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.

Read more:

Reality Strikes: Obama Lowers Expectations; Puts Hope on Hold

Early on in his campaign, Barack Obama accused his detractors of wanting to “boil all of the hope out of him.” The audacity of hope guy wasn’t about to let that happen. Now that he’s won the election, Obama is pulling the same kind of trick he pulled shortly after receiving the Democratic nomination when he made a quick right turn and lunged for the center, reneging on almost every pledge he’d made to his wild-eyed left-wing supporters. But I don’t recall that he tried, as they say, to “lower their expectations.”

Quelling a brief rebellion by thousands of his Facebook friends, Obama continued to easily turn his political rallies into revival meetings with his adoring fans chanting “Yes, we can.”

The sudden transition from the candidate to the president-elect has had a sobering effect on Obama. Now, instead of “Yes, we can,” the One is saying, “Well, look, maybe later on we can.”

The change has been so dramatic the AP’s Nedra Pickler and Beth Fouhy this evening are accusing Obama of having put hope on hold.

“In two appearances since he was elected, Obama has emphasized the monumental challenges the country faces and warned against expectations that he will bring a quick fix. The change he promised on the campaign trail will come, he told an eager nation, but it will take some time.”

‘“We are facing the greatest economic challenge of our lifetime,’ Obama said at a news conference Friday.

“Obama faces war and recession, and an ambitious list of campaign promises like tax cuts, expanded health care and a new approach to energy. No president can do it all at once, and politically Obama needs the country to be patient so it isn't disappointed when he doesn't deliver monumental change overnight.

‘“It is not going to be quick, and it is not going to be easy for us to dig ourselves out of the hole that we are in,’ he said.”’

I can’t speak for the millions who voted for Obama on his promise of hope and change, but I’ve said all along that I don’t need a charismatic politician to give me hope; my hope is rooted in my faith. And neither Obama, nor ten like him, has the power to put it on hold.