It only seems to get worse. The war on working people is going to accelerate the next two years as Republicans try to break unions and decimate social programs. And so we get the salesman of NAFTA, a banker, and one who sought "free trade" with China rumored as a top contender for WH chief of staff.
President Barack Obama is considering naming former Commerce Secretary William Daley to a top White House job, possibly chief of staff, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.
Daley, an executive at JPMorgan Chase, has extensive private sector experience, an attractive profile for the Obama administration, which has been looking to counter the notion that the president is antibusiness.
snip
As special counsel to President Bill Clinton, he coordinated the successful campaign to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement. He later served as commerce secretary to Clinton. In 2000, he coordinated the effort for permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, and he served as chairman of Vice President Al Gore's presidential campaign.
msnbc.com, Obama may name William Daley to White House job
Even Ezra Klein is worried about Daley.
"They miscalculated on health care," Mr. Daley said in an interview last year with The New York Times. "The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left."
The problem isn't Daley's take on health-care reform, which I disagree with, but which is certainly legitimate. It's his take on the meta-politics of health-care reform, and perhaps politics itself.
Bill Daley vs. health-care reform, By Ezra Klein
As Ezra points out, if RomneyCare is the left, then there is no left at all in DC.
The health-care law the president signed was modeled off of the health-care law the Republican governor of Massachusetts had signed, which was in turn modeled off of the health-care law the Republicans in Congress had proposed in 1993. That's "left"?
And meanwhile, Daley thinks the country had moved substantially leftward over that period -- "after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left" -- but that even a compromise bill based on Republican ideas was too far left for the country, which would imply that the administration he served in the early-'90s, which pushed a more ambitious health-care bill when the country was further to the right, bordered on communist.
Bill Daley vs. health-care reform, By Ezra Klein
It just seems to get worse and worse. Happy New Year all.
Update I: More on Daley:
Equally illuminating, however, is the stance Daley took on the other major piece of domestic legislation passed during the past two years: financial regulatory reform. Daley, reportedly, was not exactly enamored with a new consumer financial protection agency, a key element of the plan and one of the president's most cherished provisions, going so far as to lobby White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to drop the idea.
A reader points out this article from the April 7, 2010 Wall Street Journal:
But when White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called a top J.P. Morgan executive to ask for the bank's support in creating a new consumer-protection agency, the executive--former Commerce Secretary William Daley--said no, according to people familiar with the conversation. His boss believed that sufficient consumer safeguards were already on the books.
William Daley, Rumored Chief Of Staff Nominee, Opposed Consumer Protection Agency