Will Obama Triangulate by Hiring Daley?

by Paul A. Rahe

There have been reports – here, here, and here– that Barack Obama has approached William M. Daley about becoming the White House Chief of Staff.  If true, these reports are very interesting, indeed.

You see: Bill Daley has a history. On Christmas Eve, 2009 – a few hours after the Democrats in the US Senate shoved through a version of Obamacare adorned with colorful provisions nicknamed the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Connecticut Compromise, and Gatorade (sometimes called the Florida Flim-Flam) – the gentleman in question published an op-ed in The Washington Post, warning his fellow Democrats that they were in danger of bringing about a realignment in favor of the Republicans.

After alluding to the announced retirements of four centrist Democrats in the House and to Parker Griffith’s switch to the Republican side, Daley argued that “the Democratic Party — my lifelong political home — has a critical decision to make: Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.”

The political dangers of this situation could not be clearer.

Witness the losses in New Jersey and Virginia in this year’s off-year elections. In those gubernatorial contests, the margin of victory was provided to Republicans by independents — many of whom had voted for Obama. Just one year later, they had crossed back to the Republicans by 2-to-1 margins.

Witness the drumbeat of ominous poll results. Obama’s approval rating has fallen below 49 percent overall and is even lower — 41 percent — among independents. On the question of which party is best suited to manage the economy, there has been a 30-point swing toward Republicans since November 2008, according to Ipsos. Gallup’s generic congressional ballot shows Republicans leading Democrats. There is not a hint of silver lining in these numbers. They are the quantitative expression of the swing bloc of American politics slipping away.

Griffith and the Democrats who have decided to retire are, Daley said, “the truest canaries in the coal mine.”

In drawing attention to this in a piece posted later that morning, I remarked, “Bill Daley is a man well worth listening to. His father was a legendary machine politician and longtime mayor in Chicago; and his brother has for sometime held that office. Bill Daley is himself the man behind the curtain. He was Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce, he chaired Al Gore’s presidential campaign back in 2000, and, as is widely acknowledged, he is the brains behind today’s Chicago machine. He is also a leading Catholic layman, and he knows just how explosive the abortion question could be. He would not have written this op-ed had he not been profoundly worried.”

Of course, as I pointed out, Daley thought that the Democrats could head off disaster in the long run by changing course. “It may be too late,” he observed, “to avoid some losses in 2010, it is not too late to avoid the kind of rout that redraws the political map.” All that his party had to do was to “to acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.” The Democrats need not, he added, abandon their radical agenda. They needed only take the polling data “as a sign that they must continue the hard work of slowly and steadily persuading their fellow citizens to embrace their perspective.”

I opined that Daley’s “tactical advice” was sound. But I thought it “too little and too late.” With “the Senate’s passage of Harry Reid’s version of the healthcare bill in the wee hours this morning,” I wrote, “the die is cast.”

Whether my judgment was correct we will never know – for Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid did not take Daley’s advice. Even after Scott Brown’s remarkable victory over Martha Coakley in the race for Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate – a race that turned on Obamacare – the Democratic Party’s unholy trinity pressed on, getting the commanding Democratic majority in the House of Representatives to hold its nose and pass the Senate version of Obamacare.

What is certainly clear by now is that Daley’s warning was apt. As political scientist James W. Ceaser points out in the current issue of The Claremont Review of Books, the Democratic Party this past November “the greatest midterm defeat following a new president’s election since 1922.” It was, he adds, and election that

changed the landscape of American politics. In viewing the national electoral map of House seats, it is as if someone came in overnight and redid the whole canvas, changing huge swaths of blue to red, especially in the vast area between the coasts and-adding to the impression of Republican dominance-in non-urban districts, which cover much larger geographic areas. Republicans have their largest majority in the House since 1948. And the political reality is even redder than it looks, since a number of the blue dogs who did survive, having observed their colleagues’ cruel fate, will now be less likely to sit and stay at the president’s command. In the Senate, one new Democrat, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, was elected by firing a shot in a campaign commercial at President Obama’s cap-and-trade policy, and a large number of the 23 Democratic senators up for re-election in 2012, especially those who come from redder states, have taken note. Although the House Democrats come January will be a more progressive lot, with a small but helpless contingent of surviving blue dogs, the Senate is apt to be very different. Some Democrats may look to “do business” with Republicans, although there appear to be too few moderate Democrats to mount a sustained opposition against Obama from the center. If the president faces pressure from within his party, it is more likely to come from progressive intellectuals and bloggers outside of Congress. Given where the center of American politics now is located, such posturing will be of no real significance.

From this, we can draw, I think, the following conclusion. If Obama asks Daley to serve and if he agrees to resign the well-remunerated position that he now occupies at JPMorgan Chase and come on board, he will serve as Obama’s Dave Gergen, and David Axelrod, who is leaving the White House to run the President’s re-election campaign, will turn into something hard to distinguish from Dick Morris. And this means that, at least for a time, the President will try to alter his image as a radical by doing considerable business with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. If, however, Daley is not asked to serve or demurs when asked, that, too, will be a sign.

Stay tuned.


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Posted Jan 4th 2011 at 2:33 pm in 2012 Election, Congress, Healthcare, History, Midterm Elections, News, Obama, Politics | 63 Comments