You may recall when Hillary Clinton said the presidency is no place for on-the-job training. Three years into his term, Barack Obama seems to still be struggling to get up to speed, now having to replace his Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, to the surprise of most. Daley is deemed to have been the wrong man for the job. Also, Daley was not a first year choice, he replaced Rahm Emanuel only a year ago, suggesting that Obama was still making bad staff decision two years in.

The Washington Post’s Jena McGregor brings the bad news.

The revolving door at the White House is swinging again, and this time, Chief of Staff William Daley is on his way out. Many seemed to be taken off guard: Obama says it wasn’t easy news to hear. Others said official Washington was surprised by the news.

They shouldn’t have been. It seems painfully obvious that Daley was wrong in the role….

His departure calls into question Obama’s judgment when picking one of the key posts for his administration. While addressing the relationship with the business community and Republicans may have been an important task in late 2010, it wasn’t necessarily the right one for the president’s chief of staff. That post is, in effect, the White House’s chief operating officer—the person responsible for being the president’s most senior adviser and the person in charge of all West Wing administrative and operational matters.

Daley, considered of the moderate, Clinton-wing of the Democrat Party, was heralded as the right man for the job by Obama and the Democrats when he brought him in. Or, perhaps he felt he needed him to curry favor with Wall Street to raise cash for his coming re-election campaign. Whatever the reason, Daley never caught on and, for his job of governing America, Obama simply picked the wrong man. He couldn’t even get along with Harry Reid, let alone Republicans.

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Phase one for restoring the republic is over: the House is now in Republican hands, thereby assuring nothing radical will sail through the Congress in the next two years (although it would be wise to be on the alert for unconstitutional executive orders intended to accomplish that purpose). If the electorate remains informed and stays on task, 2012 will see the Senate flip as well since the majority of seats up for reelection are currently in Democrat hands.

Phase two may be more difficult. How likely is it that an incumbent president will be stripped of his position? What will it take? Some say it’s a very difficult task, yet it has occurred rather often. Under what circumstances? A short survey of twentieth-century presidential politics may offer some clues as to the feasibility that Barack Obama will be a one-termer.

We can begin with William Howard Taft, Republican winner of the 1908 election as the handpicked successor to Theodore Roosevelt.

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These may well be the times that try the souls of Democrat politicians.

In the year since Obama took the oath of office, the fortunes of the Democrat Party have changed substantially. Voters, especially Independent voters, now favor Republicans on many issues and in Rasmussen’s Generic Congressional Ballot by 9%. Entrenched Senate Democrats like Christopher Dodd and Byron Dorgan are retiring and now – in no small irony – in the election heard ‘round the world, Scott Brown, campaigning against ObamaCare was elected to “Kennedy’s seat.”

It has been a remarkable turnaround – yet the worse is yet to come for Democrats in office.

Keep in mind that voters turned out the Republicans in 2006 and 2008 in large part because they spent too much, reformed too little and ran up the deficit into the $400 billion range. By the end of the Bush Presidency, economic troubles were mounting and the Republicans had no clear plan for a national recovery.

Today, the incidence of buyer’s remorse for voters over Barack is mounting for all the same reasons and more. Unemployment is at double digits, government reform has been abandoned in favor of unprecedented government spending and the deficit is in the $1.5 trillion range. All of that, with no meaningful recovery in site.

Beyond that, the President has his Party in the stickiest of wickets known to you as the Health Care debate. By allowing Pelosi and Company to write the bill, Obama lost control of the process and now public opposition to the bill is at an all time high.  Even so, the Democrat leadership still promises to push it – whether we like it or not.

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