Why did Americans allow Axelrod, Plouffe, and Daley to take over the country?

David Plouffe: "All hail the Messiah!"

Early in the Obama Administration, an upcoming Sunday sermon in my liberal church fellowship was titled, “The Obama Era.” Seriously. My God, I thought, they’ve anointed him pharaoh. I stayed home that morning.

The Obama Era emerged from the messianic campaign messages of David Axelrod and David Plouffe who, with the aid of Bill Daley, are apparently still trying to get all of us peasants to bow down to the One.

I don’t recall how Michael Tomansky responded to the Obama presidential campaign. He may or may not be one of the disillusioned who were once swept up in the glory days of 2008. Today, he’s in touch with reality in this post at the Daily Beast titled, “The Obama Team is Blowing it”:

We were told, as I recall, that Barack Obama had to seek a debt deal with the Republicans to please independent voters. Well, the independent voters are speaking, and they don’t appear to be especially appeased. There’s a new Gallup poll just out showing that independent voters hate the deal. Their views on it are far more similar to the GOP’s than to the Democratic Party’s.  Combine these data with the president’s approval numbers, which are swiftly heading south, and we have little choice but to conclude that this brilliant stratagem backfired. Isn’t it time for someone to say: this new White House political team is worse than the previous one?

First let me run you through the numbers. Americans disapprove of the deal by 46 to 39 percent. Democrats support it 58-28. Republicans oppose it 26-64. Independents oppose it 33-50. A second question asked of respondents: Was the deal a step forward or backward or neither with respect to “addressing the federal debt situation?” Democrats lined up 30-14-50. Republicans, 15-28-52. Independents, 16-25-50. Finally, independents also align more closely with Republicans on the question of whether the deal will have a good or bad effect on the economy.  Whereas 29 percent of Democrats think the effect will be good, just 12 percent of independents and 8 percent of Republicans believe that.

Let’s see, what else? The immigration speech from May? What, you don’t even remember it? If it was at least partly intended as a sop to Latino voters before the campaign really revs up, it seems to have left them largely unmoved—Obama is below 50 percent with Latinos in some surveys. OK, how about the more recent Midwestern jobs swing? Probably did no damage, but certainly did no good. The Vineyard vacation? I don’t begrudge the man a little R and R, and maybe it’s a small thing, but that destination—a bad symbol, Martha’s Vineyard. He might as well have gone to California wine country. Last I checked, there are golf courses aplenty to be found in North Carolina, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Colorado.

When David Axelrod left to go to the campaign office in Chicago, and Rahm Emanuel left to become mayor, the spin was that David Plouffe and Bill Daley, their respective replacements, would, if nothing else, bring fresh and unwearied perspectives to these admittedly grueling and thankless jobs. But they appear to have given Obama bad advice at nearly every turn. Plouffe, from what I can see, just looks to be in over his head in this job. He was a whiz at organizing a campaign field network. But this is a different game.

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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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