WASHINGTON — It is testament to former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s star power among many Democrats that as President-elect Barack Obama fills out his economic team, a virtual Rubin constellation is taking shape.

The president-elect’s choices for his top economic advisers — Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers as senior White House economics adviser and Peter Orszag as budget director — are past proteges of Rubin’s, who held two of those jobs under President Bill Clinton. Even the headhunters for Obama have Rubin ties: Michael Froman, Rubin’s chief of staff in the Treasury Department who followed him to Citigroup, and James Rubin, Robert Rubin’s son.

All three advisers — whom Obama will officially name today and Tuesday — have been followers of the economic formula that came to be called Rubinomics: balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation, a combination that was credited with fueling the prosperity of the 1990s.

But times have changed since then. On Wall Street, Rubin is facing questions about his role as director of Citigroup given the bank’s current woes. And in Washington, he and his acolytes are calling for a new formulation to address the global economic crisis that Obama will inherit — and rejecting or setting aside, for now, some of their old orthodoxies.

Instead of deregulation, Obama has sworn to usher in a period of re-regulation, to avoid the freewheeling risks that Citigroup and the rest of the financial industry undertook after Rubin, with Summers, helped tear down the regulatory walls between banks, brokerages and insurance companies, and freed them to trade in unregulated and little-understood derivatives worth trillions of dollars. Geithner spent his first years as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York seeking ways to at least monitor those markets better.

Instead of balancing budgets, the Obama team will be going deeper into debt for at least two years by spending hundreds of billions of dollars more to stimulate the economy, without concern for deficits — for aid to the jobless and strapped states and cities, tax cuts for workers, and job-creating construction of roads, schools and other public works. Nor, given the downturn, is Obama expected to try to quickly bring in more revenue by repealing the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000.

Shared ground?

Summers, who may well end up being Obama’s closest economic adviser, has been especially public in calling for a big stimulus package. Many saw his touch in Obama’s call this weekend for the stimulus plan to create or save 2.5 million jobs.

“Everyone recognizes that we’re looking at deficits of considerable magnitude. Whether it’s Bob Rubin, Larry Summers or the most conservative economist, that is a widely shared recognition,” said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. His past differences with Rubin have so softened that the two men recently co-authored a column about their new common ground on spending, regulation and trade protections for workers.

And Summers has “truly evolved,” Bernstein said, based on his close reading of Summers’ regular columns in the Financial Times this year. Both men have been advisers to Obama, and at a recent meeting, Bernstein recalled, “I told him, ‘Boy, Larry, your views on trade, on income inequality, on stimulus spending they’re approaching ours at EPI!’ And he sort of huffed and puffed, and said, ‘Oh well, changing circumstances.’”

The other side

Yet Rubin critics remain, mostly in Obama’s own Democratic Party among liberals and union members who favor even more domestic spending and more protectionist trade policies.

“What worries me is there is not one person in the senior group who is the outsider to this club. And that’s particularly ironic given Barack Obama’s bias toward copying Lincoln’s ‘team of rivals,’” said Robert Kuttner, a colleague of Bernstein’s at the liberal Economic Policy Institute who has written a book, “Obama’s Challenge,” on free-spending, pro-regulatory approaches to the economic crisis. “Where is the diversity of opinion in this economic team?” he asked.

Yet even Kuttner has warmed to some of those he calls Rubinistas. He praises Geithner for not hailing from a Wall Street investment bank and for being “among the toughest on the need to re-regulate” the financial industry from his perch at the New York Federal Reserve.

Kuttner calls Summers brilliant and notes that he has been out front in proposing big stimulus spending. But he disapprovingly noted that in recent meetings of economists advising congressional Democrats, Summers has argued against restricting banks’ ability to issue dividends to stockholders as a condition of receiving federal bailout money.

By all accounts, the trait that ties the 70-year-old Rubin and the younger men is their braininess. All but Summers are seen as cautious about policy. And all but Summers share their mentor’s low-key affability and conversational ease; many wonder just how Summers, whose brusque ways left a trail of enemies when he was president of Harvard, will perform as director of the National Economic Council in the White House when the job description demands someone who can coordinate with others, listen to them and fairly represent their views to the president.

“There’s no way he will be confined to the NEC’s turf; he will be sticking his nose into everything,” said Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of the Reagan administration Treasury Department, and a Summers admirer. “Personally, I think that’s more good than bad.”

Stimulus efforts ramped up

Facing an increasingly ominous economic outlook, President-elect Barack Obama and other Democrats are rapidly ratcheting up plans for a massive fiscal stimulus program that could total as much as $700 billion over the next two years.

That amount, more than the nation has spent over the past six years in Iraq, would rival the sum Congress committed last month to rescuing the country’s financial system. It would also be one of the biggest public spending programs aimed at jolting the economy since President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Hints of a massive new spending program began emerging last week. Democratic New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, an Obama adviser, and Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, whom Obama has chosen to lead his White House economic team, both raised the possibility of $700 billion in new spending. On Sunday, Obama adviser and former Clinton administration Labor secretary Robert Reich and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., also called for spending in the range of $500 billion to $700 billion.

— The Washington Post