When William Daley was appointed White House chief of staff back in January, I wrote an Examiner column in the Examiner making the point that Daley’s business experience, which Barack Obama stressed while introducing him, was not in job creation but “in the intersection of government and business” and predicting that Daley and Speaker John Boehner would be congenial partners in making deals on policy. And in a Beltway Confidential blogpost I noted that Daley in his response to Obama noted that he had been in the White House in 1961 while Obama was a fetus. “The implied message to Obama: I’ve been around a lot longer than you have, and I know how things work. This looks something like the opposite of groveling.” And like many I thought that Daley’s appointment meant a move to the center on policy, given his Christmas Eve 2009 opinion article in the Washington Post in which he wrote, “Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or we risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.”
Now comes the news that Daley is going to yield the tasks of managing the White House to Pete Rouse, who was interim chief of staff between Rahm Emanuel’s resignation and Daley’s appointment, and that Daley will handle relations with the outside world. That sure sounds like a demotion, from the center of power to an outer point in the intersection of government and business. Rouse, a former Tom Daschle staffer, can surely be counted on to support Obama’s current leftward and partisan course on policy and, obviously more important to the president, politics. I was wrong in thinking Daley’s appointment might mean Obama was moving to the center and dead wrong in thinking Daley would have a good negotiating relationship with Speaker John Boehner; quite the contrary seems to have been the case. The mystery to me is why Daley is sticking around but, as he pointed out in January, he’s been in and out of the building many times in the last half-century.
