Weighing In: The Daley Dilemma

Sandra Korn is right about one thing.  Anyone jumping for joy over Bill Daley’s appointment as Chief of Staff needs to take a second look.
Sandra is upset because of Daley’s ties to business and his criticism of health care reform and financial regulation.
Disagreeing with your boss isn’t always a bad thing in my mind (just ask HPR editor in chief Max Novendstern), but Daley does present a dilemma.
Namely, he’s a Daley.
In politics, it’s about who you know, and for President Obama that’s Chicago machinists.
It would be nice if Obama were the transcendent figure he was once thought to be.  It would have been poetic, really, if the man who could clean up Washington arose from the single most corrupt place in the country.  Instead, he has decided to bring in a member of the royal family after Rahm Emmanuel, himself a Chicagoan in the truest sense despite his residency battle, went back to run the Windy City.
Kaiyang Huang wrote a piece a while ago about political dynasties, and the Daley clan is definitely among them.  John Kass of the Chicago Tribune has lampooned them brilliantly since the Bill for Chief of Staff rumors began circulating.  Dad Richard J. Daley was Mayor until he passed in the late seventies.  Bill’s brother Richard M. Daley assumed that same post in 1989, and is now giving it up to Emmanuel.  Brother John Daley is a Chicago legislator with marital ties to organized crime.  Chicago politics, as a rule, equal dirty politics.  And for the past 50 years, Chicago politics have equaled the Daleys.
Let me be clear.  I’m from Chicago.  It’s a great town with more character than a five-mile trek to school in the snow, uphill both ways.  It has a lot to offer and would have been a great place for those Olympics the President vainly tried to secure.  It has many great public servants.  Not everybody who comes out of Chicago is as dirty as the Union Stockyards.  President Obama, for all of the griping from the right over his expensive diplomatic trips, appears to be driven more by a genuine desire to implement a historic liberal agenda than by the perks of power.  But when you’re talking about the Daleys, you’re talking about the epitome of Chicago style politics.
Bill has lived a charmed life in the intersecting worlds of business and politics, spending time at Fannie Mae, as President Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce, at J.P. Morgan, and at SBC Communications (where he received fat state contracts, go figure).  I’m of the (possibly naïve) opinion that not all Wall Street types are unscrupulous con men, so the mere fact that Daley is pro-business doesn’t disgust me as it does Sandra.  The fact that Daley has a history of blending business interests and political interests is a tad more disconcerting.
One thing that liberals (assuming they don’t abandon the Dems and go Green) can hang their collective hat on: Daley is a professional.  The President is looking pretty darn good after a politically stupendous lame duck session, and Daley will all but ensure he continues to look that way.  Liberals can complain about Obama’s move to the center all they want, but it is largely overblown.
The great “Tax Cut Compromise” of 2010?  He gave the Republicans their favorite form of spending while getting the spending he wanted.  The President has never really cared about deficit reduction, so it was an easy deal to make.  Sure, it’s not the type of compromise the country needs, but it has the word compromise in it, and that’s all that really matters.  Obama doesn’t actually have to be centrist to win in 2012, he just has to look centrist.  Daley is a crucial part of that.  Sandra is right to suggest that the left will continue to be disappointed, but that is next to inevitable given Republican ascendency in Congress.  President Obama could probably read the Constitution better than most congressmen, but that doesn’t mean he gets a vote.  If this were Chicago, he would get more than one vote, but that’s a different story.
Obama is far too ambitious to settle for a one-term presidency, and after the tempest that was his first two years, he needs a professional to steady the ship.  The Daley pick makes sense for the President.  The rest of us?  That’s more of a dilemma.
photo credit: http://gbmnews.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Obama_Bill_Daley_002.jpg