Posts Tagged ‘white house’

White House Chief of Staff, William Daley, is resigning his post in the Obama White House at the end of this month and returning to Chicago.

What makes this story interesting is that Daley caught Obama by surprise with his resignation.  In Washington, typically a resignation is a nice way of saying “you’re fired.”  There are cases in which people serve for a predetermined amount of time and then that time comes.  Daley had previously said he was committed to staying on through the 2012 election.

My hunch is that he say that it was going to be a particularly rough year, that Obama was going to get more nasty in his rhetoric (particularly about big business) and Daley wanted to maintain some credibility for his long term viability.

Most importantly, Chiefs don’t usually leave a campaign unless they think it’s a loser.

Congress and President Obama struck a deal to fund the government through next fall and avoided a shutdown.

What, you didn’t know anything about that?  No surprise.  I get the sense that the American people have tuned out the machinations of Washington lately.  I’m going to call it the calm before the storm.  There is no doubt that dark clouds are brewing and it’s going to be pretty rough for Washington – both Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats have more to lose – the Senate and the White House – and the Republicans who lose are more likely to go down in primaries to other Republicans.  Let’s just say there is some serious angst out there.

You know it’s the dog days of a cold winter in Washington when the media is captivated by the palace intrigue of the Obama White House.

The typical narrative pits the loyal, long-time Obama staffers (eg. David Axelrod) against the interloper who came on board after Obama’s election (read: Rahm Emanual).

Of course, it’s the interloper that is seen as the bad guy. In part, that is because the liberal media is more aligned with the progressive ideologues in the White House, and less with the pragmatic practitioners like Rahm.

Remember, Rahm is a veteran of the Clinton White House and there was much wailing and knashing of teeth when Obama selected him as Chief of Staff.

Now, you have a hard-core liberal Congressman who is accusing Rahm of forcing him out of office because he voted against Obama’s health care bill… not because it was too liberal, but because it wasn’t liberal enough.

Rep. Eric Massa is under investigation for inappropriate sexual conduct with a male staffer (or maybe multiple male staffers) by the ethics committee and just resigned his seat over it.

Now Massa is saying that because he was a no vote, and Pelosi needs every possible vote she can get, he was forced out. His resignation makes the magic number for her to pass the health care bill 216 votes. If he hadn’t resigned, she would have needed 217 votes. So pushing him out gives her a two-fer… it takes away a no vote and reduces the number of yes votes needed.

This follows Obama’s quote saying he would do “whatever it takes” to pass government-run health care.

And they say that right-wingers like me are conspiracy theorists…

If something happens twice, it begins to be a trend. Everyone in the world has heard about the couple that crashed Obama’s first state dinner, uninvited, which set off a inside-the-beltway game of finger pointing.

Now the administration is trying to explain how a Georgia couple ended up in a Veteran’s Day breakfast in the White House in November when they were merely there for a public tour. The Associated Press is reporting that the couple showed up at the White House on the wrong day for a tour and were promptly ushered into an invitation-only breakfast honoring Veterans.

This is the same administration that is bringing suspected terrorists into our nation’s borders to imprison them in Illinois.

Somehow I don’t feel safer.

When Chicago operatives are running the White House they do things that are likely illegal.

 President Obama’s approval is now just above 50%, the lowest it has been in his presidency.  In the Presidential Approval Index he is -2 – that is, there are 2% more people who strongly disapprove of his performance than those who strongly approve.

I believe that as more and more people start paying attention to the debate over health care reform his numbers are going to dip below 50% and it will become harder and harder for him to get what he wants on health care.  Why? Because what he wants is a fundamental government takeover of health care and the cost of government running health care is going to be unacceptable to most Americans.  They are also going to be suspicious of the claims made by Obama and Congressional Democrats about why the government should run health care.

The common theme that you hear from the White House and from Congress is that we MUST solve the problem of the uninsured and we have to get cost under control.  The problem for them is that Senate bill spends at least $1.5 TRILLION and only insures 16 million of the estimated 46 million uninsured.  And they cut Medicare and Medicade by more than $300 billion.  Seniors (and Senators) are not going to react well to having their care cut so the government can take more control over health care.