May 10 (Bloomberg) -- Senator Barack Obama portrays himself as a new kind of leader who transcends conventional politics. Judging by the economists he has enlisted in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he may just be.

Obama's economic brain trust -- a blend of up-and-coming academics and former officials in President Bill Clinton's administration -- displays a fondness for backing innovative solutions to the nation's problems. Among them: offering ailing U.S. automakers aid in return for increased investment in hybrid cars and rewarding doctors for the improvements they make in patients' health...

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.

Obama's economic cadre, like the candidate himself, is still evolving. The candidate is shopping for a big-name macro economist to join the group, perhaps one with the cachet of former Bush economist Glenn Hubbard, who recently joined the team of Republican candidate Mitt Romney...

What's more, there's no guarantee that Obama will sign on to every idea his economists advance because a candidate's political aides often dilute economists' suggestions for fear of stirring controversy. "As the campaign gears up, there will be a tension between the right policy response to a problem and the politically expeditious one," said Steven Clemons, senior fellow at the New America Foundation...

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