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http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/as-obamas-top-aide-daley-is-everywhere/

As Obama’s Top Aide, Daley Is Everywhere

He may not be the high-profile, high-volume, hard-charging White House chief of staff that Rahm Emanuel was, but suddenly, William M. Daley is everywhere.

He was at the negotiation table Thursday evening, as administration officials and top party lawmakers convened in a face-to-face meeting in their efforts to agree on a budget and avoid a government shutdown.

Two days before, he spoke via videoconference to business executives at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Florida. And it was Mr. Daley last weekend who wrote an opinion article in the Financial Times to counter the claim — made earlier by the chief executive of 3M — that President Obama is anti-business.

Looking forward, political junkies all over the country will have a chance to see him on Sunday morning, when he appears on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

In only a few weeks on the job as President Obama’s top aide, Mr. Daley, a former banking executive and commerce secretary, has emerged as a valued behind-the-scenes legislative negotiator and ambassador to big business while helping to impose a new sense of discipline at the White House.

With legislative relationships — especially in the House — dating back two decades, Mr. Daley has become a key part of the administration’s legislative liaison strategy, reaching out personally to Republican lawmakers by phone and in person, according to people on Capitol Hill who have been on the receiving end of the effort.

His presence in that strategy was clear on Thursday as photographs showed him side-by-side with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Jack Lew, the budget director, as the trio headed to the opening round of budget negotiations.

House Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, are demanding deep cuts in federal spending as the two sides work to end a months-long impasse over the current year’s spending. Democrats have offered cuts as well, but object to the depth of the Republican effort, saying it would hurt needed programs and slashes spending too deeply while the economy is still recovering.

Mr. Biden offered the shortest of assessments of the meeting after it ended: “We had a good meeting, and the conversation will continue.”

CNN’s Dana Bash reported that at some point Mr. Biden asked staff members, including Mr. Daley, to leave the room to the elected officials. But those familiar with Mr. Daley and Mr. Boehner have said they expect conversations between these two to be at the heart of negotiations.

“From my interchanges with them, infrequent but over the span of two decades, I’ve found that they both have good political judgment on both people and issues, including a keen sense of when their own side is about to get clobbered,” Michael Barone, a fellow at the American Enterprise institute and the co-author of the Almanac of American Politics, wrote earlier this year. “It’s not hard for me to see these two guys negotiating agreements on major issues.”

Earlier this week, Mr. Daley’s video appearance at the chamber event was welcomed by business executives, many of whom have known Mr. Daley for years. The new chief of staff answered questions about economic and trade issues, according to an official who attended.

“We were pleased to hear from Bill Daley at our board meeting today and enjoyed discussing ways to address our mutual goals of creating jobs and bolstering the economy and US competitiveness,” said Tom Collamore, the senior vice president for communications at the group.

Mr. Daley has also helped to bring less drama to the White House, according to the Times’s Jackie Calmes. He has a bearing that fits the moment for Mr. Obama as he begins his re-election campaign: a no-nonsense, calm, I’m-the-adult-in-the-room manner.

In the Financial Times’s opinion article, Mr. Daley took George Buckley, the 3M executive, to task in a way that is reminiscent of a mildly scolding teacher.

“There is plenty of work to do. But the stakes are too high to give credence to the kind of comments Mr Buckley made this week, or to believe those who would question Mr Obama’s commitment to our economic recovery,” Mr. Daley wrote.

But look for Mr. Daley’s most public role to be as a new and frequent pitchman on the Sunday morning news programs. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, has left the White House after filling that role on many Sundays. So has Robert Gibbs, the former press secretary. David Plouffe, who replaced Mr. Axelrod, is famously camera-shy.

In his first Sunday morning interview as chief of staff at the end of last month, Mr. Daley offered the administration’s view on the then-unfolding protests in Egypt and on the president’s relationship with Wall Street. Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on January 30, he also foreshadowed Thursday’s budget meeting on Capitol Hill.

“We want to sit down with the leadership of Congress as we work through the deficit, as we work through the other issues and talk about the possibilities,” he said.


Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
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