Clinton trade official to be Obama's trade advisor

Bloomberg reports on Sen. Barack Obama's trade team, and it's not going to excite fair traders:

Three academics -- Austan Goolsbee, 37, a University of Chicago professor and columnist for The New York Times, Jeffrey Liebman, 39, a pension and poverty expert at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and David Cutler, 41, a Harvard health economist -- form the core of Obama's economic team...

A trio of seasoned Washington hands bolsters the academics: Karen Kornbluh, policy director in Obama's Senate office; Daniel Tarullo, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, and a former senior economic adviser in the Clinton administration; and Michael Froman, the chief of staff for former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin who now works with his old boss at Citigroup Inc...

The tough task of helping to develop a trade policy that avoids overt protectionism may fall to Tarullo, a 54-year-old trade expert. Tarullo ``escapes easy labeling,'' said former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, a self-described progressive advocacy group in Washington. ``That makes him especially valuable in finding new solutions to a new set of thorny problems.''

Quien es este Daniel Tarullo? Deborah James and I took a look at his recent work over at Alternet. He is also a Clinton administration trade official (i.e. the team that did NAFTA, WTO and China PNTR) who had previously advised the Mexican government on NAFTA.