Obama Brain Trust's Key 'Ism' Is Pragmatism

Barack Obama’s brain trust leans heavily on behavioral economics, the New Republic reports, with academics who start small in their analyses—looking at everyday anomalies—and are relatively ideology-free pragmatists. From his top economic adviser to his health-care and Social Security aides, Obama is surrounded not by "big-think public intellectuals," but rather experts motivated by policy that better accounts for human behavior.

Such academics tend to come from a right-leaning world and aren't threatened by conventional wisdom; they may err less than Clintonites on the side of cautiously mimicking Republicans. But a minimum of ideology among Obamanauts doesn't mean they lack ambition: These would-be leaders want an automatic tax return, the global elimination of nuclear weapons and cap-and-trade arrangements that would drop carbon emissions. (More Barack Obama stories.)