Matt Bai doesn't think Obama has gone triangular, as least not ideologically. His choice of William Daley, among other things, signals that he's adopting Clinton's "theory of presidential power and how to use it."
Both sides interpreted the announcement of Mr. Daley’s hiring — along with the pending addition of Gene Sperling as the administration’s top economic advisor — as a sign that Mr. Obama has essentially decided to throw in with the centrists.
Let's be realistic for a moment. There are liberals for whom any compromise is untenable. It's probably fortunate that the president is a grown-up and would rather get done what needs to be done than get mad.
Mr. Daley’s politics are essentially indistinguishable from those of the man he replaces, his fellow Chicagoan and protégé Rahm Emanuel (who, like Mr. Daley, got rich working for an investment bank). Both men are said to be pragmatists who care less about political theory than about getting things done, and progressives were never any happier with Mr. Emanuel than they are with the choice of his successor.
Similarly, Mr. Sperling, who worked for Goldman Sachs before joining the Obama administration, may fairly be called a centrist thinker, but he’s certainly no more of a centrist than his immediate predecessor, Lawrence H. Summers, another veteran of the Clinton administration who also spent a profitable interlude on Wall Street.
In other words, if anything, this week’s appointments would seem to represent a continuation of the ideological course Mr. Obama has been following since before he took the oath of office, rather than any substantive shift in his worldview.
If that's true -- and if it means President Obama will find ways of achieving what he has achieved during his first two years in office -- we'll still have a president who manages to pull off some of the most significant liberal wins ever. Only this time, Bai writes, he'll be paying a lot more attention to his constituents and to the American public beyond Washington with the goal of extending liberal reforms for six, not just two, more years.
What these appointments suggest is that Mr. Obama is now readying himself for an extended public campaign — or, rather, for two of them. The first begins now, as the president tries to recast himself as a reformer beholden to neither party, a grownup parrying the partisan thrusts of pettier adversaries.
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Ezra Klein adds this about the appointment of Gene Sperling.
... Sperling's former colleagues say his long record should ease those fears. "Gene did more good for the working poor in the Clinton White House than anyone else," says Paul Begala, who served as an adviser to President Clinton. "He was there for them in every single meeting." He also happened to lead the NEC while the White House was facing a Republican Congress -- which is, at least with the House, the exact situation the Obama White House suddenly finds itself in.
In that way, there's a pattern apparent in the recent appointments: The people who served successfully in Clinton's second term, when he had found his rhythm against a hostile Congress, are being brought back into key roles. Sperling, who has more experience running the NEC in these circumstances than anyone else alive, was, for Obama, the logical choice.
