Marathon Pundit: Obama picks Wal-Mart defender as his economic policy director

"I won't shop there." Barack Obama on Wal-Mart, May 14, 2007. When Obama said that, his wife was sitting on the board of TreeHouse Foods, a major Wal-Mart supplier.

And now Obama has more Wal-Mart duplicity to deal with, and for the second day in a row, the New York Sun's Josh Gerstein exposes some Obama hypocrisy.

As I've written many times before, I like Wal-Mart.

From the Sun:

Just days after clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Obama is naming as his economic policy director an economist who has clashed with critics of Wal-Mart by defending the company as a boon to poor Americans.

The appointment of Jason Furman, 37, a former Clinton administration official who is a visiting scholar at New York University, immediately met with skepticism from some who have faulted Wal-Mart for being stingy toward its workforce.

"It's surprising because this guy seems to feel that Wal-Mart's low-wage, low-benefit business model is good for America. That's just flat-out wrong," the executive director of Wal-Mart Watch, David Nassar, said. "This guy helped to lend credibility to the Wal-Mart business model. That was disappointing then and it's disappointing now given this position," said Mr. Nassar, whose group is backed by a board that includes the president of the Service Employees International Union, Andrew Stern. Mr. Nassar quickly added that he was "not critiquing the Obama campaign."

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As the company became a pariah in Democratic circles, Mr. Furman stepped out on the issue in 2005 by publishing a 16-page paper titled, "Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story." He argued that the huge cost savings the company has delivered to its customers, who tend to have low incomes, far outweighed any impact the chain may have had on wages.