In his column at the Chicago Tribune, Clarence Page says that Bill Daley made a better fit as White House chief of staff a year ago, but today's feistier President Barack Obama needs a "wartime" consiglieri.
Daley was brought in last January when Obama sought wanted to mend fences with the business community and Congress. But as the world soon witnessed, neither Wall Street nor the Grand Old Party's congressional armies was buying it.
The son and brother of former Chicago mayors soon gained a reputation as a “steady, seasoned political operative struggling to find his footing,” as a September Politico profile put it, in a hostile environment in the White House and on Capitol Hill.
One unnamed source in the story even compared Daley unfavorably to his predecessor Rahm Emanuel, now mayor of Chicago: “You can’t replicate Rahm, he was a once-in-a-lifetime guy, for good and bad. Daley is much more of an executive and former member of the cabinet … When it comes to dealing with the Hill, well, they just don’t know Bill.”
By late October, Obama was steering his ship on a [collision] course with those with whom Daley tried to make peace. Obama executive orders, vowing to act even if Congress would not. He channeled Teddy Roosevelt in a populist broadside he delivered December in Kansas …
Read Clarence Page's entire column at the Chicago Tribune.
