Working the Beat.

Ezra Klein:

We may be stuck in an economic crisis, but we're long past the point of being interested in what economists have to say about ending it. Last weekend, Republicans succeeded in forcing Nobel-prize winning economist Peter Diamond to withdraw his nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. Their reasoning? He was unqualified. For two years now, economists on both sides of the political aisle have been begging Congress to cut the obvious deal: significant short-term stimulus paired with two or three or four times as much long-term deficit reduction. We're nowhere near cutting that deal. About half of official Washington is now pretending that tax cuts have nothing to do with deficits and tax increases have no place in closing deficits, a position even conservative economists consider extreme.

Is that why Austan Goolsbee is leaving? Perhaps not. The Chicago economist has been with Obama since the campaign (and in fact worked on his initial Senate campaign). That's a long time to be in the political pressure cooker. It's a long time to be away from your university, and to ask your family to accomodate a new city and new hours and new responsibility and new notoriety. But it can't have helped. If Goolsbee was spending his days crafting major economic policy to help the country dig out of this hole rather than trying to wanly explain that a slow recovery is nevertheless a recovery, the job would've been rather harder to vacate.

[Zachary Goldfarb: "Goolsbee, who is regarded as one of the administration’s most effective speakers on economic policy given his background as a star lecturer, spent Friday answering questions about the unexpected news that the economy added only 54,000 jobs in May as the unemployment rate inched back up to 9.1 percent."]


Which suggests that the real question isn't who his replacement will be, but whether he or she will matter. The job of the CEA chair is to give the president good economic advice. That's a very important job if the president can take your advice. It's a very dispiriting job if he can't.

His female counterpart, online blogger Megan McArdle:

Austan Goolsbee, currently the head of the CEA, has been one of Obama's economic advisors for the last four years. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Chicago's Booth Graduate School of Business, where he was one of my favorite professors. Last night, news broke that Goolsbee would be returning to Booth this fall.

Goolsbee was one of the things that commended Obama to me. Austan Goolsbee is smart, fearless, and slightly unorthodox, and he's not afraid to tell people that they're wrong. It showed great wisdom to choose such a person as an advisor. Obviously, that didn't mean that I always got policies I agreed with. But I have been very glad that he was in the White House.

Goolsbee gives the same reason that Summers gave for leaving the administration--he cannot stay on leave from his academic job forever without risking tenure. He's certainly earned a rest; he's been working for Obama for more than four years, and spent most of it grappling with the worst economic crisis in living memory. But without slighting the president's other advisors, I think that the administration is losing a valuable asset that will be hard to replace.

But cut the lady some slack. She's been assigned to the Married Middle-Aged Lady Morality Beat too, and she's pulling a double, allegedly representing her constituency:

A lot of over-35's, including me, view this behavior as pathologically reckless. A lot of under-35's are saying "meh, what's the big deal? Lot's of people do it!"

Maybe so. But here's the thing: Anthony Weiner is 47, not 24. Like the rest of us fuddy-duddies, he grew up with a strong taboo against mailing naked photographs of yourself to strangers. Whether or not college students really distribute naked photographs of themselves as indiscriminately as their email address, middle-aged married people do not regard this as a slightly less formal way to say "have a nice day."

So I don't find the argument that "it's normal" very convincing -- not for a man of Weiner's age and position. It was obviously pretty reckless, even if the only standard you use is that obviously, if these pictures became public, he would have to spend a lot of time explaining himself.

And of course, this ignores the fact that he was married. I think we can safely say that premarital sex with more than one person is now normal in our society. That doesn't mean it's okay for a married man to have a girlfriend on the side. If this had happened while Weiner was still single, it would have been embarrassing, but -- aside from the possibility that he used government computers -- not particularly newsworthy. Once he started sexually explicit relationships outside of his marriage, it became an entirely different thing.