Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and current J.P. Morgan executive Bill Daley was chosen today as Barack Obama's new White House chief of staff to cheers from the Chamber of Commerce, which should come as a relief to the millions of Americans worried that the administration has been too mean to rich people and bankers.
All kidding aside, I'm not sure how much Daley's personal politics actually matter. In hindsight, I think most of what liberals hated about Rahm Emanuel's tenure as chief of staff were more reflections of Obama's style of governing than Emanuel's. As Tim Fernholz wrote weeks ago, prior to becoming White House chief of staff, Emanuel was seen as a hard-nosed partisan, and for some reason many of us failed to identify his new boss as the source of his sudden demureness in his new job. If Obama takes a serious rightward tilt after this, it'll be because he made the decision to do so, not because he picked Daley as his chief of staff.
