By ALEXIS SIMENDINGER
Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee -- once the chief economic adviser to candidate Barack Obama -- may be less of a shoo-in to chair Obama's White House Council of Economic Advisers than his admirers once imagined.
The Obama transition team is interviewing to find a woman, perhaps a minority woman, to fill the CEA chair -- a Senate-confirmed position. Informed sources suggest the candidates on the CEA list now include Princeton University economics and public affairs professor Cecilia Elena Rouse, whose specialty is labor economics. The hunt for a woman, explained several sources close to the transition deliberations, is aimed at broadening the white-male cast of the White House team assembled to date (the current tally of announced picks is 3 women, 9 men).
Goolsbee, a respected University of Chicago professor, remains in contention for other administration posts, the sources added.
CEA is the economic think tank inside the White House that serves the president and his team with detailed policy analysis. The top job there is a plum on the C.V. of any academically ambitious economist.
Goolsbee became embroiled this year in a minor controversy about Obama's views on trade. After notes from a meeting between Goolsbee and a Canadian government official became public in Canada -- suggesting that Obama's chief economic adviser had winked that his candidate's trade-pact critiques were less about policy convictions than political maneuvering -- the media had a field day.
Obama denied the accounts and defended Goolsbee. But by early June, at the start of the general election, he added another policy adviser -- centrist economist Jason Furman, from the Brookings Institution -- to his team, and Furman assumed the task of communicating many of Obama's policy views. Furman has since been mentioned as a possible deputy at the White House National Economic Council, according to sources familiar with transition discussions.
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