You know that old saying, "The more things change, the more they stay the same?" This is the case with Bill Daley, the White House chief of staff to President Obama. After hearing about Bill Daley's past political work on the Al Gore campaign in helping to select Lieberman as the Vice-Presidential candidate, and his role in asking Al Gore to give up his presidential campaign, I decided
to take a little walk down memory lane to explain what we're seeing happen right now with the Obama administration's refusal to go big on jobs:
Former Commerce Secretary William M. Daley took over the struggling Gore campaign as its chairman on July 15. His first task: imposing order on the factionalized enterprise. Daley has proved himself adept at quickly organizing corporate-style turnarounds in Washington, such as securing congressional passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had faced major opposition. Recently, Washington bureau chief Lee Walczak and Washington Correspondent Paul Magnusson interviewed Daley about his experiences so far in managing the Gore headquarters in Nashville. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:
On Joseph Lieberman's value as Gore's running mate:
[He brings] a certain level of seriousness and comfort with Gore. He brings a lot of excitement. [He] has been willing to test new things even if they don't work. [He] has a deeply held faith, deeply held values, and that's what the American people want to see.
Joe Lieberman's separation on the difficulties of President Clinton was strong and direct and showed enormous courage. But more important is how Lieberman has lived his life. That's one of his great strengths. And that's something that Al Gore believes is needed at the national level. If all that Joe Lieberman had done was give a speech on impeachment, he wouldn't be the Vice-Presidential nominee.
And then there's Bill Daley's role in convincing Al Gore not to press his case in the election fraud that happened in 2000:
Gore too railed against the prophesies of hopelessness he was hearing from Daley. He drew a series of concentric circles on the butcher paper to illustrate what he saw as his responsibilities. Inside the smallest circles were Gore and Lieberman; their closest supporters were in the next circle, then Democrats generally, finally the country as a whole. Gore said his actions had to serve all those groups not just those closest to him. An immediate surrender would be a violation of his obligations to all those who supported him, he said ---- all the people in the circles...
In the end Gore thought they shouldn't make "any momentous decisions." But it was clear that Daley and Christopher felt any victory for Gore was impossible even though more people had gone to the polls there intending to vote for the Vice President than for Bush. Gore and Lieberman couldn't wage the battle alone, of course, and their two principle deputies were telling them, in effect, to give up.
This Saturday had begun with Bush and Gore locked in a closer contest than earlier in the week. Indeed, the Vice President had made gains over the past three days. But the day ended with James Baker leading the attack --- and Bill Daley and Warren Christopher making the case for surrender.
We're hearing the same themes from 2000 again such as trade deals and deficit reduction. This was what Bill Daley did back then, and what he's advising President Obama to do so again now. Going for small ball politics instead of big, bold policies. Making the case for surrender time and time again, instead of going for confrontations.......that is the Daley way, and it is prevailing in the White House.
And just contrast that to what FDR did with a similar set of challenges when he went to Wisconsin to rally Americans:
Unlike Obama, however, Roosevelt refused to even entertain—let alone embrace—the absurd constructs of the private-sector fabulists who FDR said “would repeal all laws, State or national, which regulate business—that a utility could henceforth charge any rate, unreasonable or otherwise; that the railroads could go back to rebates and other secret agreements; that the processors of food stuffs could disregard all rules of health and of good faith; that the unregulated wild-cat banking of a century ago could be restored; that fraudulent securities and watered stock could be palmed off on the public; that stock manipulation which caused panics and enriched insiders could go unchecked.”
“In fact,” the president continued, “if we were to listen to [the anti-government crowd], the old law of the tooth and the claw would reign in our Nation once more.”
With those words, Roosevelt took a side.
He did not imagine the possibility of compromise with those who wanted to return to the “tooth and claw” past.
Obama needs to do the same thing. He needs to recognize the seriousness of the contemporary economic debate. And he needs to take a side, standing against today’s Tories and for the new order where it is understood that the purpose of government is to achieve “the improved conditions of the whole population and not a small fraction thereof.”
It's kind of hard to battle the economic royalists and to show Main Street that you're on their side, especially when you have a WH chief of staff that has served on major corporations like JPMorgan Chase, Boeing, Merck & Co, and other special interests on Wall Street.
Corporate America could hardly ask for a stronger signal of empathy from the West Wing. Daley, 62, is an archetypal face of the 1990s pro-business wing of the Democratic Party. He joined the Clinton administration in 1993 with the specific mission of helping the president pass the North American Free Trade Agreement over strong opposition from labor and Congressional liberals. As Commerce Secretary Daley also led the fight for permanent normal trade relations with China, also anathema to the unions. Labor animus was so great that, when Al Gore named Daley his 2000 presidential campaign manager, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney declared Daley’s positions had put him “squarely on the opposite side of working families.” (Daley may be best remembered from that campaign for his dramatic appearance onstage at 3:10 am on election night in Nashville to declare that Gore had called George W. Bush and withdrawn his earlier concession in anticipation of a recount.)
Since then Daley has been making a handsome living as a corporate executive, most recently on the executive board of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and on the boards of several other big corporations, including Boeing and the giant drug maker Merck. Over that time Daley’s pro-business views haven’t changed: Some liberals are already up in arms about Daley’s ties to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has furiously battled the Obama agenda, and where Daley co-chaired a 2007 commission which called for deregulation of U.S. financial markets less than two years before the 2008 financial meltdown. (A Chamber spokesman declined to comment on the Daley speculation.) Daley also opposed the financial reform bill’s creation of a new consumer protection agency, an office dear to many Democrats and grassroots liberals. And he has suggested that Obama misread the national political mood when he pushed a sweeping health care reform bill, telling the Times that in 2008 the U.S. “moved to center left — not left.”
That said, William Daley’s appointment as chief of staff, should it happen, would hardly be a sign that Barack Obama intends to spend the next two years digging in against the GOP and corporate America. Quite the contrary.
No wonder why there isn't even an effort to show the American people whose side the President is on, given that most of the people in the President's circle are on the side of Wall Street, including the chief of staff, Bill Daley. And if we do end up in a very close election in a highly contested state where the vote recount is in doubt, will Bill Daley be telling President Obama to surrender as he did in 2000? One hopes not.