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.”