The Impulse Towards Hackery

Daniel Gross on the hunt for the next Fed chairman:

the biggest danger for Bush is not that the next Fed chairman will be lax when it comes to fighting inflation. It's that he will use his Congressional testimony or his public speeches to speak honestly about the implications of the fiscal policy, to note that the pledges to reduce deficits and make tax cuts permanent are mutually exclusive, or to argue that the stock market can't magically cure Social Security's long-term imbalance.

Thus considered, it behooves Bush to choose the candidate least likely to speak out. Someone who, when push comes to shove, will go with partisan instincts over academic leanings and whose willingness to speak truth to power goes only so far.
[...]
If you're Bush, you need someone who has a first-rate economic mind but the soul of a political hack. You need someone who was intimately involved in the selling of the fiscal policy in the first place and who will go to great lengths to defend it. You need someone who can argue in a textbook that deficits influence interest rates and then argue as a White House adviser that they don't—and still maintain an academic reputation. You need someone who campaigned hard for you in 2004. In other words, you need the guy Chris Suellentrop dubbed a "first-rate economist, tax-cut champion, presidential Yes Man." President Bush, you need Glenn Hubbard.

Comforting, no?