OUTED (via Robert Schwartz):

Fed Official Moves Up and Into Politics (EDMUND L. ANDREWS, June 17, 2005, NY Times)

For years, some of his closest friends did not know that Ben S. Bernanke was a Republican. [...]

But now Mr. Bernanke (pronounced ber-NANK-ee) is moving directly into the political arena, taking over next week as chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. He is also on the short list of potential candidates to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve. [...]

Mr. Bernanke built a sterling reputation while at Princeton, and has won widespread praise for his cogent analyses while at the Fed.

But he has studiously avoided partisan political issues, at least in public. He has said little about issues at the top of Mr. Bush's agenda, like Social Security and tax cuts, and his economic writing betrays few hints of political ideology.

"If you read anything he's written, you can't figure out which political party he's associated with," said Mark L. Gertler, a professor of economics at New York University who has written more than a dozen papers with Mr. Bernanke. Mr. Gertler, who said he did not know his close friend's political affiliation until relatively recently, added: "He's not ideological. I could imagine Ben working with economists in the Clinton administration."

Alan S. Blinder, a longtime colleague at Princeton who has advised numerous Democratic presidential candidates, also said he had worked alongside Mr. Bernanke for years without having any sense of his political views.

"We wrote articles together and sat at the same lunch table thousands of times before I knew he was a Republican," Mr. Blinder recalled. "We never talked politics."

As Bill Clinton noted, his administration was Eisenhower Republican on economics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 17, 2005 12:19 PM