A popular example (though not Thaler’s) is the ”6 jam-vs.-24 jam” experiment:

In an upscale grocery story, researchers set up a tasting booth first with 6 jars of jams, and later with 24 jars. In the first case, 40 percent of the customers stopped to taste and 30 percent bought; in the second, 60 percent tasted but only 3 percent bought. The point is that too many options can flummox a consumer — and if 24 jars of jam pose a problem, imagine what 8,000 mutual funds can do. Standard economics would argue that people are better off with more options. But behavioral economics argues that people behave less like mathematical models than like — well, people.

Scheiber describes Thaler’s influence on Obama’s policy shop:

Though he has no formal role, Thaler presides as a kind of in-house intellectual guru, consulting regularly with Obama’s top economic adviser, a fellow University of Chicago professor named Austan Goolsbee…  You can find subtle evidence of this influence across numerous Obama proposals. For example, one key behavioral finding is that people often fail to set aside money for retirement even when their employers offer generous 401(k) plans. If, on the other hand, you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama’s savings plan exploits this so-called “status quo” bias.

Unfortunately for Scheiber, while Obama most certainly does rely on government coercion, less than a year ago, Thaler was at pains to point out that his 401(k) proposals have not “suggested that any particular contractual form be imposed, including automatic enrollment.”

Scheiber’s quote above also mentions Austan Goolsbee, who — unlike Thaler — actually is an Obama adviser.  George Will profiled Goolsbee in October, including this:

“Globalization” means free trade and various deregulations that supposedly put downward pressure on American wages because of imports from low-wage countries. Goolsbee, however, says globalization is responsible for “a small fraction” of today’s income disparities. He says that “60 to 70 percent of the economy faces virtually no international competition.” America’s 18.5 million government employees have little to fear from free trade; so do auto mechanics, dentists and many others.

Goolsbee’s rough estimate is that technology — meaning all that the phrase “information economy” denotes — accounts for more than 80 percent of the increase in earnings disparities, whereas trade accounts for much less than 20 percent. This is something congressional Democrats need to hear from a Democratic economist as they resist trade agreements with South Korea and such minor economic powers as Peru, Panama and Colombia.

So you would think Will would be happy to read, as Scheiber writes, that:

Goolsbee, in particular, is an almost unprecedented figure in Democratic politics: an academic economist with a top campaign position and the candidate’s ear.

However, if Goolsbee has Obama’s ear on trade, the candidate has not given much indication of it.  He issued a statement supportive of the agreement with Peru, but skipped the vote.  He told the Wisconsin Fair Trade Coalition that he opposes not only the South Korea trade agreement, but also the Colombia and Panama accords.  Obama is telling suffering Americans that globalization is to blame for their plight.

Back to Scheiber:

Probably the closest thing the Obama campaign has to a Richard Thaler on foreign policy is Lee Hamilton, the longtime Indiana representative who recently co-chaired the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group. Hamilton was a moderate internationalist during his years on the House Foreign Affairs committee. He opposed aid to the Contras under Reagan and urged George H.W. Bush to let sanctions play out before invading Iraq. On the other hand, he supported the U.S. intervention in Bosnia in 1995 after some initial reservations.

In short, he opposed the foreign policy of GOP presidents and supported a military intervention by a Democratic president that was not approved by the UN, despite its tenuous connection to US national security.  One wonders why Hamilton wasn’t nicknamed “Maverick.” 

Hamilton was also a co-chair of the Iraq Study Group.  Had all of his recommendations been followed, the US would have been backing down in Iraq, instead of being seen as the reliable partner of the Anbar Awakening and implementing the new counter-insurgency doctrine that vastly reduced sectarian violence and is chasing AQI out of the country.

Scheiber describes Hamilton as an informal adviser, so what about Obama’s formal foreign policy shop?

Obama’s most influential foreign policy advisers–former Clinton officials like Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice, Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, and National Security Advisor Tony Lake–all cut their teeth in the policy world.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius — hardly a member of any vast, right-wing conspiracy — recently wrote of Obama’s team:

Obama’s advisers are a mixed group, but I hear some complaints from policy analysts. One of his leading foreign policy gurus, Anthony Lake, was widely criticized as national security adviser in the first Clinton administration. His role does not reassure people who wonder what substance lies behind the “change” mantra.

Indeed, one of the critics of Obama’s foreign policy team is Marty Peretz, the Editor-in-chief of TNR, where Scheiber is touting them.  Somehow, Scheiber managed to miss the Obama adviser who most troubles Peretz:

The first is Zbigniew Brzezinski (who came in to the game as a hawk decades ago, a democratic Pole against the Soviet Union).  Then, theory enmeshed him, or what looked like theory: the theory of convergence between the United States and the Soviet Union.  It reads downright silly just now, and it is…

Now, he is fixated on Israel and how our ties to it ruin and handicap our policy with everybody else.  Yes, he’s an obsessive.  I am an obsessive.  The fact is that, given his crotchets, he cannot be a political asset for anyone. 

The second adviser also has no political or intellectual cachet.  He is Anthony Lake who has been cow-farming in western Massachusetts for maybe a dozen years.  He was replaced by Sandy Berger because Bill Clinton needed a heavy.  And that is a joke in itself.  Berger was afraid of his own shadow, his most daring act being his filching official documents on terrorism from the National Archives.

The third worrisome figure is Susan Rice, an Albright protege (which should assure no one) who was assistant secretary of state for Africa during Clinton-time.  If anybody really looked into her role in the Liberia and Sierra Leone bloodletting and the protection of tyrants they would find a certain political intimacy with Jesse Jackson who arranged things for the dictators and for their bank accounts.

Peretz might have added that Brzezinski endorsed the infamous 2006 article by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (later a book) called “The Israel Lobby,” which blames many US foreign-policy problems on Washington’s ties to Israel.

(While on the subject of virulently anti-Israel academics, Obama adviser Samantha Power may be one of the few more biased than Mearsheimer and Walt.  Peretz is also deeply troubled by Obama adviser Robert O. Malley, who co-authored a spate of anti-Israel propaganda with former Arafat adviser Hussein Agha, including a tract that blames Israel for the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks.  Coincidentally, Scheiber forgot both Power and Malley are in the supposedly non-ideological Obama policy shop.)

As for Lake, before the farming, he was partially responsible for the US inaction against Iran after the Khobar Towers bombing.  Lake also shied away from confronting Islamic fundamentalists in Algiers, panicking not only that nation, but also Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

There is more interesting material in Susan Rice’s resume, too.  During the Clinton administration, her “policy” decisions led to the failure to capitalize on Sudan’s offer to allow FBI and CIA counter-terrorism units unfettered and unconditional access to Khartoum’s intelligence during the period when Sudan was trying to hand Osama bin Laden over to the US.

Scheiber’s final example of the non-ideological Obama policy shop?  Retired Air Force General Scott Gration:

Gration is a vocal proponent of eliminating nuclear weapons globally. This may sound like a utopian idea, but it would almost certainly enhance stability. “We realize we are trying to deter the actions of non-state actors who don’t have population centers, don’t care about dying,” Gration says, explaining why nuclear stockpiles have outlived their usefulness. “But these weapons can get into the wrong hands.”

In this case, Obama could not fully adopt his adviser’s position, “saying he would seek a world without nukes but would never disarm unilaterally.”

In sum, Obama’s supposedly non-ideological policy shop is anything but.  His economic advisers claim to be influenced by Thaler, but in reality play the same left-leaning game of declaring a perceived market failure as an excuse for government coercion, blithely ignoring the likely consequences of a government failure.  Obama is ignoring Goolsbee’s position on trade to pander to the protectionists in his party.  His foreign policy is influenced by Hamilton, who is a standard-issue Democrat going back decades.  His foreign policy advisers are interested in abandoning our allies Israel and Iraq, getting chummy with the theocracy in Iran and the thugocracy in Syria, and disarming the US in the face of nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran.  Because of the pragmatism.

The only surprising to be found in Scheiber’s article is the sheer amount of tripe it contains.