Who is Gene Sperling?

It’s disconcerting these days to watch the analysis of Shields and Brooks on the PBS NewsHour. From his gleeful, fawning support of Obama in ’08 and simultaneous contemptuous disparagement of Hillary Clinton, Mark Shields, um, he’s the liberal of the pair, now speaks scathingly of “the Obama cult.” And that’s why Shields is glad to see the shakeup in the Obama Administration that includes the appointments of Gene Sperling as director of the National Economic Council and Bill Daley as chief of staff.

So who is Gene Sperling and how has the media done in introducing him to the public? Ezra Klein thinks the media has fallen down on the job:

Matt Yglesias is right that the media -- myself included -- has done a crummy job introducing people to the work and thought of Gene Sperling, as opposed to scrutinizing the few areas of his background that seemed likely to create controversy:

Like [Sperling] or hate him, I just wish the past week’s worth of commentary on him hadn’t relied so heavily on “six degrees of Robert Rubin” versus “here’s a thinly sourced anecdote from the 1990s.” Sperling’s views on economic policy are not a state secret. He published a good book in 2005, or if you want a briefer precis of his views, you can read his 2007 article for Democracy. 

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