DALEY BREAD
President
Barack Obama’s realignment of his senior staff in
the White House was already having a ripple effect, but perhaps not
in the way he intended.
According to White House sources, the loser in last week’s
announcements that Chicago machinist, William
Daley would return to Washington as Obama’s chief of staff
was senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.
“She didn’t want that job, but she wanted more
responsibilities shifted into her office,” says a White House
source. “She wanted to remain the key point person for the White
House’s interaction with the business community, and now that has
been taken away from her.”
According to another White House source, Jarrett was
advocating for more economic policy influence to be shifted to a
White House council she would have essentially managed with new
Council of Economic Advisers chair Gene
Sperling.
“She insisted that Sperling needed to be managed, that he
wasn’t ‘all in’ on our economic plans,” says one of the White House
sources. She knows Daley and can work with him, but the realignment
was a huge slap in the face to her.
In fact, Jarrett became an exceedingly wealthy and
influential player in Chicago politics thanks to the Daley family’s
good graces. But in the two years that Jarrett has served as the
point person for business, the Obama administration has taken a
black eye over a black eye seemingly every week.
CEOs grew tired of being told to wait in the lobby of the
West Wing for as long as a half an hour for meetings that lasted
sometimes less than that. There are numerous stories of Jarrett
personally calling CEOs and dressing them down with verbal assaults
for perceived slights in comments about the U.S. economy or the
President’s handling of the economy.
More than six months ago, senior economic adviser
Larry Summers threw up his hands in frustration
over the Obama Administration’s handling of the business community
and the economy. “He just apologized to me and said that there was
nothing more he could do help us get our message to the President,
that it was just a waste of time,” says a Washington-based senior
executive with ties to a manufacturing association. “For the first
two years, he was the only guy we could go to for a sympathetic
hearing. Now, I guess, we have Daley.”
The only problem: the White House now views its
relationship with American business as repaired, now that Daley is
in the fold, and does not intend to perform much more intensive
outreach than it already has. “There is a sense here that business
has gotten its tax breaks, now it’s time to shut up and perform,”
says one White House source.
NICE WORK
Republicans members of the House Financial Services committee
intend to formally request copies of the report that Gene
Sperling, the new chairman of the White House Council of
Economic Advisers, was paid almost $900,000 to write for Wall
Street investment firm Goldman Sachs in 2008.
The report laid out a plan for Goldman to underwrite a
$100 million program in Africa to educate and train more than
10,000 women in under-developed countries.
“It would be interesting to pull back the curtain on how
these Wall Street firms dole out their charitable contributions and
foundation money to people like Sperling and others,” says a House
committee staffer. “What, exactly, did Sperling give them for that
kind of money? A 10-page report? Something bigger? This guy is cozy
with the wrong people at the wrong time for the American
people.”
