Profile Of Obamas Economic Team

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GENE SPERLING

Counselor to the secretary of the Treasury

During the Clinton years, Gene Sperling was an intense, peripatetic economic aide who was famous for working into the wee hours at the White House, long after everyone else had gone home. (He once told me that vending-machine food was underrated.) Sperling began at the Clinton White House as a deputy to Robert Rubin, when Rubin served as the first chairman of the National Economic Council. After Rubin moved to Treasury, Sperling filled his seat as council chair.

A lawyer by training, Sperling was integral to all the Clinton economic initiatives of the 1990s, from the North American Free Trade Agreement to welfare reform. In that time, he became close with Geithner, then a senior Treasury civil servant. Now Sperling has returned for another stint in government, this time as a counselor to Treasury Secretary Geithner.

Sperling, now 50, is keeping less insane hours this time around, but his level of influence has held steady. As a counselor to Geithner, he’s Treasury’s representative on virtually all issues but the bank bailout—including the budget, health care, and autos.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI
Nominee for Federal Communications Commission chairman
Heading the FCC isn’t as glamorous as becoming a cabinet secretary, but as chairman of the commission, Genachowski will be an important voice in how telecoms, television, and, increasingly, the internet are regulated. Before being nominated for the chairmanship, Genachowski, 46, was the general counsel and chief of business operations at IAC/­InterActiveCorp, where he was a consigliere to Barry Diller, helping the legendary mogul acquire such companies as LendingTree as well as other internet properties. Before that, he was a Supreme Court clerk to not one but two justices, William Brennan and David Souter. And yes, he was a Harvard Law School classmate of Obama’s as well, with the added advantage of being a strong hoops player despite his diminutive height. (Disclosure: Genachowski is also a friend of mine.)

Genachowski, who was chief of staff to Clinton FCC chairman Reed Hunt in the 1990s, favors net neutrality, the position that the government shouldn’t permit internet-service providers to give priority to one kind of internet traffic over another. That’s a stance favored by the likes of Google, whose CEO, Eric Schmidt, has been an informal Obama adviser since last year. But net neutrality is something that the telephone companies oppose. Genachowski will have his hands full.

MONA SUTPHEN
Deputy White House chief of staff
Everybody has heard of Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff and the Obama White House’s tough enforcer. Sutphen is Rahm’s Rahm, the deputy who has to make sure that the trains run on time and ensure that the White House is truly a smooth-running machine.

A former special assistant to Samuel Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, Sutphen, like Emanuel, knows about more than political maneuvering. She has been a foreign-service officer and is fluent in five languages, including Mandarin. Her time as a managing director at Berger’s consulting firm, Stonebridge International, helped cement her ties to foreign leaders.

Like Obama, Sutphen, 41, has a black father and a white mother. She is also the author of a book, The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise, in which she argues that the United States should cooperate more with other countries and dictate less.

Sutphen will play a major role in formulating foreign and economic policy. If Emanuel moves on at some point, Sutphen could well find herself in his seat as White House chief of staff.

LAEL BRAINARD
Likely nominee for undersecretary of state for economic affairs
Most people don’t think of the State Department as a hotbed of economic policy. But the work of diplomacy increasingly involves economics and business, and besides, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not about to sit on the sidelines and let the Treasury Department handle such issues as Chinese currency manipulation or Colombian trade policy.

To help her claim her turf, Clinton is likely to turn to Brainard, a seasoned Washington hand and Clinton loyalist. Brainard, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant who cooled her jets at the Brookings Institution during the Bush years, was a Clinton supporter and donor in the 2008 primaries. She is a veteran of the National Economic Council, where she worked under Gene Sperling during Bill Clinton’s presidency and had the portfolio for international-finance issues. Her past relationship with Sperling, now at the Geithner Treasury, could come in handy in the Obama administration. She could be an essential figure at all the gatherings of heads of state in the coming years.

Brainard and her husband, Kurt Campbell, who was in the Clinton Defense Department, are among Washington’s most plugged-in players. (Camp­bell is now director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a branch of the Aspen Institute, and CEO and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank.) At a time when international economics matters more than ever, their $1.8 million home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, will become an important salon. Brainard could end up as the U.S. trade representative before the end of Obama’s presidency.

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