Obama's chief economic advisor hearts Wal-Mart

This is quite an interesting development. I had Obama pegged as basically a socialist on economic policy. Today he hired his chief economic advisor on his campaign, and it's a guy who likes Wal-Mart (from a liberal point of view):

So there's quite a lot of grumbling in labor circles today about his bringing on Jason Furman as his chief economic policy advisor, because Furman wrote a key, 2005 defense (.pdf) of Wal-Mart from the left, titled, unironically, "Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story."

The piece makes two arguments. The first is that Wal-Mart lowers prices, so low-income people (and others) can buy more. The second is that Wal-Mart's low-wage jobs are consistent with the Clintonite philosophy of making work pay, and that the right fix is to have government subsidize the low-wage workers' salaries and help provide them healthcare. He denies that Wal-Mart lowers local wages.

Except for having government throw tax money at poor people, I agree with the rest of the points as summarized here. Organized labor, which hates Wal-Mart with a passion even as many of its members love shopping there, is less than thrilled:

Furman's arrival is one more mark of the transition to a general election in which labor may grumble, but really has nowhere else to go, and in which virtually all major unions backed his rivals in the primary -- . giving them seriously diminished clout on his campaign.

Here is the kicker, which helps to soften my anti-Obama stance somewhat, at least given that he's a Democrat:

But is the hire reflective more broadly that Obama's more a Clinton-style centrist than a man of labor? The case has been made that that's a false distinction, but there's not much evidence (aside from a couple of weeks in Ohio) for Obama as an economic populist.

Indeed Austan Goolsbee, another economist and key Obama advisor, also seems capable of mentioning Wal-Mart without spitting. He wrote in his Times column last year, in making the case that American workers are more productive htan others, that "companies like Wal-Mart seem to be more adept at translating technology into productivity than anyone else."