Barack Obama

Why does Bill Daley still have a job?

Just as the president gets his political footing, his arrogant chief of staff trips him up

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Why does Bill Daley still have a job?Bill Daley and Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Jason Reed)

Politico’s Roger Simon has an “exclusive” interview with White House chief of staff Bill Daley, and you really have to read it to believe it. It’s a portrait of arrogant self-promotion. The piece is headlined, “Bill Daley, Unplugged.” I hope that President Obama reads it, and decides to unplug Daley, for good. Yes, I know he has announced he’s leaving after the 2012 election. That’s not nearly soon enough.

Former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was no slouch when it came to arrogant self-promotion, either. Remember when he was the obvious unnamed source behind two Washington Post puff pieces, “Why Obama Needs Rahm at the Top” and “Hotheaded Emanuel May Be White House Voice of Reason,” at the height of the administration’s early 2010 disarray? (If you don’t have time to click the links, it’s OK, the headlines say it all.)

But Daley has one-upped his predecessor by trashing him personally. He says Emanuel, now Chicago mayor, was angling for something else” while he worked in the White House, was not that “beloved,” and essentially calls him the administration’s “leaker in chief.”  I’d write it all off as inbred Chicago politics – Rahm succeeded Daley’s brother Richie as mayor – except for the rest of the interview, in which Daley undercuts his boss at least as disrespectfully as Emanuel ever did.

At a time when Obama seems to have finally given up on trashing “Washington,” to zero in on the way the GOP obstructs his agenda, the centrist Daley criticizes both parties equally. “On the domestic side, both Democrats and Republicans have really made it very difficult for the president to be anything like a chief executive,” the former JP Morgan Chase executive says. And where other advisors describe Obama’s recent attempts to bypass Congress and use executive office powers — to bring Americans help on the foreclosure, jobs and student loan front — as a way to get around a GOP that’s been hijacked by the Tea Party, Daley describes his boss as trying to thwart Congress generally, not just conservatives. Daley’s remarks are likely to incite wider congressional resistance to the president’s new assertiveness than existed before.

My favorite part comes when Simon asks Daley how the White House keeps politics and policy separate. “They can be separate, yeah,” Daley says. “You can say, ‘Look, this may be good policy, but the politics of it may be shitty.”  Simon asks which Obama will go for, and Daley’s answer may well find its way into a 2012 GOP ad. “He’ll try to find that middle ground,” Daley says. “How close can we get to it being really shitty policy or really shitty politics but getting something accomplished?’” (For the record, Politico used dashes to denote the dirty words, but I think the quote is most honest if rendered the way Daley said it.)

That’s a deeply stupid remark, but Simon plays it straight; in fact, the profile comes off as worshipful. The Politico veteran relates that Daley used to keep an old “Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply” sign in his Chicago law office, as a typical Daley reminder, in Simon’s words, “of where they came from and how far they have gotten.” Oh please. Sure, generations back Daley is said to be descended from famine Irish, but where Bill Daley came from is a place of privilege: He is the son of perhaps the most powerful mayor in America.

Daley is a Democratic version of George H.W. Bush as described by the late Ann Richards: someone born on third base who thinks he hit a triple. He used his family background and political connections to take part in today’s quintessential Democratic get-rich-quick scheme, corporate law and investment banking. It’s always shocked me how a certain type of affluent Irish Catholic can excuse his work on behalf of the wealthy as long as he has a “No Irish Need Apply” sign in his office, which puts him on the side of the underdogs. Daley is an overdog who represents the interests of overdogs.

That was one reason he made a terrible choice to be Obama’s chief of staff, but clearly he was chosen to send a message of reassurance to the Democratic Party’s corporate donors. As the president tunes up his populist message for 2012, it’s time for Daley to go. (I should note that a die-hard Obama defender, the blogger Karoli, came to this conclusion almost two months ago, after Daley utterly botched both the substance and the messaging of Obama’s response to the debt ceiling crisis.) I liked the way Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal after his arrogant, undermining remarks about Afghanistan in Rolling Stone. The president should see a strain of the same arrogance in Daley’s sit-down with Simon.

Simon’s “exclusive” made me think of the disturbing line from Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men,” in which Suskind alleges that the most “pernicious and personal dilemma emerging from inside the administration” was that “the young president’s authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers.” Daley undermined Obama’s new populist, partisan message in his self-promoting interview. The young president should send him packing.

Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large.

Obama campaign raps Romney on Trump rhetoric

McCain has yet to speak out against "Birthers"

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Obama campaign raps Romney on Trump rhetoricRepublican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, looks out the campaign charter airplane window during the flight between San Diego and Hayden, Co., Monday, May 28, 2012. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)(Credit: AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is releasing a television advertisement accusing Mitt Romney of failing to stand up to “the voices of extremism” in his party.

The ad was released Tuesday as Romney was poised to clinch the Republican presidential nomination in the Texas primary. It takes the former Massachusetts governor to task for failing to speak out against real estate mogul Donald Trump, a supporter who has consistently charged that Obama is not a U.S. citizen.

The commercial opens by showing 2008 nominee John McCain brushing aside a woman who raised the citizenship issue at a town hall-style meeting, and asks, “Why won’t Mitt Romney do the same?”

A Romney aide is shown telling a TV interviewer that “a candidate can’t be responsible for everything a supporter has said.”

Guess who’s coming to dinner?

George and Laura Bush dine with the Obamas

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Judy Gold

Emmy Award-winning actress and comedian Judy Gold is best known as the star of her two critically acclaimed off-Broadway shows, "The Judy Show - My Life As A Sitcom," and "25 Questions For A Jewish Mother." Judy has had her own comedy specials on HBO, Comedy Central and Logo. She appears regularly on Tru TV's World"s Dumbest. Check out www.JudyGold.com and follow her on Twitter at @JewdyGold.

Presidential race is most costly ever

The election is poised to dwarf the cost of 2008, when Super PACs didn't pump millions of dollars into the race

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Presidential race is most costly everPresident Barack Obama, left, tours TPI Composites, a manufacturer of wind turbines blades, with plant manager Mark Parriott, Thursday, May 24, 2012 in Newton, Iowa. In Obama’s second visit as president to Newton, a city of about 15,000 east of Des Moines, he argued for Congress to renew wind energy tax credits.(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)(Credit: AP)

The battle between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney will be the most expensive presidential contest ever — by a long shot.

There are two main reasons. It’s the first time both major-party candidates are declining post-Watergate federal campaign financing — and the spending limits attached. And the proliferation of super PACS is pumping untold millions into the fray on both sides, mostly for advertising.

So fashion your seat belts and prepare for a howling tempest of broadcast ads, especially if you live in a battleground state.

Obama and Romney were both coming off a week of intensive national fundraising.

Without Democratic primary opposition, Obama had a huge early advantage.

But Romney, likely to surpass the 1,144 delegates needed for the GOP nomination next Tuesday with a primary win in Texas, is starting to catch up as major conservative donors begin opening their wallets.

Through April, Obama and Democratic groups supporting him have raised nearly $450 million and have more than $150 million in the bank. Romney and Republicans backing him have collected more than $400 million during the same stretch and have about $80 million at their disposal.

Both candidates are shooting for raising around $800 million, which would put their combined campaign spending at roughly $1.6 billion. Add another few hundred million from super PACs and convention spending.

Obama opted out of public financing in 2008 and raised $750 million. His spending swamped GOP rival Sen. John McCain, limited to spend the $84 million he received from taxpayers. Super PACs didn’t exist then.

We know what happened in that race. Romney didn’t want to see it happen to him.

Neither candidate had public appearances Friday. Romney was taking a long weekend California hiatus from campaigning, while Obama planned several ceremonial events on Memorial Day.

 

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When leaders actually lead

Some Obama backers insisted the president could do nothing on his own to advance gay marriage. Boy, were they wrong

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When leaders actually leadU.S. President Barack Obama speaks at a campaign fund raising event in Denver, Colorado May 23, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

I count myself as a supporter of President Obama who reserves the right to criticize him when I disagree. And I disagreed with his reluctance to come out in support of gay marriage for a long time. I’m also on record wishing he’d taken a stronger public stance behind several big progressive priorities — a larger stimulus, tougher Wall Street reform, a public option for health insurance, a big jobs bill – whether or not he had the congressional support to make it happen.

Throughout the president’s first term, his most ardent supporters have reacted to those of us pushing him to do – and say – more on such issues with frustration and anger, some of it nasty and personal, some of it thoughtful and well-argued. They rightly blame Congress for blocking action on key progressive priorities, but strangely downplay the power of presidential leadership. Late last year, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait twice attacked liberal Obama critics for being “unreasonable” about what the president alone could accomplish, because “liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president.”

Chait took particular aim at lefty image guru Drew Westen, a one-time Obama admirer who criticized the president in the New York Times not merely for what he hadn’t accomplished, but for failing to tell a compelling story. Chait accused Westen and other progressives of embracing:

…a model of American politics in which the president in not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.

Chait caricatured Westen’s argument (and the beliefs of those who agreed with it), but he got lots of love for both pieces in the pro-Obama blogosphere, where folks finally felt they had a real diagnosis for the illness of those they dismissed as “emoprogs.” But now that we see the changes wrought by Obama’s politically risky embrace of gay marriage, maybe it will be easier for folks to understand that it’s the job of political advocates not merely to praise, but to push their leaders forward.

Steve Kornacki runs down the astonishing political changes we’ve seen in the mere two weeks since the president carefully announced his supposed change of heart on gay marriage. The nation’s largest African-American organization, the NAACP, has come out behind it – and maybe most important, recognized it as an important civil rights issue. Maybe most dramatic, in Maryland, African-American voters have now flipped to support the state’s gay marriage ballot measure 55 to 36 percent –almost the exact percentage by which they opposed it in previous polling on the state issue. And in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, African-Americans’ support for gay marriage jumped to 59 percent from 41 percent in the wake of the president’s historic announcement.

Now, I’m not going to argue that Obama’s turnaround alone caused this sea change. The arc of the moral universe has been bending toward justice on gay rights for a long time, and as I wrote last week, the president gave it an additional tug. There have been advocates within the NAACP working to make this happen for a long time, and they deserve a lot of credit. African-American voter opinion had already been trending in this direction, even if black voters had been less receptive to gay marriage than other demographic groups. There is also an emotional and personal component to the president’s stance that makes his moral suasion hard to replicate on behalf of, say, the jobs bill or the public option. (And let’s also remember it’s white voters who are most hostile on some of those economic issues, thanks to the divide and conquer politics of the GOP over the last 40 years.)

Still, it’s hard not to conclude that Obama’s words made a significant difference in the political course of this debate. Ironically, it was once critics of Obama who mocked the power of words, and specifically the candidate’s own oratorical gifts. Obama shot back at them many times.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” he told Wisconsin Democrats in February 2008. “‘I have a dream’ — just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words. Just speeches.” At many times over the last three years, I’ve been amazed at how Obama’s critics and supporters seemed to change sides on the question of the power of his words.

I give the folks who call themselves “prag progs” – pragmatic progressives, as opposed to “unreasonable” emoprogs – a lot of credit for fixing attention on what the president has accomplished, and reminding others not merely to fixate on what he hasn’t. But I think it’s time that all of us acknowledge that there’s a role for constructive pressure, too. Progressive change has always required impatient agitators – and it will continue to.

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Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large.

Obama courts LGBT vote

The president has launched a new website and video touting his "evolution" on gay marriage

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After a long “evolution” on marriage equality, the Obama campaign is moving to take full ownership over LGBT rights as a political issue today, rolling out a new website and video narrated by Glee’s Jane Lynch.

Lynch, who married her partner in 2010 after New York legalized same-sex marriage, praises Obama in the video, calling him “a leader who not only acknowledged the LGBT community, but who embraced us.” Lynch ticks off a series of Obama’s accomplishments, saying the president has made “more significant advances on LGBT issues than other president that came before him.”

But on a conference call this morning, campaign officials said the website, called “Obama Pride,” is as much about touting the president’s advances on LGBT rights as it is a means to organize and engage with the LGBT community. “We will run robust LGBT Vote programming to turn out LGBT voters this November,” said National LGBT vote director Jamie Citron.

The five-minute video also features new interview-style footage of Obama, who explains how his view on marriage has changed over time and notes that “we’ve seen a profound cultural shift just over the past decade,”

Indeed, the roll out — timed to coincide with Harvey Milk Day — comes as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds opposition to gay marriage at all time low in the wake of Obama’s announcement.

That puts Obama on the right side of history, the campaign said. “[Mitt] Romney’s position on same-sex marriage is also historic but not in the way it should be,” said Obama co-chair Joe Solmonese, the outgoing president of the LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Coalition, who noted that Romney has pledged to push for an anti-marriage equality amendment.

While the marriage reversal carries major political risks, the aggressive PR effort from the deliberate Obama campaign suggests they feel confident that Obama’s stance on gay rights will be a net gain, politically. Already, fundraising is reportedly up as both disillusioned gay Democrats and even some gay Republicans are coming back into the fold. Indeed, the founder of the Log Cabin Republicans, Rich Tafel, told NPR last weekend that he’s considering defecting to Obama in light of the announcement. If the campaign and Jane Lynch have their way, he won’t be the last.

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Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

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