White House Chief of Staff Latest Scapegoat for Failed Policies Print
By Ashton Ellis
Thursday, November 10 2011
What Americans have learned since [Obama's] election in 2008 is that for all the flashy credentials of his advisors, not one of them has been able to explain in common-sense language how greater government involvement in the economy leads to sustainable economic growth.

To hear the political media tell it, Bill Daley’s failure as White House Chief of Staff was due to his inability to communicate President Barack Obama’s policies effectively to Congress and Wall Street.  But the messenger wasn’t the problem.  Just like other high-profile has-beens Obama has cast aside when reality undermined their credibility, Daley’s problem wasn’t communicating ideas poorly.  It was thinking that wrapping a job-killing ideology in a business suit and back slaps would soften the blow to the private sector. 

To his credit, Daley seemed to understand that Obama’s version of being pro-business – crony capitalism instead of free market – was going to be a hard sell to any business leader not already receiving government subsidies.  The frustration bubbled over in unguarded moments with congressmen and the media. 

In an anonymously sourced piece at The Daily Beast, Daley is quoted as saying to Congressional Democrats that Obama and other White House luminaries are “not listening to me” in how to handle economic issues.  In a Politico interview last month, Daley laid the blame for government gridlock at the feet of both parties, claiming that “both Democrats and Republicans have really made it difficult for the president to be anything like a chief executive,” leading to “a kind of frustration.” 

But Daley already knew that Republicans in 2011 would be in no better mood to help a Democratic president than they were in 1993 when Daley, as Bill Clinton’s Commerce Secretary, steered the North America Free Trade Agreement to passage.  The opposition party’s job is to oppose.  The real news was Daley’s admission that the liberal ideologues in his own party – from the president on down – are the biggest obstacle to a breakthrough on economic policy.  (Some of these obstructionists on the Super Committee just rejected a Republican proposal to increase revenues, i.e. money for government spending.  The reason: Democrats want to raise taxes, not just revenues, as is possible with lower tax rates.)  

Like Daley, Jack Lew (Office of Management and Budget) and Gene Sperling (National Economic Council) were Clinton-era hands brought in to push the same job-killing tripe formerly mouthed by Christina Romer and Austan Goolsbee.  Unlike Daley, those two learned basic economics not in business, but in the reality-free halls of academe.  The difference shows. 

Romer promised that the $830 billion Recovery Act stimulus passed in 2009 would keep unemployment “below 8 percent.”  While it was a shot in the arm for state budgets that delayed firing unionized public employees, the move was nothing more than a future tax on private earnings.  Two years later, Goolsbee likened the nation’s resulting 9 percent unemployment rate to a “bump” on the road to recovery.  But, like Romer, he returned to the safety of the classroom rather than face reality.  Who could blame them?  After nearly a trillion dollars of deficit spending, Americans have more debt, less jobs and bleak prospects for the future.   

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  Barack Obama was sold as the kind of leader who could get the best and brightest to go to Washington, and remake the country in his own post-partisan, purple state image.   What Americans have learned since his election in 2008 is that for all the flashy credentials of his advisors, not one of them has been able to explain in common-sense language how greater government involvement in the economy leads to sustainable economic growth.  Instead, the list of liberal economists who’ve failed to save the economy grows with each new resignation.   

Staffing problems are management problems.  If, after three years, Obama can’t find a mouthpiece clever enough to convince people that liberal fantasies can be willed into existence, it’s time he stopped hiding behind his subordinates and take responsibility for his own failed presidency.