 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton appears on stage at a rally a Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center in Columbus, Ohio, Sunday, July 31, 2016. Clinton and Kaine are on a three-day bus tour through the Rust Belt. (AP/Andrew Harnik) By Jim Tankersley One of the more interesting features of Hillary Clinton's circle of economic policy advisers is that many economists aren't sure whether they are, in fact, in it. This is both a function of how many policy experts Clinton has consulted in the course of this campaign, and of the fact that she consults some of them far more than others. It is less a circle of advisers than a set of concentric circles, with a very policy-engaged candidate squarely in the middle. Clinton has long built an image as a policy wonk, dating back to her days leading her husband's health-care task force. As a senator from New York in the early 2000s, aides say she was a heavy consumer of research papers. She would read newspaper articles at home, cut out ones that interested her, then bring them into work in a cardboard box for her staff to pull out and discuss. During her 2008 presidential primary campaign, the economist Alan Krueger, who had served on the health-care task force and elsewhere in her husband's administration, gave her a briefing on labor economics, his specialty. He recalls that she asked him for an explanation of why two surveys the Labor Department uses to gauge the health of the job market sometimes show contradictory trends. "Her willingness to go deep into the weeds on policy is exceptional," Krueger, a Princeton economist and former Obama administration official who now advises Clinton, told me, "even among the group of exceptional presidents I've worked for." Another senior Clinton adviser, speaking on background to discuss the campaign policy operation candidly, offered the ultimate wonk praise of the candidate: "If she hadn't been who she is," the adviser said, "she would have been one of us." |
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