Paul Starobin has a nice story in The New Republic on Bill Daley’s short and ultimately unhappy tenure as White House chief of staff. One of his key conclusions, after interviewing close Obama and Daley associates, is that Daley failed to break through the Obama inner circle that has been together since he was a Senator and presidential candidate:
“I think coming in late [to the White House] and not being part of the original Dream Team is a hard nut to crack,” a Daley intimate recently told me, because “the folks who got the president elected” always have the inside track. And what’s “a little bit unusual” about the Obama White House in particular is some senior staffers “having individual lanes reporting to the president,” without having to go through the chief of staff.
This has become a familiar story at the Obama White House. Remember that Obama chose as his first national security adviser, a job of the utmost importance, a man he’d spoken to only twice: Jim Jones. That, too, was a management misfire, as Jones complained openly almost from the start that he was resisted and undermined by Obama’s longtime inner circle. (They had their complaints about Jones’s shortcomings, to be sure.) By now many readers will have forgotten that Obama’s first White House communications director was the short-lived Ellen Moran, another Obamaland newcomer who lasted all of three months before she was gone. Richard Holbrooke, a close Hillary Clinton ally in 2008, sufficiently ingratiated himself with the President to become his point man on Afghanistan and Pakistan. But if Bob Woodward’s reporting is accurate, the President never really warmed to Holbrooke before the envoy’s tragic death last year.
Of course, the great exception to this rule is Clinton herself. Her tenure as Secretary of State has, by most accounts, been a success. And we’ve seen little evidence of friction between Clinton and the man she fought so bitterly against in the 2008 election. That tells you it’s not impossible for an outsider to thrive in Obama’s inner circle. But it sure doesn’t seem easy.