Profile Of Obamas Economic Team

PREV 2 of 3 NEXT

Regarded as a genial moderate, Froman will most likely be a voice encouraging more trade deals and greater international cooperation on efforts to overhaul the world’s financial architecture. He’s got a shot at one day becoming Treasury secretary.

LEE SACHS
Treasury Department adviser
Sachs will be the man to see on the bank bailout, the reworking of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, and anything else having to do with keeping the economy from going over a cliff. Currently serving as an adviser at the department, he is the likely nominee for the position of undersecretary for domestic finance.

Sachs has clout. He, Summers, and Geithner are frequent tennis partners, and most years they attend a tennis camp together. (This year, they’ve had to pass because they’re a tad busy.) Sachs is regarded as “a total brainiac,” in the words of one administration insider. “Is he the most exciting guy? No,” offers another, a Washington financial policy veteran. “Does he have the Treasury secretary’s ear and attention? Absolutely.”

Sachs has private-sector financial experience with Bear Stearns, one of the poster firms for ineptitude and financial hubris. He was the youngest senior managing director in the bank’s history in the early 1990s. J.P. Morgan Chase—which bought Bear in the Wall Street equivalent of a fire sale in March 2008—hasn’t taken any government bailout money, allowing Sachs to avoid potential conflict-of-interest issues. Before the Obama gig, he was at Mariner Investment Group. As far as his government experience goes, Sachs was assistant Treasury secretary for the financial markets during the Clinton administration. He had the job of advising top officials on federal credit policies, lending, and privatization activities.

JEANNE LAMBREW
Health-care adviser
Jeanne Lambrew was Tom Daschle’s guiding muse on all things health care. She was one of his top advisers, and the two wrote a book together about health policy. Though tax issues forced Daschle to give up the chance to become secretary of health and human services, Lambrew remains very much at the center of the Obama administration’s health-care reform efforts.

Lambrew uses the Dr. honorific before her name, but she isn’t a medical doctor; she has a PhD. As deputy director of the White House health reform policy group, she wields enormous influence over the health-care plan that President Obama hopes to pass this year. Her job is to take the broad outlines of the health-care package that Obama presented during the campaign—a plan that promised to provide coverage for all 50 million Americans without health insurance—and turn it into an actual program. It won’t be easy. Presidents have been trying to bring health insurance to every American since Harry Truman was in office. But Lambrew, primarily a policy player, is also known as a pragmatist. She believes the best way to achieve universal coverage is to work in stages.

Obama has singled out Lambrew for possessing one of the traits that he finds most praiseworthy: civility. “Jeanne has a personality perfectly suited to reaching out and building consensus,” he said when he announced her appointment this past winter. “She listens. She treats people well.” Lambrew will need those skills for what lies ahead.

PREV 2 of 3 NEXT