WASHINGTON — While conservative commentator Glenn Beck wields a mean green chalkboard on Fox TV, the White House this fall is deploying economist Austan Goolsbee to work magic with a marker.
Pay a visit to the White House blog, Facebook or YouTube and you’ll find Goolsbee, chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, planted in front of a dry-erase board deconstructing the president’s economic policies on matters such as taxes and jobs.
Four times this fall, Goolsbee has taken marker in hand to frame complex economic matters in viewer-friendly terms. For instance, tax cuts for the wealthy are sketched as big red circles. Goolsbee tells viewers that “giving these big red eggs to the very-high-income people would cost $700 billion.”
Goolsbee’s background as an economics professor with a talent for improv comedy made him a natural choice to be the dry-erase board guy.
Now he’s getting recognized on the sidewalk by people wanting to chat about export policy, bantering with comedian Stephen Colbert on TV about the color of his markers and getting unsolicited advice about his on-screen fashion choices.
“It seems like there was a sore need in society for some format that involved a little less yelling and a little more fact,” he said. How much fact is debatable. The videos have spawned online rebuttals questioning Goolsbee’s analysis.
