When Robert E. Rubin became the first director of the National Economic Council at the beginning of the Clinton presidency in 1993, he had at his side a young Rhodes Scholar and McKinsey consultant named Sylvia Mathews, who served as the council’s staff director.
She was just one of a host of ambitious Democratic aides who would work under and around Mr. Rubin in the Clinton administration. And like many of them, she is now back in government, nominated by President Obama on Monday morning to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
It is hard to overstate how pervasive the experience of the Clinton years is in shaping the people who have populated the upper reaches of the Obama administration. And it is equally hard to overstate Mr. Rubin’s role in supporting a generation of Democratic economic policy makers who have circled in and out of his orbit over the past 20 years.
Mr. Obama’s choice as his new budget director - now Sylvia Mathews Burwell â€" is a good example. From her start in government at the N.E.C., she followed Mr. Rubin when he became Treasury secretary, serving as his chief of staff. She went on to become deputy White House chief of staff and deputy budget director under Mr. Clin! ton.
Gene Sperling, who was a deputy under Mr. Rubin at the N.E.C., went on to become the council’s director under Mr. Clinton. He now has the same job under Mr. Obama, succeeding another Rubin protégé, Lawrence H. Summers, after having served as a top adviser to former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. Mr. Geithner in turn served under Mr. Rubin at the Treasury Department in the Clinton years and later became president o the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with Mr. Rubin’s support.
Mr. Rubin’s economic policy research group, the Hamilton Project, has associations with other Clinton-era veterans who have played key roles in the Obama years, including Peter Orszag, Mr. Obama’s first budget director, and Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Citigroup, where Mr. Rubin worked from 1999 to 2009, employs Mr. Orszag and formerly employed Jacob J. Lew, who was sworn in last week to succeed Mr. Geithner as Treasury secretary.
To many liberals, Mr. Rubin’s influence is corrosive, evidence of excessive Wall Street sway and of a shift in the Democratic Party away from progressive values to a bond market-centric focus on deficit reduction.
Mr. Rubin undoubtedly had a profound influence on Mr. Clinton’s willingness to raise taxes to narow the deficit and later to pursue a balanced budget pact with Congressional Republicans. He has also been criticized for failure to rein in financial market excesses during the 1990s that led to the market meltdown of 2008.
But it is not entirely clear that he has left a clear ideological stamp on the current generation of Democratic policy makers. After leaving Washington following the Clinton administration, Ms. Burwell worked for both the Gates Foundation in Seattle and the Walmart Foundation in Arkansas, spanning the ideological spectrum in the foundation world.
Mr. Lew comes out of the world of House Democrats, and is as associated with his first mentor, Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr., an old-school liberal, as much as with Mr. Rubin. Mr. Sperling is widely viewed as closer to a traditional liberal than as a budget hawk in the style of Mr. Orszag.
In any case, times have changed. The kinds of budget deals Mr. Clinton made with Speaker Newt Gingrich in the late 1990s might not be possible today, given the influence of conservatives on Speaker John A. Boehner. Mr. Obama has already signaled that he sees much of the job of deficit reduction having been completed for the short run and that rather than be caught up in endless crises over budget deadlines, he is eager to get on with the rest of his agenda, including overhauling the nation’s immigration laws and tightening gun control.
As a result, it is likely that Ms. Burwell’s job wll be less to bring an ideological vision to the table than to carry out an agenda that is already well underway.
Follow Richard W. Stevenson on Twitter at @dickstevenson.
