Obama's stand-up: 'Chicago's big week'

by Mark Silva

Austan Goolsbee, the economist on leave from the University of Chicago advising a fellow Chicagoan in the White House now, has a pretty strong sense of humor and a practiced soto voce.

"We packed up, like the Beverly Hillbillies, we came to Washington,'' Goolsbee said in last night's 16th annual "D.C.'s Funniest Celebrity" contest.

"Anybody can win in a landslide,'' he said. "But the people in the campaign, we share this bond... We came here because we knew that the president had a lot of things to do. No. 1 on the list we wanted to make sure -- all the Clinton people got their jobs back -- that we were going to do something to help the country.''

Goolsbee is a good friend of the president - he's not suggesting that they were "separated at birth in 1961 - in a village in Kenya '' - but they're buddies.

"I'm just a guy from Chicago -- future Fed chair,'' said Goolsbee, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers serving as director and chief economist on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Now a lot of the president's friends have flown off to Copenhagen, he noted, in pursuit of Chicago''s bid for the 2016 summer games. (The president flies tonight at 6:50 pm EDT.)

"This is a big week for Chicago,'' Goolsbee said of the delegation in Denmark. "It's an amazing group. Valerie Jarrett is going over there. They've got Oprah, the president, the first lady, the mayor. They're bringing the senators. I think they're bringing the governors - if the parole board says it's OK.... I hope we get the Olympics.''

This is an administration that took office in tough times, the economist noted.

"it was OK, because as we took office, it was an all-star team of economists and we basically knew what to do - panic,'' he said. "Let's just sort it out and start from the fundamentals - how do we throw money at this problem?... We kind of had to go back and look at the old text books. Karl Marx, Trotsky.''

"I think, from all sides, there are some things we agree on,'' he said. "We all want our kids to be educated. Think of somebody in today's world in the 21st Century, if you have no skills and no education and you don't know anything, what future do you possibly have? FOX News correspondent.''

He had a few things to say about the next election, too.

"I think [Republicans] might do better looking outside of Washington to governors, there's a lot of governors,'' he said. "There's obviously Sarah Palin - wingnut - from Alaska who's a former governor -- quitter -- and you just cannot rule out that by 2012 -- there will be a warrant for her arrest -- that she will be the nominee....

"They might want to just pick somebody who was against Obama from the start, someone who was against somebody from the start, just had it out for him for some time -- Hillary Clinton ... If they do that, they could challenge him competitively.''

There are plenty of people still unemployed, he noted. "When Rahm Emanuel sees my comments from this evening, I'm going to be one of them.''