"FELLOW TRAVELER" IS UNFORTUNATE:

'Chicago School' Dons Give Obama High Marks (JUSTIN LAHART, 11/07/08, Wall Street Journal)

One reason for the alliance among economists at Chicago and elsewhere with Mr. Obama is that they feel he is a fellow traveler, sharing their empirical, data-driven bent. [...]

Many economists were cheered in April when, amid higher gasoline prices, Mr. Obama opposed a gas-tax holiday -- an idea supported by Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton, who was competing with Sen. Obama for the Democratic nomination. Textbook economics said in response to the tax cut, demand would simply raise gas prices to their previous level, and so the benefit of the cut would flow to energy producers rather than consumers.

"The gas-tax episode was a very good sign," said Princeton University economist Jose Scheinkman, who spent most of his career at Chicago and was chairman of its economics department from 1995 to 1998.

Mr. Scheinkman, an Obama supporter, says that insofar as economics has changed, so has politics. "There are many things that used to be very common to the left that the left is no longer interested in," he said. "They moved closer to the way economists tend to think."

Still, a number of Mr. Obama's pronouncements have made many economists wince. His sometimes strident views on trade protection during the campaign weren't only troubling to Chicago's free-trade backers. A 2005 survey of Ph.D.s randomly selected from the American Economics Association found that 87.5% of economists agreed that the U.S. should eliminate tariffs and barriers to trade.

In March, when a Canadian government memo surfaced citing Mr. Goolsbee saying that Obama campaign statements on the North American Free Trade Agreement amounted to "political positioning," Mr. Obama took some lumps, but many economists were relieved.

The gas tax holiday was certainly Maverick's low point, but where is Mr. Obama's call for increasing gas taxes?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 7, 2008 10:23 PM