Quite a few Belmont Clubbers seem to think Obama’s an outright Marxist, while my liberal nephew won’t support Obama because he’s a “Chicago-school” capitalist. I pushed him on this and he started ranting about some Svengali named Austan Goolsbee. I looked it up and concluded that Obama’s a liberal, in my book, but he does seem devoted to free-markets . . . maybe.

“From the beginning, Obama has sought out academic economists, rather than lawyers or former White House aides. His first economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, is a young University of Chicago professor who shares Obama’s market-oriented Democratic views. This summer, Obama added Furman, who has a more traditional background, having worked for both the Clinton administration and the Kerry campaign. But he, too, has a Ph.D. in economics, from Harvard.

As anyone who has spent time with Obama knows, he likes experts, and his choice of advisers stems in part from his interest in empirical research. (James Heckman, a Nobel laureate who critiqued the campaign’s education plan at Goolsbee’s request, said, “I’ve never worked with a campaign that was more interested in what the research shows.”) By surrounding himself with economists, however, Obama was also making a decision with ideological consequences. Far more than many other policy advisers, economists believe in the power of markets.”