By choosing Bill Daley, Obama alarms his liberal fans yet again

Once a beacon of hope for the left, Obama now perches at the center

If you spent any time at all in the trenches back in the ’08 Democratic primary, you recall how viciously those kids on the left, while fueling Obama’s campaign with their $1.00 donations, denigrated the Clinton Administration and attacked Hillary Clinton. They especially vilified the Clintons for being centrists, and they held up the haloed Obama as the harbinger of a new politics.

Obama’s politics are about as new as the politics of the Daley machine in Chicagoland, and it’s interesting how the punditry are finding ways to support Obama’s pick of Bill Daley, who is apparently as centrist as they come, to replace Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff.

That would be the same punditry that joined the kids in '08 in elevating Obama while tearing Hillary down. Oh, well, maybe it was just their sexism.

In his NY Times piece on Daley’s appointment, Eric Lipton does acknowledge that Daley’s appointment has “alarmed some of the president’s liberal supporters, who say that bringing Mr. Daley into the White House violates a commitment to curtail the sway of special interests.”

But then Lipton provides one of the more objective takes on Obama’s latest decision to bring an old Chicago pol to the White House:

WASHINGTON — He is a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, where he is paid as much as $5 million a year and supervises the Washington lobbying efforts of the nation’s second-largest bank. He also serves on the board of directors at Boeing, the giant military contractor, and Abbott Laboratories, the global drug company, which has billions of dollars at stake in the overhaul of the health care system.

And now William M. Daley, the son and brother of Chicago mayors and a behind-the-scenes political player himself, will hold one of the most powerful jobs in Washington: chief of staff in the White House, where he will help decide who gets into the Oval Office and what President Obama’s Capitol Hill agenda should be.

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