WASHINGTON — President Oba ma’s decision to tap Bill Daley as his top consigliere in the White House is a shrewd signal he understands the sober reality that if he does not quickly revive the economy, he will go down in history as a poor, one-term president.
At first blush, the choice seems easy to ridicule as politically incestuous. For a president who made big promises about changing the way Washington works and restoring some kind of leg-tingling idealism to the Beltway, going with Daley is an old-style, realpolitik move.
Daley is just one more part of the Chicago political machine from which Obama has already drawn.
Daley’s brother is the man his predecessor as chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, hopes to replace as the Second City mayor. Dizzying, but true.
And, of course, Daley is a retread from an earlier Democratic administration. Yesterday’s announcement did not draw a chorus of Hosannas from either liberals or conservatives.
Liberals complain that Daley — with his business background and appeal to Wall Street — will further moderate an Obama White House that bleeding hearts had dreamed would never desert them.
“Bill Daley consistently urges the Democratic Party to pursue a corporate agenda that alienates both independent and Democratic voters,” seethed one leading liberal.
“If President Obama listens to that kind of political advice from Bill Daley, Democrats will suffer a disastrous 2012.”
Nobody on the right is particularly thrilled, either, with a leftover from the Clinton administration, where Daley served as commerce secretary.
Add to that the fact that Daley served on the board of Fannie Mae — the reckless lender widely blamed among conservatives for causing the collapse of the housing market — and you have a fairly compromised chief of staff from Day One.
But this presidency is no longer about building some post-partisan bridge to Republicans.
Nor is it about the grand hopes of the government lifting all the poor out of poverty and healing all the nation’s sick.
This administration has only one goal anymore and that is political survival.
Obama knows that his only hope for re-election in 2012 is to become far more hospitable to businesses large and small, because the only shot at lowering the alarming rate of unemployment lies with them.
Bill Daley understands this and will certainly push Obama in that direction.
Anything else and Obama will be forever remembered for the hopeful tone of his historic campaign and the hopeless execution of a single term.