The Kudlow pick

Obviously, it's great.

I have sometimes rolled my eyes at Kudlow's incessant pony-in-here-somewhere optimism, always seeing a golden age right around the corner. (In 2010, in the middle of the era of utter stagnation, he famously penned a column called "A V-Shaped Boom Is Coming".) And sometimes his tendency to wax wonky at moments when a broad perspective is called for comes off as a bit tone-deaf.

But then you read his pieces that do take culture and the world stage into account, and you realize he's quite a seasoned observer after all. He's also quite devout in his faith walk, due in large part to the seriousness with which he takes his 17-year addiction recovery.

The timing is interesting, and gives us another aspect of the way Trump builds a team to ponder. Kudlow, along with Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer, was pretty much outraged by the tariff move.

Kudlow seems to have been surprised to get the call:

Mr. Trump called Mr. Kudlow on Sunday while the commentator, an avid tennis player, was on the court. “I thought he was calling to bawl me out because I was so critical,” he said. Instead, he said the president walked through his reasons for implementing tariffs.

Mr. Kudlow said he spoke by phone again with Mr. Trump on Monday and again on Tuesday night, when he said the president offered him the position. 

“I immediately accepted,” he said.

It will be interesting to see how he interacts with the die-hard protectionist Peter Navarro, currently head of the White House trade council. What kind of synthesis of their widely divergent views can be forged?

Did you know that Larry Kudlow actually doesn't have any kind of economics degree? And that he went through a peacenik phase?

Mr. Kudlow, who grew up in a Republican family in northern New Jersey’s upwardly mobile suburbs, became a leader of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1969 from the University of Rochester, where he majored in history. He later studied politics and economics in a graduate program at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.

He didn’t finish his degree but landed a job as an assistant to Paul Volcker, then the president of the New York Federal Reserve, before jumping to Wall Street. At 28, he became chief economist at Paine Webber, a prominent brokerage firm, and later took the same position at Bear Stearns, even though he lacked an economics degree.

After a turn through government—he served as the top economist to Reagan budget director David Stockman—he returned to Bear Stearns. In 1994, he resigned and subsequently acknowledged a drug and alcohol addiction. It isn’t clear whether that episode could complicate efforts to obtain security clearances.

For the last 17 years, he has appeared as a commentator and host on various CNBC and radio programs, and he has toyed with running for the Senate as a Republican.

He just likes to study human behavior from an economic perspective. It's something that has piqued my interest increasingly over the years.

As I say, a great pick. He understands what makes for a freer and more prosperous society. Let's hope his influence prevails.