When you are White House Chief of Staff, or any senior administration official really, you never want to hear the President’s press secretary say publicly you are doing a good job. That’s because there is only one reason for the press secretary to praise you: Someone thinks you are messing up.
And so, Chief of Staff Bill Daley will not read Press Secretary Jay Carney’s words this morning as a ringing endorsement. “Bill Daley is an excellent chief of staff,” Carney told reporters in an off-camera briefing. “He is a fantastic leader, both internally and externally, in advancing the President’s policy goals. He brings enormous experience to the job.” Alas, not everyone agrees.
Indeed, the Daley backlash has been a long time coming. He was picked to succeed Rahm Emanuel for a slew of reasons: He had big business credibility, he would perform well on television as spokesperson, he could approach Republicans as a fresh face, he was known and trusted by Obama’s Chicago-native inner circle, he would signal shift in direction to the political center, he had been around the block during presidential election years. No one doubted that he was taking the job at a difficult time, or that the coming year would be a cakewalk. And everyone assumed that he would come into the job delegating far more responsibility than his predecessor Emanuel, most notably to the other newcomer to the White House, David Plouffe, who has centralized, streamlined and authored much of Obama’s political and messaging strategy with the unmistakable goal of wooing independents for 2012. Daley’s task was made more difficult by the fact that he was, though a Democratic party insider, a present-day Washington outsider. He had to build, or rebuild, many of the relationships with Congress that Emanuel had been living for the better part of a decade.
Now, predictably, the knives are starting to come out. I first heard well-positioned Democratic griping about Daley in early August, shortly after the debt-limit debacle had concluded. The muttering grew louder after Daley and his team bungled the scheduling of the joint address to Congress, a mistake that steadier Washington hands, including Obama’s longtime consigliere Pete Rouse, would not likely have made. And then there were the big picture problems: Obama’s attempts to rebuild bridges to Republicans have failed to yield the desired results. His attempts to repair relations with the business community have had no clear victories. And Daley’s public performance as a representative and defender of Obama, before interest groups and on television, has not been remarkable.
“Is there a level of unhappiness with Bill around the White House? Yeah,” one person, identified as being close to the White House tells Politico, in a story on Friday. Another former administration official speaks to Huffington Post of the “longing for Rahm.”
Such stories are par for the course. Remember that Rahm got his fair share of “longing for not-Rahm” anonymously sourced criticism in his day. But the stories, and the Carney attaboy, point to a bigger problem for Daley and Plouffe than their own reputations. After the political failures of the last two months, and the growing gloom among Democrats, the united front is falling. The inner circle has been enlarged and scattered. Confidence that the Plouffe-Daley be-reasonable-to-win-independents strategy is waning, and calls are growing for a more populist, fight-the-power response. Daley is safe in his job for now, but since Obama is not in any way safe in his, Daley’s position may yet erode. In the meantime, the process stories will only further undercut the Obama message. In a week he was supposed to be on offense, his team ended up playing defense again.