Saying that Chicago is Barack Obama’s hometown is as misleading as me claiming that Portland is mine. Our president is from Hawaii, so it’s interesting to me that the articles about his new chief of staff, announced yesterday, consistently trumpeted this inaccuracy. Over and over again I heard and read one cheesy reference to the “hometown connection” between Obama and William Daley after another.
Daley, so said the authorities, is more Chicago than deep-dish pizza. That’s great, but I do wonder why the pizza talk seemed of greater interest to the people whose job it is to inform the people of this country than William Daley’s really big job with J.P. Morgan Chase. It pains me to write this, but his appointment to one of the most powerful positions in Washington rivals the audacity of Ronald Reagan’s paving of the expressway of influence that connects the White House and Wall Street by awarding top jobs to Goldman Sachs executives. And what a top job the chief of staff position is. I couldn’t write a job description if my life depended on it, but my understanding of that role is that the person basically picks the music and then conducts the orchestra. The entire orchestra.
Speaking of job descriptions, at the PR agency where I used to work, every now and then people were hired into very senior positions with salaries to match who had zero experience in whatever the business interest of the moment happened to be. Then, when the agency would pitch itself in front of a new client, voila, there they were, fully brainwashed and able to sell the agency’s “culture” and “best practices.” These people were called “investment hires,” and while I’m not saying that William Daley’s experience isn’t immediately applicable – he obviously has an impressive understanding of how the system works – if the philosophy behind his appointment is similar to the one used by my former employer, I have to applaud Mr. Obama.
Election day is a mere 22 months away, and he needs to prove to the big boys at the banks that their money, their power and their exemption from the rules that govern most individuals and companies in this country are all in safe hands. I can think of no other industry that gets to have it both ways quite so flamboyantly: in good times, it’s all private sector and innovation and entrepreneurship and all the rest of that trumped up marketing stupidness, and when times turn bad, it’s tax money to the rescue (some people call that socialism). William Daley will see to it that there is no change on that front.
And in another year or so, I imagine something shocking will happen – some more tax breaks, say, or perhaps a relaxation of the regulations, if they may be called that, on the trading of derivatives – and at gatherings of people who call themselves liberal or progressive with the same misplaced smugness that’s emitted from those who have come to believe that clicking a ‘like’ button on Facebook equates to actually supporting something, well, there will be an outpouring of outrage so fresh and raw you’ll swear nothing like this has ever happened before and that it was totally unexpected.
