Daley’s Ominous Departure

When Bill Daley was growing up in Chicago, he watched his father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, fight bare knuckle for control of Democratic national politics from the living room of their South Side bungalow. (“Dick Daley is the ballgame,” as Bobby Kennedy put it.) Once it was time for his son, Richard M., to elbow into the family business, Bill ran campaigns through races in which people stuffed and stole so many votes that it “was like a Fellini movie,” Bill said later. Even when they lost, Chicago politics was bloody: In ’83, Richard ended up brawling on the floor of a toy store with a guy who blamed him for splitting the white vote. “The guy’s punching him, and his son Patrick’s there screaming, ‘Hit him, Dad!’” Bill recalled.

So when a Daley concludes that the political atmosphere is poisoned, that’s saying something. As a predictor of bipartisan coöperation, Bill Daley’s resignation as White House chief of staff is as auspicious as watching the canary quit and tiptoe out of the coal mine.

He was supposed to be the fixer. Daley arrived less than a year ago, charged with seeking accommodation with congressional Republicans and critics in corporate America. As a former JPMorgan Chase executive and Clinton-era commerce secretary, with the old-world pol’s attachment to a suit and tie, he carried the aroma of compromise, and he became known for stroking the aggrieved bankers who trooped into his West Wing corner office, where he kept the television tuned to CNBC. Even before Republicans took the House, Daley had been warning Democrats of overreach, urging the Party “to move back toward the center,” as he put it in a high-profile op-ed in 2009. “My liberal friends don’t like that, but they haven’t quite convinced Americans to buy into their agenda,” he told me shortly thereafter, when I was writing a Profile of his brother. (“The Daley Show.” March 8, 2010.)

When he returned to Washington in January 2011 after a decade away, he “believed that the Washington he left after serving in the Clinton administration still existed,” as Politico’s Glenn Thrush and Carrie Budoff Brown noted. Alas, the collegial, kumbaya days of the Starr Report and Whitewater and impeachment were only a gauzy memory, and Daley, instead, made the acquaintance of House Speaker John Boehner. By now, the postmortems are clear: Daley tried and failed for a long-term budget deal, then misjudged Boehner’s ability to reach a grand bargain on the debt ceiling, a combo that left him staggering around shell shocked. Along the way, the story goes, he alienated some key Democrats for closing his office door and catering too much to Congressional Republicans. The final spasms of civility ended in farce, when he mistakenly assumed that Boehner had approved Obama’s request for a jobs speech to a joint session of Congress in September. Boehner said no, and everyone looked ridiculous. By the time he tried to pull up—to try “what we can do on our own!”—it was too late.

“You know, when the minority leader of the Senate says my No. 1 objective in life is to make President Obama a one-term president, and then all decisions flow from that, it’s pretty hard not to be pretty cynical about that,” Daley complained to Roger Simon, in an exhausted interview in October. Within weeks, his job had been re-imagined and by Christmas vacation in Mexico, he was having a moment of clarity. In announcing the spend-more-time-with-the-family moment on Monday, President Obama gave Daley the minor dignity of pretending it was a shocker, which is hard to believe.

While Daley goes back to Chicago to co-chair the President’s reëlection campaign, he’ll be succeeded by Jack Lew (see “Lew: A liberal GOP says it trusts.”), with an assist from the stalwart Pete Rouse—a duo of well-liked figures with deep connections on the Hill.

But the appetite for negotiation is now nil. The President is “not giving up on moderation,” John Podesta, former White House chief of staff under Clinton tells USA Today. “He’s just giving up on the Republican leadership in the House and Senate.”

Daley leaves next month. Rarely, I suspect, will anyone have been so eager to land in Chicago in the dead of winter.

Photograph by Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo.