The end of an error:
White House Chief of Staff William Daley will step down from his post at the end of the month, President Obama announced Monday.
Daley will be replaced by Jack Lew, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Announcing the staff change, Obama thanked Daley for his service and said he didn’t accept his resignation right away.
“In fact, I asked him to take a couple of days to make sure that he was sure about this. But in the end, the pull of the hometown we both love, a city that has been synonymous with the Daley family for generations, was too great,” Obama said while standing in the State Dining room beside Daley and Lew.
“Bill told me that he wanted to spend more time with his family, especially his grandchildren, and he felt it was the right decision,” Obama said.
The departure comes two months after the White House announced that Pete Rouse, the president’s senior adviser, would be taking over the daily operational duties.
The arrival and departure of Bill Daley as Obama’s Chief of Staff stand as bookends to what was, on the whole, a brutal and wasted year for the Obama Presidency.
The logic behind picking Daley was fundamentally flawed from the start; to believe that this scion of the ultimate machine boss and his patronage system would — fresh from a very lucrative foray into banking — help Obama repair his “damaged” relationship with the business community at the same time as he found middle ground with the new Tea Party-infused Congressional GOP…this was the height (and nadir) of Obama’s wishful thinking. You’d think the President would notice, after 2 years of bitter partisan struggle with an opposition that made historic gains in the midterm by portraying him as a dangerous socialist usurper, that the Republican party was not interested in forging compromise. He eventually has, but it took a near-default and Jimmy Carter-levels of voter discontent to shock him into at least a vague sense of the world as it is.
Recall that it’s been more than a month since Pete Rouse, longtime CoS to Senator Tom Daschle (known as the “51st Senator” among old hands in DC) and top-tier Obama advisor and confidante, stripped Daley of all but the most ceremonial duties. So in reality he’s been sidelined and effectively sacked for quite some time. But for whatever reason, now was the time when Daley decided to make the sacking official. (Keep your eyes out to see if he soon lands himself another plush gig on Wall St.) I’m happy to see him go, obviously; but I don’t want to heap too much scorn on him — he really did nothing worse than what he was asked.
Turning to Lew: besides his vacancy of the top spot at OMB creating a void that, one imagines, won’t be filled by any means besides recess appointment, there’s not a ton to say about the guy. Noam Scheiber’s got a book forthcoming about the Obama economic team, so he’s got the inside track. While Lew doesn’t look quite as cool as his name would lead one to believe (“Jack Lew, P.I.” anyone?) it does sound like he’s an enormous improvement over not only Daley but Emanuel as well:
As for whether liberals will warm to Lew, my reporting suggests it could cut either way. On the one hand, Lew has a well-deserved reputation for defending programs that serve the poor, particularly Medicaid. On the other hand, as I elaborate on in my book, Lew and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were the administration’s chief proponents of accepting cuts to Medicare during last year’s ceaseless deficit-bargaining with Republicans. Lew’s enthusiasm for making a deal on Medicare was such that it prompted considerable grumbling in progressive circles.
There’s also the question of whether accommodating the GOP’s demands for large-looking cuts, even while minimizing them in practice, was as successful strategically as it was tactically. One could argue, after all, that the approach shifted the conversation entirely in the direction of cuts for much of the year, which wasn’t exactly a smashing success. I litigate this at some length in the book. (In fairness, the top political operatives, like David Plouffe and Daley, deserve much more credit/blame for the strategic portion of this calculus than Lew, who was operating on a more tactical level.)
I think it’s a big wrongheaded to assign any blame for 2011′s Summer of Pain to not only Lew but Plouffe/Daley as well; “The Buck Stops Here,” right? But if I have to choose between Medicare and Medicaid, I’d take the latter in a heartbeat. What’s more, it seems like a no-brainer to me that the President’s CoS should be someone he not only knows well but admires and trusts. More than any other figure in the White House, this is the person whose judgment and vision most directly impacts the worldview presented to the President through whatever small crevices allow escape from the POTUS bubble. A more seasoned manager would likely have known this before assuming the most consequential position in the world; but perhaps, three-plus years into his tenure, Obama’s figured out what he needs.
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