Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Time to examine the Daley departure. Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor kicks it off.
Bill Daley was demoted back in November, a move that had Valerie Jarrett’s fingerprints all over it. Now Daley is gone altogether, resigning from the White House to return to Chicago to “spend more time with his family” (cue the Dirge of the Political Dead).
Daley and Jarrett (and Michelle Obama, not to mention the president) are Chicago Democrats, but just as in Russia there are vicious rivalries among clans that are ostensibly part of the same governing elite, there are deep-seated hatreds and rivalries within the one party of the One Party State that is Chicago. Anyone who lived, as I did, through the Byrne-Daley-Washington election, the subsequent election of Harold Washington, Council Wars, and the open warfare that followed Washington’s death understands that. The rule of Daley II had some similarities with Putinism, with Richie Daley–Bill Daley’s brother–running a natural (city) state, and dividing the spoils among the factions to maintain a semblance of peace. But the hostilities never went away, and hands always rest on dagger handles.
Jarrett and Bill Daley belonged to different factions in Chicago. Moreover, whereas Daley was and is a practitioner of crony capitalism who intermediated between government and heavily regulated businesses, Jarrett is and was more ideological, and her ideology is hard core progressive class warrior.
Bringing both factions so close within the White House was a recipe for conflict, and it is pretty clear that such conflicts indeed continued unabated, with Rahm Emanuel (another Chicagoan) and then Daley arrayed against Jarrett and Michelle Obama. Obama’s political travails starting in 2009, culminating with the election of Scott Brown in early 2010, led to a fundamental divide over what path to pursue: a more accommodating traditional political course (the Emanuel then Daley position) or a more ideological, progressive one (Jarrett and Michelle Obama).
We now know who prevailed. …
Tom Elia at New Editor sums it up.
Daley will step down at the end of the month and will be replaced by current budget director Jack Lew.
Update: Does anyone else find it as interesting as I do that President Obama’s first two chiefs of staff, both very important Chicago Democrats, chose to resign their positions — one right before a big midterm election, and the other before a big presidential election campaign?
Perhaps it’s best explained by an old Chicago Democratic Party political maxim, first uttered by West Side ward boss Bernie Neistein: “Don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers.”
Charlie Gasparino says the moderates have been shellacked.
… Daley thought he had the president’s blessing to move the Obama economic agenda to the center, but that support quickly evaporated as the ideologues and the spin masters like Valerie Jarrett and David Plouffe assumed bigger roles in the administration’s daily affairs.
As I reported on the Fox Business Network back in September, Daley grew increasingly agitated about his role. He openly complained that he was being isolated by Jarrett, Obama’s friend and personal adviser, who’s been at the forefront of Obama’s most recent leftward tilt, and let it be known that he wanted to do something else — maybe serve as treasury secretary, given his banking background at JP Morgan.
At the time, I received an interesting phone call from Daley himself, grousing about my report without offering any specific complaints. When I asked him if he wanted the treasury, he told me he didn’t “lust” for the job. He issued a similar nondenial when I asked him about his issues with Jarrett.
Those issues were obviously too much for Daley to overcome; he had no choice but to resign and “spend more time with his family.”
One thing is certain: Bill Daley may want to spend more time back in his native Chicago, but the president’s ultraliberal handlers clearly wanted him to spend less time with the man in the White House.
Seth Mandel has more.
The resignation of White House chief of staff Bill Daley must be frustrating to President Obama because it–with some help from the well-timed release of Jodi Kantor’s new book on the Obama White House–reveals the extent to which Obama has succeeded not in creating a no-drama administration (an impossible goal in the Washington of 2012 anyway), but rather in creating the impression of one.
The New York Times? tries admirably to parrot the administration line, calling Daley’s departure a “distracting shake-up in a White House that has prided itself on a lack of internal drama, with a tightly knit circle of loyal senior advisers playing a steadying role.” But the paper is forced to give away the game later on in the story, revealing the Obama White House for what it is: the Hotel California of presidential administrations:
“While the president said he asked Mr. Daley to reconsider his decision, he did not apply the kind of pressure he brought to bear on Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has for several months been eager to return to New York.”
The Times is right; Geithner has been begging to leave. And far from being chock full of “loyal senior advisers,” the White House is made up of people trying desperately to get out before their term is up (Daley, Geithner) and comically disastrous hires to which Obama has shown a generous amount of loyalty (Eric Holder?, former press secretary Bob Gibbs). …
… In the wake of the president’s extra-constitutional power grab on recess appointments and his demonization of the Republican Party, it would seem the president’s leftist instincts and advisors are fully in command. There is no pretense of trying to reach deals with the Republicans on entitlement or tax reform. The Defense Department’s budget, if the president has his way, will be cut. The base extols in the showing of no-holds-barred leftism. But now that everything is subsumed to the goal of re-election, how exactly does the undisguised lurch to the left help Obama?
Obama’s blank slate, on which moderate voters projected their aspirations, is now filled in. The resulting portrait is of a president unwilling to talk turkey to his own base, unwilling to address our debt and convinced that vilification and name calling is the key to success. Comity, the constitution or governance? Forget it. In both Obama and Newt Gingrich you now see the crystallization of lowest-common denominator politics. The politics of personal destruction? They are a matched pair, perfect practitioners of that game. Alas, the country is not better off. But boy do they feel good showing who is a force to be reckoned with.
The Hill Blog has a post on the subject.
… Daley was only ineffective because his boss would not let him be effective.
Bill Daley is a political pragmatist. He cuts deals. Like his father and his brother, he is not a left-wing ideologue; nor is he a Republican in Democratic clothing.
He is a pro-business Democrat, an increasingly rare breed these days in Washington.
Obama is not a pro-business Democrat. His wife is not a pro-business Democrat. They don’t like the business community. They don’t trust the free market. They want to spread wealth around (other people’s wealth, I might add).
Jennifer Rubin reports David Brooks went to confession on the Laura Ingraham show.
Politico reports that moderate New York Times columnist David Brooks confessed to radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, regarding President Obama:
‘ I still like him and admire him personally, but he’s certainly more liberal than I thought he was. He’s more liberal than he thinks he is. He thinks he’s just slightly center-left, but when you get down to his instincts, they’re pretty left. And his problem is that he can’t really act on them, because it would be political disaster. And so that means, I think right now he’s doing very little, proposing very little.” ‘
I’ll put aside for now whether he should turn in his pundit badge after misjudging a liberal president so badly, for so long and with so much certitude.
But for now, let’s consider carefully what Brooks is saying. He contends in essence that the entire 2008 campaign was a canard and, worse, that Obama is so politically tone-deaf and insulated that he doesn’t recognize that he is badly out of step with a center-right country. No wonder Obama imagines the Republicans who decry his liberal statism are acting out of malice. If he’s the personification of reasoned centrism, then they must be extreme and irrational. …
Jennifer also looks into the background of the foolish Gingrich attacks on Romney.
The decision by Newt Gingrich to go anti-Bain — and those ostensibly trying to help him — are in some ways inexplicably stupid. Why would Gingrich, who already has a reputation as a thorn in the side of the right and a malicious self-promoter, attack Mitt Romney on free-market capitalism, which is at the center of the modern Republican Party?
Gingrich has never been known as one to distinguish good ideas from bad, but consider the other Republicans who have involved themselves in an endeavor which will likely go down as a text-book example of political stupidity.
There is Barry Bennett, the longtime establishment Republican operative from Ohio, who supposedly paid for the anti-Bain film. Did he think this was smart Republican political strategy? A longtime Ohio Republican activist and national Republican fundraiser who knows Bennett said, “I’m shocked.” He acknowledged, “Barry is a gun for hire,” but said that mainstream Republicans would find the attack piece repulsive. …
The Occupiers in DC are getting some of their natural allies.
The rat population around the two Occupy D.C. camps at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza has “exploded”since protesters began their vigil in October, according to Mohammad N. Akhter, the director of the District’s Department of Health.
Akhter said in an interview Monday that city health inspectors have seen rats running openly through both camps and spotted numerous new burrows and nests underneath hay-stuffed pallets occupiers are using for beds. Both campsites had working kitchens for weeks until last week, but protesters at McPherson Square voluntarily closed down theirs after health inspectors pointed out unsanitary conditions during an informal monitoring visit. …