Obama’s Chief of Staff Laments Bad Luck, Talks Up Skirting Congress

Politico interviewed Bill Daley, President Obama’s chief of staff. The piece is titled “Bill Daley, Unplugged,” I would assume because of Daley’s colorful language. He pretty much pinned Obama’s failures as president on bad luck, and Congress.

So do you think, I ask, that President Obama would be satisfied saying, “We did a good job, we did good stuff,” and if he’s a one-term president, “That’s the verdict of history”?

“Nope, no, absolutely not!” Daley begins, shaking his head and then growing more outraged at the thought of a single term entering the president’s mind. “I think he’d be angry! Pissed! Unhappy! Frustrated! No, if somebody said yes to that, that would be crazy.”

But the polls stink.

“Considering the debacle that he came in with, the tough choices he’s made and how there have been few, if any breaks, he says it himself all the time,” Daley says. “He doesn’t know why he’s as high as 44 percent.”

What is he saying, that to be a successful president one needs to rely on luck?

From there we get more whining about how very hard things have been over the past three years. You know, the same way the Bush people constantly reminded us how hard it was to deal with the bursting of the dot-com bubble and 9/11. As if no president has ever faced a challenge. What we don’t get is any recognition that any of the policies rammed through during the first two years of Obama’s presidency (when Democrats controlled the House and the Senate) have prolonged the misery.

So, what are they going to do about it? Why, they plan to ignore the Constitution and skirt Congress.

But good times — well, better times — are possible before November 2012, Daley says. And all President Obama has to do to achieve this is make a startling end run around not just the Republicans but also the Democrats, in Congress.

All he has to do, Daley says, is operate in domestic affairs with the same speed, power and independence that he possesses in foreign and military affairs.

That’s all.

“On the domestic side, both Democrats and Republicans have really made it very difficult for the president to be anything like a chief executive,” Daley says. “This has led to a kind of frustration.”

If Daley was kidding this would be funny. Who is preventing Obama from acting like a chief executive? When is the last time he sat down with congressional leaders to work out a compromise on legislation? We could probably count on one hand how many times he’s done that – and when he did, he wasn’t exactly gracious. Taking taxpayer funded tours through swing states to bash one’s political opposition isn’t in the job description of “chief executive,” chief campaigner is more like it.  That’s all Obama’s been good at, he’s not a leader, he’s a campaigner. And a divider.

Tags: bad luck, Bill Daley, obama, whine