Jack Lew as OMB director

Naturally,  I am deeply disappointed that President Obama did not choose our own Stan Collender as the next White House budget director.  If you read the Wall Street Journal or the Hill, you might have noticed Stan's name pop up as a person under consideration.  Sure, he might have been a dark horse -- a very dark horse.  But he spent years on the House and Senate budget committees, wrote a book on the budget process and has been better than relentless at ripping through the nonsense used to justify endless tax cuts and soaring deficits.

Besides, he's my friend and colleague.   Loyalty counts.

That said, fiscal mavens are singing the praises today for the man Obama did nominate: Jacob (Jack) Lew, who was OMB director from 1998 til 2001, the last two years of the Clinton White House, and is now Deputy Secretary of State.   I was posted in Europe at the time, so I never crossed paths with Lew when he was budget director.  But he won praise back then for being smart, effective, dedicated and seasoned.  He was a top aide to Tip O'Neill, and had a hand in the Social Security negotiations of the early 1980s.  He was not a "friend of Bill'' or from Arkansas, but he moved up rapidly and was close to Bob Rubin. 

He was lucky enough to run OMB at a brief moment in time when tax revenues were flooding in as a result of the economic boom and the federal government was running surpluses.   After Clinton left office, he became executive vice president and chief operating  officer at New York University, where he stayed until moving to Citigroup in 2006.  

I am told that the Obama team talked to him about several jobs before he took the job as Deputy Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton.  

Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, calls Lew "a terrific choice" for succeeding the surprisingly kaleidoscopic Peter Orszag as OMB director.  

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