Chicago Boy, 2.0

William Daley will be a pragmatist in an ideological White House..

When Barack Obama picked fellow Chicagoan Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff in late 2008, we applauded the choice as a sign of the President-elect's political maturity. "Mr. Emanuel," we wrote, "can help Mr. Obama understand when he needs to ignore the pleas of the left and govern from the center."

Bill Daley, we've come to praise you.

Yesterday, Mr. Daley was appointed to succeed Mr. Emanuel, and perhaps to help a politically chastened President fulfill the hopes we had for his first chief of staff. The younger brother of the outgoing Chicago mayor is a Democratic moderate who has spent the last decade in private business, most recently as a senior executive at JP Morgan Chase. In the 1990s he was instrumental in helping Bill Clinton pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, and he later served as a pro-free trade Commerce Secretary. As a scion of the Daley dynasty, his political instincts are not in doubt.

Mr. Daley was also among the first top Democrats to see the political risks the Obama Administration ran as Mr. Emanuel was letting no crisis go to waste. "Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come," he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2009. Sixty-three former Democratic Representatives might now be wondering why they didn't heed that advice sooner.

Not surprisingly, the progressive blogosphere is reacting to Mr. Daley's appointment by howling at the moon. "As more about [Mr. Daley's] activities since leaving the Clinton administration have emerged, the worse [his appointment] looks," wrote one writer on the Daily Kos. But Mr. Obama knows her vote won't be in doubt in 2012. Meanwhile, Mr. Daley can help him try to recapture the constituencies most disappointed by his first two years, particularly political independents and the business community.

Still, we've been wrong before. Whether we're wrong again rests less with the pragmatic Mr. Daley than with the man of the left who is now his boss.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704415104576066094081529156.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop