Should Obama win the nomination, political considerations may well force upon him a more interventionist position, but his first inclination is to seek a path between big government and laissez-faire, a trait that reflects his age—he was born in 1961—and the intellectual milieu he emerged from. Before entering the Illinois state Senate, he spent ten years teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, where respect for the free market is a cherished tradition. His senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, is a former colleague of his at Chicago and an expert on the economics of high-tech industries. Goolsbee is not a member of the "Chicago School" of Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, but he is not well known as a critic of American capitalism either. As recently as March 2007, he published an article in The New York Times pointing out the virtues of subprime mortgages. "The three decades from 1970 to 2000 witnessed an incredible flowering of new types of home loans," Goolsbee wrote. "These innovations mainly served to give people power to make their own decisions about housing, and they ended up being quite sensible with their newfound access to capital."
When I spoke to Goolsbee earlier this year, he said that one of the things that distinguished Obama from Clinton was his skepticism about standard Keynesian prescriptions, such as relying on tax policy to stimulate investment and saving. In a recent posting on HuffingtonPost.com, Cass Sunstein, who for ten years was a colleague of Obama's at the University of Chicago Law School—and has said he is "an informal, occasional adviser to him"—made a similar point regarding government oversight of the financial markets: "With respect to the mortgage crisis, credit cards and the broader debate over credit markets," Sunstein wrote, "Obama rejects heavy-handed regulation and insists above all on disclosure, so that consumers will know exactly what they are getting."