Daley opposed the Dems' push for health care reform & creation of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau #p2

from http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/bill_daley_vs_health-care_refo.html

To expand a bit on the argument I made in today's Wonkbook, the right test for the Obama administration to apply to potential candidates for chief of staff is not "will this person be liked?" or "will this person be greeted with laudatory news stories?" but "will this person make the administration more effective and successful?" The problem, of course, is that that's hard to predict -- both for the administration and the news media -- while press coverage is fairly easy to predict. These paragraphs from the New York Times story on Daley, however, don't leave me optimistic:

Mr. Daley, who has not responded to requests for comment, is also known to offer blunt advice and criticism. He thought the president and Democratic leaders in Congress overreached on some of their priorities in the last two years.

"They miscalculated on health care," Mr. Daley said in an interview last year with The New York Times. "The election of '08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left."

The problem isn't Daley's take on health-care reform, which I disagree with, but which is certainly legitimate. It's his take on the meta-politics of health-care reform, and perhaps politics itself.

The health-care law the president signed was modeled off of the health-care law the Republican governor of Massachusetts had signed, which was in turn modeled off of the health-care law the Republicans in Congress had proposed in 1993. That's "left"? And meanwhile, Daley thinks the country had moved substantially leftward over that period -- "after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left" -- but that even a compromise bill based on Republican ideas was too far left for the country, which would imply that the administration he served in the early-'90s, which pushed a more ambitious health-care bill when the country was further to the right, bordered on communist.

It's all a bit confusing, as most sweeping pronouncements about 30-year cycles of American political history are. Being a bad pundit does not disqualify someone from being a good chief of staff, but it's not a promising sign. Moreover, President Obama has repeatedly expressed pride in the accomplishments of his first two years, and frustration that a bad economy and poor messaging undermined public support for them. That theory may be right or may be wrong, but it sounds like if Daley had had his way over the past two years, there would be less for Obama to be proud of.

from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/04/william-daley-rumored-chi_n_804254.html

WASHINGTON -- The floating of William Daley for the post of White House chief of staff has started a predictable, but nevertheless revealing examination of how his personal politics line up with those of the president.

Much discussed has been Daley's fairly public disapproval of the president's health care reform package, which he castigated as either an overreach or a miscalculation. "The election of '08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left -- not left," he told The New York Times.

Equally illuminating, however, is the stance Daley took on the other major piece of domestic legislation passed during the past two years: financial regulatory reform. Daley, reportedly, was not exactly enamored with a new consumer financial protection agency, a key element of the plan and one of the president's most cherished provisions, going so far as to lobby White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to drop the idea.

A reader points out this article from the April 7, 2010 Wall Street Journal:

But when White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called a top J.P. Morgan executive to ask for the bank's support in creating a new consumer-protection agency, the executive--former Commerce Secretary William Daley--said no, according to people familiar with the conversation. His boss believed that sufficient consumer safeguards were already on the books.

The White House has not commented on Daley speculation, and an email to aides was not immediately returned. It's conceivable that Daley was merely passing along JP Morgan header Jamie Dimon's beliefs. Not his own.

That said, the potential appointment of someone who was sour on the major elements of the president's domestic legislation to the top-ranking presidential position creates some uncomfortable optics. So too does Daley's position, from 2005 through 2007, as a co-chair of the Chamber of Commerce's "Commission on the Regulation of Capital Markets in the 21st Century" -- a committee that played a role lobbying on derivatives regulation and consumer protections -- as well as the fact that JPMorgan Chase, where he served as an executive, had a $30 billion subprime mortgage business.

The administration, in the end, may feel like Daley's expertise as a manager and his close ties to Wall Street are assets too valuable to let go. But the questions about policy frictions and the negative press that an appointment will engender seem likely to compete with, if not outnumber, the positive stories about Daley's capacity for the job.