Exit the moderates
By CHARLES GASPARINOLast Updated: 12:33 AM, January 11, 2012
Posted: 10:45 PM, January 10, 2012
The announcement that Bill Daley will step down as President Obama’s chief of staff is further proof that as the 2012 election approaches, Obama is embracing his inner leftist on anything touching the economy. The administration has moved so far left that even one of the country’s most prominent Democrats can’t fit in.
Embracing Wall Street protesters, massive government programs and tax hikes might seem like a losing formula for re-election, but Team Obama is betting it’s the best way — maybe the only way — to win.
A scorched-earth assault on the GOP nominee as a plutocrat, and on Republicans in Congress as the roadblock to progress, seems to be their chosen strategy for distracting the public from the disaster of the president’s economic policies.
That left Daley — as one of the last moderates left in the administration — as odd man out at the White House. Of course, it’s also rotten news for the struggling economy: At least one more year of full-throttle Obamanomics, with the promise of four more if the strategy works.
As moderates like Daley depart, anti-business crusaders increasingly fill key slots at the new consumer bureau, the National Labor Relations Board and elsewhere in the administration — giving businesses ample reason to scale back hiring for the foreseeable future.
The administration can celebrate anemic economic growth and an unemployment rate of “only” 8.5 percent — but millions more Americans have been out of work so long they’ve stopped looking, and no longer show up anymore in the “unemployed” tallies.
Daley’s departure, it should be noted, had been in the cards for months. He was brought in last January to convince the business community that, despite constant verbal jabs and plans imposing both new taxes and onerous regulations, the president really wasn’t all that anti-business.
Daley would work to change both the perception and the reality. A former banker and Clinton-era commerce secretary (and son and brother of two Chicago mayors), he saw the “shellacking” the Democrats received in the 2010 elections as proof positive that Team Obama needed to move to the center in order to have a chance at a second term.
He even had the guts to preach economic moderation in public, agreeing with a businessman at one gathering that regulations are too onerous to support decent economic growth.
Daley thought he had the president’s blessing to move the Obama economic agenda to the center, but that support quickly evaporated as the ideologues and the spin masters like Valerie Jarrett and David Plouffe assumed bigger roles in the administration’s daily affairs.
As I reported on the Fox Business Network back in September, Daley grew increasingly agitated about his role. He openly complained that he was being isolated by Jarrett, Obama’s friend and personal adviser, who’s been at the forefront of Obama’s most recent leftward tilt, and let it be known that he wanted to do something else — maybe serve as treasury secretary, given his banking background at JP Morgan.
At the time, I received an interesting phone call from Daley himself, grousing about my report without offering any specific complaints. When I asked him if he wanted the treasury, he told me he didn’t “lust” for the job. He issued a similar nondenial when I asked him about his issues with Jarrett.
Those issues were obviously too much for Daley to overcome; he had no choice but to resign and “spend more time with his family.”
One thing is certain: Bill Daley may want to spend more time back in his native Chicago, but the president’s ultraliberal handlers clearly wanted him to spend less time with the man in the White House.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.
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