The Wrong Kind of White House Shake-Up

[Geee]

National Review:

 

Last week, in a shake-up designed to arrest his falling poll numbers, President Obama brought in several new staffers. We’ve seen this before with Obama, and it ultimately didn’t change much. If anything, the current shake-up anchors the president even more firmly to his left-wing base and makes it more likely he will use legally suspect executive orders and rogue regulations to impose his will and go around Congress.

 

In early 2011, after Democrats received a “shellacking” in the midterm elections (to use Obama’s phrase), he brought in Bill Daley, a scion of the Chicago Machine that had kick-started Obama’s own political career, to be his new chief of staff. Daley, a former Commerce secretary under Bill Clinton, was a smooth salesman with ties to the business leaders Obama needed on his side to win the 2012 reelection campaign. Many onlookers predicted that Daley would help shift Obama toward the center. After all, in the middle of the debate over Obamacare, Daley had famously written a Washington Post op-ed titled “Democrats, reclaim your center.” All Democrats had to do to regain their political footing, he said in the op-ed, was “acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day.”