Julian Assange Interview - ABC TV Australia 4/11/11

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Transcript

LEIGH SALES: Julian Assange: given your circumstances, is Wikileaks currently operational?

JULIAN ASSANGE: We have increased our publishing since late last year when my present difficulties began to include over 63 media organisations from around the world. We have now published over 7,000 US Embassy cables relating to Cablegate, so, yes, we're continuing on. Even when I was in prison for 10 days we continued publishing.

LEIGH SALES: So Wikileaks exists outside of Julian Assange?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, we have been structured that way quite deliberately to avoid interruption to our publishing, although certainly there has been very aggressive efforts to do so, but also to provide disincentive for decapitation attacks on the organisation.

LEIGH SALES: The US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates basically said that the impact of Wikileaks has been overstated; that it was a little awkward and embarrassing for the US but it basically hasn't had any effect on foreign policy, what's your response?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Of course the hype that the Pentagon has always drummed up and the White House has always drummed up in response to bona fide scrutiny of its national security sector is to say, well, the end is nigh, people are going to die. No official from the US Government or anywhere else has claimed that anyone has come to physical harm as a result of what we have done. Certainly politicians have been embarrassed and lost elections and officials have lost their jobs, but that is not the end of the world

LEIGH SALES: Commentators have noted that in terms of what the cables revealed about American diplomacy, it didn't show anything particularly scandalous, if anything it showed that there was quite a bit of consistency between America's public positions and their private positions, although in private of course they are more frank. Do you agree with that assessment?

JULIAN ASSANGE: The statement that embarrassing information, information, internal information is revealed and it simply shows the US Government to be a good guy is something that is done by apologists. The cables across the board reveal a very nuanced position - everything from that state security apparatus using a diplomatic core to spy on NGOs and take their DNA all the way through to bona fide pushing of a human rights agenda in some countries. So we can see that the State Department and US embassies in their interactions with other governments are not the caricature that the White House presents, but neither are they the caricature that some leftists present.

LEIGH SALES: I want to whip around a couple of other quick issues before we're out of time. In a book about you that's recently been released by two Guardian journalists, David Leigh and Luke Harding, they say they had an exchange with you last July, they wanted you to redact the names of informants mentioned in the Iraq War logs and they claim that you said, "Well, they're informants, so if they get killed, they've got it coming to them, they deserve it." Did you say that?

JULIAN ASSANGE: No, and we are suing them for liable and we have witnesses to show that is a libellous claim, and is an ongoing dispute, so there's a lot of vitriol in the top end of the news business and a lot of back-stabbing, and unfortunately we happen to be on the receiving end of it from this individual.

LEIGH SALES: So you're saying that that statement was completely fabricated?

JULIAN ASSANGE: It is completely fabricated.

LEIGH SALES: When the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard appeared on the 'Q and A' program and you asked her a question, you wanted to know what information she'd supplied foreign powers about Australian citizens working or affiliated with Wikileaks, and you also raised that point in an SBS interview in February. What exactly are you suggesting there?

JULIAN ASSANGE: What I am suggesting and what we have, what our sources tell us is that the Australian Government provided in its liaison, in its intelligence liaison function, foreign powers information about me and other individuals working for Wikileaks. Why? Simply because I am an Australian citizen. What possible pressure could enable them to do that? Well it's bootlicking for the United States, that's the reality, that unfortunate reality is as a result of the ALP being grouped, some people in the ALP like Mark Arbib being groomed for many years by the US Embassy and other inducements from Washington.

LEIGH SALES: If you have that information from sources, will you be prepared to release that into the public domain?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well unfortunately thus far the type of information we have is such that to reveal it would be to reveal the sources of it, so that is why we want the Australian Government, and Australian Government personnel who know that statements to the contrary are false to step forward to the Australian media and reveal that this sort of liaison has been occurring. It is not acceptable for that sort of liaison to occur.

LEIGH SALES: But Australia shares intelligence with its allies all the time, you're the subject of a Justice Department investigation in the United States. What's wrong with Australia sharing what intelligence it has?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, yes, but not on Australian citizens. The Australian Government's purpose is to protect Australian citizens. It has no other purpose.

LEIGH SALES: You've come from being a kid who's had a suburban Australian upbringing, to at times sleeping rough on the streets of Melbourne to being Time magazine's Person of the Year and being talked about by the President of the United States. Does it feel unreal?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well it does feel unreal because I've never slept rough on the streets of Melbourne, although I have ...

LEIGH SALES: That's a myth is it?

JULIAN ASSANGE: I had when I was 20 slept in the Dandenong Ranges, but not as a homeless person but rather because I enjoy the wilderness, but yes, of course it feels unreal. On the other hand I know we're doing good work and very, very important work and the trials and tribulations that we all go through is really quite a small price to pay to do something that is so profoundly meaningful and which our sources and the public at large demands that we do.

LEIGH SALES: Is your motivation genuinely that altruistic or is there a side of you that enjoys the power and the spotlight?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Encoded within me from a young age is a sense about what is just and what is not just and those things that I see in the world that I feel to be unjust I want to do something about.

LEIGH SALES: As I said before you've developed a very high profile and not everybody likes you, to put it gently. Do you fear for your life?

JULIAN ASSANGE: I have to disagree with that actually

LEIGH SALES: You think everybody does like you?

JULIAN ASSANGE: No, not everybody, but these sorts of statements are in fact mischievous. I mean, if we look at Australian opinion polls, actually Wikileaks and myself have far greater popularity amongst the Australian population than sitting prime ministers have had in many years.

LEIGH SALES: So does that mean you?

JULIAN ASSANGE: It's not right to say - it is not right to say that this organisation is polarising or that somehow the critics are evenly balanced with our supporters because it's simply not true.

LEIGH SALES: So does that mean you feel comfortable then about your personal safety?

JULIAN ASSANGE: In terms of my personal safety and the safety of my team, we have had right wing politicians in the United States such as Sarah Palin calling for our assassination, kidnapping, rendition, etc. Now some of that goes a bit beyond mere rhetoric which can inflame mentally unstable people. We have bills in the US Senate to declare our organisation a transnational threat, to take us from the status of individuals, Australians, Americans and turn us into enemy combatants where we can be dealt with in the same manner as senior figures in the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. That's a serious business.

LEIGH SALES: Julian Assange, I know our audience will be very interested to hear your views. Many thanks for making time to speak to us.

JULIAN ASSANGE: You're most welcome.

LEIGH SALES: The full half hour interview with Julian Assange will be available shortly on our website.

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Obama to Call for Broad Plan to Reduce Debt - NYTimes.com

Image via WikipediaObama to Call for Broad Plan to Reduce Debt - NYTimes.com

By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — President Obama will call this week for Republicans to join him in writing a broad plan to raise revenues and reduce the growth of popular entitlement programs, as the battle over the nation’s financial troubles moves past Friday’s short-term budget deal and into a wider and more consequential debate over the nation’s long-term fiscal health.

In a speech to be delivered at a university here on Wednesday, Mr. Obama will in effect come off the sidelines on the debate over reducing the nation’s debt, which is reaching dangerous heights as the population ages.

After months of criticism that he has not led on budget talks, Mr. Obama will urge bipartisan negotiations toward a multiyear debt-reduction plan that administration officials said would depart sharply from the one proposed last week by House Republicans.

The Republican plan includes a shrinking of Medicare and Medicaid and trillions of dollars in tax cuts, while sparing defense spending. Mr. Obama, by contrast, envisions a more comprehensive plan that would include tax increases for the richest taxpayers, cuts to military spending, savings in Medicare and Medicaid, and unspecified changes to Social Security.

In his remarks, which come after Friday’s bipartisan deal to cut domestic spending by about $38 billion for the remainder of this budget year, Mr. Obama will not offer details but will set deficit-cutting goals, White House officials said. The numbers were still under discussion on Sunday.

“He’ll lay out his approach this week in terms of the scale of debt reduction he thinks the country needs so we can grow economically and win the future — a balanced approach,” David Plouffe, the senior White House political strategist, said on “Fox News Sunday,” one of four talk shows on which he appeared Sunday.

“Obviously, we need to look at all corners of government,” Mr. Plouffe said, adding, “We’re going to have a big debate.”

Until now, Mr. Obama has avoided prescribing specific changes to entitlement programs like Medicare, beyond those contained in his health care overhaul. Indeed, few of the recommendations made by his own bipartisan fiscal commission were included in the budget he presented to Congress in February.

What is more, while Mr. Obama proposed a five-year freeze on the growth of domestic spending, he recommended increases in education, research, infrastructure and clean-energy programs — emphasizing that although deficit reduction is important, so are investments to create jobs and skilled workers.

The growing debate over federal spending and taxes is certain to ripple from the White House and Congress to the 2012 presidential campaign, helping to shape voters’ assessment of Mr. Obama’s record and challenging rivals for the Republican presidential nomination to respond, even as they court conservative voters who oppose any compromise with Mr. Obama.

Whether anything tangible comes of the debate, it will contrast the parties’ visions of the role of government.

Republicans reacted skeptically to word of Mr. Obama’s speech. “I sit here and I listen to David Plouffe talk about, you know, their commitment to cut spending and knowing full well that for the last two months we’ve had to bring this president kicking and screaming to the table to cut spending,” Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, said on Fox.

The timing of Mr. Obama’s remarks reflects a White House strategy devised late last year after Republicans won their House majority, together with the confluence of four events, two last week and two ahead.

Friday night’s 11th-hour agreement on spending cuts, which averted a government shutdown, removed what had been a distraction for months over this year’s unfinished federal budget. Administration officials said they also hoped that the compromise helped build trust with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, that would carry over to the larger debates about long-term spending and the national debt.

Some lawmakers said Sunday that they opposed the compromise, but leaders in both parties remain confident it will pass in the House and Senate this week.

Also last week came a moment the administration had been awaiting for months: Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman, outlined House Republicans’ long-term budget plan.

Mr. Ryan said it would cut $6 trillion in the coming decade, though budget analysts questioned some of the claimed savings. The plan would turn Medicare into a voucher program for future generations and slash spending for the need-based Medicaid program and other domestic initiatives, while largely sparing the Pentagon and cutting $4 trillion more in corporate and high-income taxes.

The White House settled on a strategy in December by which Mr. Obama would wait for the House Republicans to lay down their cards before he proposed major reductions in popular entitlement benefit programs, according to interviews with administration officials at the time.

Mr. Obama’s budget waiting game, however, has helped to fuel widespread criticism by Republicans, pundits and some Democrats that he has failed to lead.

Another impetus to Wednesday’s move is the White House’s belief that a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators will announce this week that they have reached agreement on a debt-reduction package similar to that of the president’s fiscal commission.

After months of private discussions, the tentative agreement among the three Republican and three Democratic senators would cut military and domestic programs and overhaul the tax code, eliminating popular tax breaks but using the new revenues to lower income-tax rates and reduce annual deficits. It would be the model, if not in all details, for Mr. Obama’s own goals, Democratic officials say.

Perhaps the biggest prod for Mr. Obama to act, however, is the need for Congress to vote to raise the legal limit on the federal debt, now $14.25 trillion. The government will hit that limit on its borrowing authority in as few as five weeks, the Treasury Department has said. Without an increase by early July, the government cannot continue to make payments on its existing debt, potentially forcing it into an economy-shaking default.

Speaking on Saturday in Connecticut, Mr. Boehner said Republicans would not agree to raise the cap “without something really, really big attached to it.”

Unlike the recent spending-cut negotiations, in which Mr. Obama was not active until the final days, “he knows he has to take a greater role from the beginning” on the debt-limit measure and any companion plan for reducing debt, said an adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Several presidential advisers interviewed in recent weeks said Mr. Obama has been torn between wanting to propose major budget changes to entice Republicans to the bargaining table, including on Social Security, and believing they would never agree to raise revenues on upper-income Americans as part of a deal.

Three House Republican leaders, including Mr. Ryan, were on the fiscal commission; unlike the three Senate Republicans, they opposed the recommendations because they raised revenues and did not cut enough from health care.

The risk to Mr. Obama includes further alienating liberals in his own party. Progressive groups have formed coalitions to oppose any changes to Social Security, for instance.

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Budget Deal Reached to Avert Shutdown - NYTimes.com

Budget Deal Reached to Avert Shutdown - NYTimes.com

By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders and President Obama headed off a shutdown of the government with less than two hours to spare Friday night under a tentative budget deal that would cut $38 billion from federal spending this year.

After days of tense negotiations and partisan quarrelling, House Republicans came to preliminary terms with the White House and Senate Democrats over financing the government for the next six months, resolving a stubborn impasse that had threatened to disrupt federal operations across the country and around the globe.

Speaker John A. Boehner, who had pressed Democrats for cuts sought by members of the conservative new House majority, presented the package of widespread spending reductions and policy provisions and won a positive response from his rank and file shortly before 11 p.m.

Both Democrats and Republicans proclaimed they had reached a deal and would begin the necessary steps to pass the bill and send it to Mr. Obama next week.

Democrats said that under the agreement, the budget measure would not include provisions sought by Republicans to limit environmental regulations and to restrict financing for Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions. But Mr. Boehner said in a statement that the agreement included a restriction on abortion financing in Washington.

“This has been a lot of discussion and a long fight,” Mr. Boehner said as he left the party meeting. “But we fought to keep government spending down because it really will in fact help create a better environment for job creators in our country.”

Speaking from the White House after the Republican meeting ended, Mr. Obama said that both sides gave ground in reaching the bargain and that some of the cuts accepted by Democrats “will be painful.”

“Programs people rely on will be cut back,” said Mr. Obama, who said Americans had to begin to live within their means. “Needed infrastructure projects will be delayed.”

The announcements capped a day of drama as lawmakers and members of the federal work force waited anxiously to see whether money for government agencies would run out at midnight.

“We didn’t do it at this late hour for drama,” Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, said. “We did it because it has been hard to arrive at this point.”

In the closed-door Republican session, according to people present in the room, Mr. Boehner described the plan as the best deal he could wring from Democrats and said the cuts — an estimated $38 billion in reductions — represented the “largest real dollar spending cut in American history.”

Although both sides compromised, Republicans were able to force significant spending concessions from Democrats in exchange for putting to rest some of the vexing social policy fights that had held up the agreement.

Because of the need to put the compromise into legislative form, Congressional leaders said the House and Senate would vote overnight to pass a stopgap measure financing the government through Thursday to prevent any break in the flow of federal dollars. The actual budget compromise would be considered sometime next week.

The Senate approved the stopgap measure by 11:20 p.m. and the House approved it after midnight. The Office of Management and Budget issued a memo saying normal government operations were back on track.

The developments came after Republicans and Democrats spent the day blaming each other for what could have been the first lapse in government services brought on by Congress in 15 years.

As the midnight deadline approached, efforts to finish a deal intensified, and Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner spoke by telephone to try to find an agreement.

“Both sides are working hard to reach the kind of resolution Americans desire,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, who had consulted closely with Mr. Boehner on strategy during the fractious talks. “A resolution is actually within reach. The contours of a final agreement are coming into focus.”

Mr. McConnell’s optimism could not disguise the fact that time was steadily slipping away, and testy leaders of the two parties were pushing hard to shape public perceptions of who was responsible for an impasse that threatened to have serious political repercussions — and to presage even more consequential fiscal showdowns in the months ahead. Democrats said Republicans were insisting on overreaching policy provisions; Republicans said it remained about money.

After nightlong negotiations that ended before dawn on Friday yielded no agreement, Senator Reid went on the offensive. He told reporters and said on the Senate floor that Mr. Boehner, the Senate Democrats and Mr. Obama had essentially settled on $38 billion in cuts from current spending, a figure that represented a substantial concession for Democrats.

But he said that Republicans were refusing to abandon a policy provision that would withhold federal financing for family planning and other health services for poor women from Planned Parenthood and other providers.

“This is indefensible, and everyone should be outraged,” Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. “The Republican House leadership have only a couple of hours to look in the mirror, snap out of it and realize how truly shameful they have been.”

In a terse statement of his own to reporters, Mr. Boehner said there was “only one reason we do not have an agreement yet, and that is spending.” He asked, “When will the White House and when will Senate Democrats get serious about cutting spending?”

As the day went on, aides reported progress in attempts to reach an accommodation on the family planning provision. Even veteran anti-abortion Republicans, like Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, indicated a willingness to compromise, not wanting the party to be accused of shutting down the government over divisive social policy and diluting its new emphasis on cutting spending. Other Republicans, in interviews and statements, indicated that it was time to end the stalemate.

The dueling characterizations of the negotiations added to the frustration, extending far beyond the nation’s capital, among federal employees and the people who rely on their services, as they waited to find out whether serious disruptions were imminent, and how long they might last.

Despite the disagreement over what still divided the two parties, it was clear the dollar difference had been reduced considerably, to about $1 billion or $2 billion. That amount left some lawmakers and their constituents grappling to understand how the federal government could be shut down over such a relatively small sum. Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said he was embarrassed. “People across Virginia cannot understand why we can’t get this done,” he said.

Allies of Mr. Boehner, the veteran lawmaker in his first months as speaker, said he seemed to be pursuing a strategy of pushing the negotiations to the last possible tick of the clock to appease rank-and-file conservatives, who have been very reluctant to give an inch from the $61 billion in cuts approved by the House.

In a private party meeting Friday afternoon, Mr. Boehner told Republican lawmakers that he was fighting for all the cuts he could get, and regaled them with reports of how angry Mr. Obama was with him for the hard line he has taken in the talks — news that elated his membership.

Emerging from the meeting, Mr. Boehner called the negotiations “respectful,” but added: “We’re not going to roll over and sell out the American people like has been done time and time again in Washington.”

In the absence of a deal, Mr. Boehner again urged the Senate to pass a temporary House budget resolution that would finance the military for the balance of the fiscal year, cut $12 billion in spending from the current year’s budget and keep the rest of the government operating for another week, as Republicans in the House had voted to do.

“This is the responsible thing to do,” he told reporters.

Senate Democrats rejected that approach as a gimmick, and Mr. Obama said he would veto the resolution.

Mr. Reid, who at one news conference was surrounded by about three dozen Democratic senators in an unusual tableau, told reporters that the Senate would explore the possibility of a stopgap bill that would keep the government open for another week. But it was unlikely to clear procedural barriers.

It was an unusual Friday on Capitol Hill, a day when corridors are often empty of lawmakers who have left for the weekend. Instead, they milled about, and took the Senate floor to expound, as they nervously awaited news of an agreement or braced for the expiration of government financing. It was frustrating to some because most lawmakers were not privy to the high-level talks.

“I hope that negotiations are continuing by someone somewhere,” Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said as he spoke about six hours before funding would run out.

Lawmakers said they realized that the outcome of the negotiations would have implications not only for them, but also for the federal work force, the public, the economy and the nation’s image.

“We know the whole world is watching us today,” Mr. Reid said.

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

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The Mellon Doctrine - NYTimes.com

Image via WikipediaThe Mellon Doctrine - NYTimes.com

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” That, according to Herbert Hoover, was the advice he received from Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary, as America plunged into depression. To be fair, there’s some question about whether Mellon actually said that; all we have is Hoover’s version, written many years later.

But one thing is clear: Mellon-style liquidationism is now the official doctrine of the G.O.P.

Two weeks ago, Republican staff at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee released a report, “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy,” that argued that slashing government spending and employment in the face of a deeply depressed economy would actually create jobs. In part, they invoked the aid of the confidence fairy; more on that in a minute. But the leading argument was pure Mellon.

Here’s the report’s explanation of how layoffs would create jobs: “A smaller government work force increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs.” Dropping the euphemisms, what this says is that by increasing unemployment, particularly of “educated, skilled workers” — in case you’re wondering, that mainly means schoolteachers — we can drive down wages, which would encourage hiring.

There is, if you think about it, an immediate logical problem here: Republicans are saying that job destruction leads to lower wages, which leads to job creation. But won’t this job creation lead to higher wages, which leads to job destruction, which leads to ...? I need some aspirin.

Beyond that, why would lower wages promote higher employment?

There’s a fallacy of composition here: since workers at any individual company may be able to save their jobs by accepting a pay cut, you might think that we can increase overall employment by cutting everyone’s wages. But pay cuts at, say, General Motors have helped save some workers’ jobs by making G.M. more competitive with other companies whose wage costs haven’t fallen. There’s no comparable benefit when you cut everyone’s wages at the same time.

In fact, across-the-board wage cuts would almost certainly reduce, not increase, employment. Why? Because while earnings would fall, debts would not, so a general fall in wages would worsen the debt problems that are, at this point, the principal obstacle to recovery.

In short, Mellonism is as wrong now as it was fourscore years ago.

Now, liquidationism isn’t the only argument the G.O.P. report advances to support the claim that reducing employment actually creates jobs. It also invokes the confidence fairy; that is, it suggests that cuts in public spending will stimulate private spending by raising consumer and business confidence, leading to economic expansion.

Or maybe “suggests” isn’t the right word; “insinuates” may be closer to the mark. For a funny thing has happened lately to the doctrine of “expansionary austerity,” the notion that cutting government spending, even in a slump, leads to faster economic growth.

A year ago, conservatives gleefully trumpeted statistical studies supposedly showing many successful examples of expansionary austerity. Since then, however, those studies have been more or less thoroughly debunked by careful researchers, notably at the International Monetary Fund.

To their credit, the staffers who wrote that G.O.P. report were clearly aware that the evidence no longer supports their position. To their discredit, their response was to make the same old arguments, while adding weasel words to cover themselves: instead of asserting outright that spending cuts are expansionary, the report says that confidence effects of austerity “can boost G.D.P. growth.” Can under what circumstances? Boost relative to what? It doesn’t say.

Did I mention that in Britain, where the government that took power last May bought completely into the doctrine of expansionary austerity, the economy has stalled and business confidence has fallen to a two-year low? And even the government’s new, more pessimistic projections are based on the assumption that highly indebted British households will take on even more debt in the years ahead.

But never mind the lessons of history, or events unfolding across the Atlantic: Republicans are now fully committed to the doctrine that we must destroy employment in order to save it.

And Democrats are offering little pushback. The White House, in particular, has effectively surrendered in the war of ideas; it no longer even tries to make the case against sharp spending cuts in the face of high unemployment.

So that’s the state of policy debate in the world’s greatest nation: one party has embraced 80-year-old economic fallacies, while the other has lost the will to fight. And American families will pay the price.

Shift by Clinton Helped Push Obama to Take a Harder Line - NYTimes.com

Shift by Clinton Helped Push Obama to Take a Harder Line - NYTimes.com

By HELENE COOPER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — In a Paris hotel room on Monday night, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself juggling the inconsistencies of American foreign policy in a turbulent Middle East. She criticized the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates for sending troops to quash protests in Bahrain even as she pressed him to send planes to intervene in Libya.

Only the day before, Mrs. Clinton — along with her boss, President Obama — was a skeptic on whether the United States should take military action in Libya. But that night, with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces turning back the rebellion that threatened his rule, Mrs. Clinton changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention.

Within hours, Mrs. Clinton and the aides had convinced Mr. Obama that the United States had to act, and the president ordered up military plans, which Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hand-delivered to the White House the next day. On Thursday, during an hour-and-a -half meeting, Mr. Obama signed off on allowing American pilots to join Europeans and Arabs in military strikes against the Libyan government.

The president had a caveat, though. The American involvement in military action in Libya should be limited — no ground troops — and finite. “Days, not weeks,” a senior White House official recalled him saying.

The shift in the administration’s position — from strong words against Libya to action — was forced largely by the events beyond its control: the crumbling of the uprising raised the prospect that Colonel Qaddafi would remain in power to kill “many thousands,” as Mr. Obama said at the White House on Friday.

The change became possible, though, only after Mrs. Clinton joined Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been pressing the case for military action, according to senior administration officials speaking only on condition of anonymity. Ms. Power is a former journalist and human rights advocate; Ms. Rice was an Africa adviser to President Clinton when the United States failed to intervene to stop the Rwanda genocide, which Mr. Clinton has called his biggest regret.

Now, the three women were pushing for American intervention to stop a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Libya.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, one of the early advocates for military action in Libya, described the debate within the administration as “healthy.” He said that “the memory of Rwanda, alongside Iraq in ’91, made it clear” that the United States needed to act but needed international support.

In joining Ms. Rice and Ms. Power, Mrs. Clinton made an unusual break with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who, along with the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and the counterterrorism chief, John O. Brennan, had urged caution. Libya was not vital to American national security interests, the men argued, and Mr. Brennan worried that the Libyan rebels remained largely unknown to American officials, and could have ties to Al Qaeda.

The administration’s shift also became possible only after the United States won not just the support of Arab countries but their active participation in military operations against one of their own.

“Hillary and Susan Rice were key parts of this story because Hillary got the Arab buy-in and Susan worked the U.N. to get a 10-to-5 vote, which is no easy thing,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert with the Center for American Progress, a liberal group with close ties to the administration. This “puts the United States in a much stronger position because they’ve got the international support that makes this more like the 1991 gulf war than the 2003 Iraq war.”

Ever since the democracy protests in the region began three months ago, the Obama administration has struggled to balance America’s national security interests against support for democratic principles, a struggle that has left Mr. Obama subject to criticism from all sides of the political spectrum. And by taking a case-by-case approach — quickly embracing protesters in Tunisia, eventually coming around to fully endorse their cause in Egypt, but backing the rulers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — the administration at times has appeared inconsistent. While calling for Colonel Qaddafi’s ouster, administration officials indicated Mr. Obama was more concerned with unfolding events in Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt than with removing the Libyan leader.

There was high drama right up to the surprising Security Council vote on Thursday night, when the ambassador for South Africa, viewed as critical to getting the nine votes needed to pass the resolution, failed to show up for the final vote, causing Ms. Rice to rush from the chamber in search of him.

South Africa and Nigeria — along with Brazil and India — had all initially balked at authorizing force, but administration officials believed they had brought the Africans around. Mr. Obama had already been on the phone pressing President Jacob Zuma of South Africa to support the resolution, White House officials said. Eventually, the South African representative showed up to vote yes, as did the Nigerian representative, giving the United States one vote more than required. Brazil and India, meanwhile, joined Russia, China and Germany in abstaining.

The pivotal decision for Mr. Obama came on Tuesday though, after Mrs. Clinton had called from Paris with news that the Arab governments were willing to participate in military action. That would solve one of Mr. Gates’s concerns, that the United States not be viewed on the Arab street as going to war against another Muslim country.

Mrs. Clinton “had the proof,” one senior administration official said, “that not only was the Arab League in favor, but that the Emirates were serious about participating.”

During a meeting with Mr. Obama and his top national security aides — Ms. Rice was on video teleconference from New York; Mrs. Clinton from Paris — Ms. Rice sought to allay Mr. Gates’s concern that a no-fly zone by itself would not be enough to halt Colonel Qaddafi’s progress, recalled officials attending the meeting.

“Susan basically said that it was possible to get a tougher resolution” that would authorize a fuller range of options, including the ability to bomb Libyan government tanks on the road to Benghazi, the rebel stronghold in the east, administration official said.

“That was the turning point” for Mr. Obama, the official said. The president was scheduled to go to a dinner with military veterans that night; he told his aides to draw up military plans. And he instructed Ms. Rice to move forward with a broader resolution at the Security Council.

She already had one ready — drawn up the week before, just in case, officials said. Besides asking for an expanded military campaign, Ms. Rice loaded up the resolution with other items on the American wish list, including the authorization to use force to back an arms embargo against Libya. “We knew it would be a heavy lift to get any resolution through; our view was we might as well get as much as we could,” Ms. Rice said in a telephone interview.

On Wednesday at the Security Council, Russia put forward a competing resolution, calling for a cease-fire — well short of what the United States wanted. But the French, who had been trying to get a straight no-fly resolution through, switched to back the tougher American wording. And they “put it in blue” ink — U.N. code for calling for a vote.

“It was a brilliant tactical move,” an American official said. “They hijacked the text, which means it could be called to a vote at any time.”

On Thursday, the South Africans, Nigerians, Portuguese and Bosnians — all of them question marks — said they would support the tougher resolution.

Even after getting the Security Council endorsement, Mr. Obama made clear that the military action would be an international effort.

“The change in the region will not and cannot be imposed by the United States or any foreign power,” the president told reporters at the White House on Friday. “Ultimately, it will be driven by the people of the Arab world.”

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Bill O’Reilly interview of Barack Obama could be victory for both - Keach Hagey - POLITICO.com

Image via WikipediaBill O’Reilly interview of Barack Obama could be victory for both - Keach Hagey - POLITICO.com

By: Keach Hagey

February 6, 2011 07:39 AM EST

With a classic showman’s swagger, Bill O’Reilly has declared that more people will see his live pre-game interview with President Barack Obama on Sunday than “any other interview that’s ever been done in the history of mankind.”

He may well be right. Last year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched television broadcast ever, drawing 106 million viewers. This year, the game happens to fall in the middle of the greatest foreign policy crisis of Obama’s presidency, following a week of complaints from the White House press corps about a lack of access to the president to ask about Egypt.

And most important, for those keeping score in the political media game, it will be the first time Obama sits down as president with the highest-rated host of the cable network he once called “entirely devoted to attacking my administration.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more bitter rivalry in the NFL. And no one expects one interview to change that.

But there are a variety of factors that make the interview a possible win-win for Obama and Fox. The sheer size of the Super Bowl audience, O’Reilly’s history of giving the president a fair shake when he interviewed him as a candidate and the opportunity for Obama to look like a stand-up guy for stepping into the ring with a highly visible and highly vocal critic.

“I think it’s a very smart idea for both Obama and O’Reilly to do the interview before the Super Bowl,” said Jane Hall, a former Fox News analyst and associate professor at American University’s School of Communication. “In the 2008 campaign, he did a terrific, serious, lively interview with Barack Obama that probably helped Obama with Republican voters.”

Considering the rocky past with Fox, it may seem strange that the White House would have agreed to the interview at all. Obama’s not in the habit of doing sit-downs with opinionated cable hosts. He hasn’t done one yet as president with the primetime hosts of the more ideologically aligned, though lower-rated, MSNBC, though he did sit down with Jon Stewart last fall.

Truth is, it wouldn’t have been easy for Obama to decline. There’s a recent tradition that the network that broadcasts the Super Bowl also gets to have one of its top personalities interview the president. Saying no to O’Reilly — especially after Obama sat down with CBS’s Katie Couric last year — would have touched off a whole new Obama vs. Fox story line, right at the moment Obama is trying to recapture his campaign persona as a bipartisan healer.

Still, the White House — which, like Fox News, did not respond to requests for comment for this article — is getting surprisingly little criticism from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, which is usually quick to criticize Fox News.

O’Reilly, meanwhile, is bracing for criticism from the left and the right for his 14-minute live interview Sunday, which will air on local Fox stations.

“I fully expect to get hammered after the interview is over,” he wrote in his column this week. “Depending on how you feel about the president, the questions will either be too soft or too intrusive.”

His previous interview with Obama was able to be a “spirited back and forth,” he said, in part because Obama was a senator. When interviewing the president, “there is strict protocol” and “if I interrupt him too much, I look like a dope.”

That interview in September 2008, took a long time for O’Reilly to land. Three months before it, then-Sen. Obama met with News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch and Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes to air his concerns about whether Fox News was going to give him a “fair shake,” Ailes told Howard Kurtz. Until then, Obama had resisted going on Fox for months, but he left the meeting agreeing to an interview with O’Reilly before the election.

The interview was civil, even collegial at times, though not without interruptions from O’Reilly. He alternated between praising the candidate’s “good speech” and pointing out points of policy agreement between them, to saying Obama was “desperately wrong on the [Iraq] surge.”

That interview, though tough, stands in contrast to Bret Baier’s interview with Obama as president last March in the midst of the health care battle, which was so filled with interruptions that Baier apologized for it at the end, saying he was just trying to “get the most for our buck.”

Baier’s interview came six months after the Obama administration basically declared war on Fox News. The war began in October 2009, when Anita Dunn, then the White House’s communications director, called Fox “opinion journalism masquerading as news” in an interview. David Axelrod, then the president’s senior adviser, asked other news organizations to join the administration in declaring that Fox was “not really a news station.” Rahm Emanuel, then White House chief of staff, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Fox “is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.”

With Axelrod departing the White House last month, none of these voices leading the attack on Fox is in the White House any longer.

“Having declared Fox not a news network didn’t work,” Hall said. “It was not a winning idea.”

The war didn’t last long. By November 2009, Obama had granted an interview to Major Garrett, then Fox News’s White House correspondent, in Beijing.

Although Fox’s primetime hosts remain critical of the president’s policies, particularly on health care, there have been signs of further thawing recently.

Following the president’s speech after the shootings in Tucson, Ariz., Brit Hume, Charles Krauthammer and Chris Wallace participated in a Fox News panel, all giving positive marks. Hume said it was “precisely what the people of this region needed and wanted,” while Wallace called it a “very powerful speech.” Krauthammer said it was delivered in a “very skillfully, successful way.”

The praise caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh, who accused the Fox panel of “slobbering” over the speech because it was “all the things the educated, ruling class wants their members to be and sound like.”

That’s not to say that things can’t still be quite adversarial between Obama and Fox News. Fox has been emphasizing coverage of the lawsuit striking down the health care law for the past week. Also last week, Axelrod, signaling the kind of messaging that may be coming from the president’s Chicago reelection headquarters, responded to a question about the 2012 Republican field of candidates by saying they were “all Fox News personalities.”

Five potential candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination are Fox News contributors: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and John Bolton.

Axelrod attempted to use Palin’s and Huckabee’s Fox contracts against them in sizing them up as competition, POLITICO reported.

“She’s an interesting person,” he said of Palin. “I know she has a robust broadcast career at Fox. And I don’t know if she’s going to want to give that up. The same with Gov. Huckabee. He’s a very formidable person, very genial person, someone I personally like.” But, he added, “they have a great platform right now, and I don’t know whether they’re going to want to give that up.”

Hall, who appeared regularly on O’Reilly’s program until she quit Fox News over what she considered to be over-the-top rhetoric by Glenn Beck, cautioned against conflating Fox News and O’Reilly too much.

“[O’Reilly] considers himself and talks about himself as an independent,” she said. “I would say, compared to Sean Hannity, he is a person who does not always say what you think is going to be the predictable line from Fox News’s conservative hosts.”

This independence has sometimes cost O’Reilly. In the wake of the Tucson shootings, he complained on his show that he wasn’t able to book Palin, despite having defended her in his “Talking Points Memo” on his first day back on the air, and despite her being on his employer’s payroll. He had done some of the former Alaskan governor’s toughest interviews last summer. She went on “Hannity” a week later.

From the left, the loudest critique of Obama’s Super Bowl sit-down came from former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who delivered a “Special Comment” the night of the Tucson shooting, decrying violent rhetoric and calling on several Fox News personalities to apologize for their use of it in the past.

“If Glenn Beck, who obsessed about gold and debt and who joked about killing Michael Moore, and Bill O’Reilly who said, ‘Tiller the Killer,’ until it was burned into the minds of their viewers, if they do not begin their broadcasts with an apology, then those commentators and the others must be repudiated by viewers and listeners, by all politicans who appear on their programs, including President Obama and his interview with Fox on Super Bowl Sunday and by the networks that employ them,” he said.

“If they are not responsible for what happened in Tucson, they must be held responsible for doing what they can to make certain Tucson does not happen again.”

Fox’s Ailes did give an interview the following week, saying he had told his personalities to “tone it down,” adding that he hoped “the other side does that” too.

But even Robert Greenwald, who made the highly critical documentary, “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” about Fox News in 2004 and sees himself as having passed the Fox-critiquing torch on to liberal organizations like Media Matters, understands why the president is doing the interview, even if he doesn’t approve.

“It’s an effort to reach the largest possible audience, which will be more than a Fox audience at that particular time. So I understand the tactic in terms of wanting to reach that audience,” Greenwald said. “If I were president, I wouldn’t make that decision. It’s looking for a short-term ability to reach some more eyeballs, but it will cost them in the long term because it gives further credence and further support to Fox.”

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Why Obama Chose Businessman William Daley as His Chief of Staff

Why Obama Chose Businessman William Daley as His Chief of Staff

President Obama picked former Commerce Secretary William Daley to be his new chief of staff on Thursday, bringing on board a businessman with vast political experience at a time Obama is preparing to launch his re-election bid and improve relations with the corporate community.

Though the president and Daley have known each for years from Chicago politics, Obama's quick rise from the Illinois State Senate to the White House had little to do with Daley or his brother, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Daley has never been part of Obama's inner personal circle -- considered a plus because he can bring an outsider's perspective to the White House.

What Obama and Daley -- and former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel -- have in common are close ties to Obama Senior Adviser David Axelrod, who is expected to depart at the end of the month to return to Chicago and take on duties as the main strategist for the 2012 Obama campaign.

Daley is stylistically different from Emanuel, far more measured than the harder-edged Emanuel, whose early political job was as a fundraiser for Richard Daley's 1989 mayoral campaign. The vacancy Daley is filling was created when Emanuel quit in October to run for Chicago mayor, getting in the race once Mayor Daley decided not to seek another term.

In selecting William Daley, White House officials told Politics Daily, Obama gets a very specific skill set needed as he prepares to launch his re-election bid and deal with a potentially hostile GOP-controlled House and a Senate where Democratic strength has diminished.

Daley, who is expected to join the administration in a few weeks, brings in deep links to the global business world, Cabinet experience, national political knowledge and a comfort factor stemming not only from connections to Axelrod but also to David Plouffe, Obama's 2008 campaign manager who is joining the White House on Monday.

Since May 2004, Daley has been working from Chicago as the Midwest chairman banking giant JP Morgan Chase & Co. and head of its corporate responsibility operation. Daley's last major political assignment was in 2000, when he was brought in to rescue Vice President Al Gore's presidential campaign, setting up camp in Tallahassee, Fla., during the brutal recount battle against George Bush that was eventually decided by the U.S Supreme Court.

He also was an early backer of Vice President Joe Biden's 1988 presidential bid and a veteran of Walter Mondale's presidential contest.

But Daley is as familiar with Chicago's precinct politics as he is with presidential elections. Though Daley, 62, the mayor's youngest brother, in the last 10 years flirted with runs for Illinois governor and senator, he never jumped in himself.

Obama noted how Daley straddled the government and political worlds when he announced his chief of staff pick Thursday afternoon in the White House East Room, flanked by Daley and interim chief of staff Pete Rouse.

Rouse got high grades for his work, but did not want to stay on as chief. Instead, the super low-profile Rouse, who served Obama as his chief of staff when he was an Illinois senator -- and was an architect of his presidential campaign -- will remain as a counselor to the president.

In speaking about Daley, Obama said, "He's led major corporations. He possesses a deep understanding of how jobs are created . . . And, needless to say, Bill also has a smidgen of awareness of how our system of government and politics works. You might say it is a genetic trait," Obama said, a reference to Daley's brother and father, both Chicago mayors.

Obama cited Daley's "tremendous experience, his strong values and forward-looking vision," adding, "I'm convinced that he'll help us in our mission of growing our economy and moving America forward. And I very much look forward to working with Bill in the years to come."

Daley said it was an "extreme honor" to take on the assignment. Alluding to President John F. Kennedy, always a Daley family favorite, he recalled a visit to the White House decades ago with his family.

"Fifty years ago this month, I visited the White House with my parents and my brothers and sisters to visit a young president who went on to show great strength, leadership and vision in the face of enormous challenges in those times. You, Mr. President, are proving your strength, your leadership, your vision during a most difficult time for our nation and for the world. You have also shown through your example that public service is an honorable calling, and I am pleased to answer your call," Daley said.

Daley's appointment drew mixed reviews: Democratic progressives were disappointed and the business community was very upbeat. Daley frayed relations with unions in 1993, when he was President Clinton's "NAFTA czar," successfully winning congressional approval for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Clinton later tapped Daley as Commerce secretary in 1997 at the start of his second term and earlier had named him to a seat on the board of Fannie Mae, the quasi-governmental mortgage maker, in part to make up for not making him Transportation secretary in his first term.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was wary of Daley. "The president is of course entitled to choose a chief of staff in whom he has complete confidence," Trumka said in a statement. "Yet President Obama and his Administration will ultimately be judged by results -- whether the economy recovers robustly and begins to generate good jobs on the scale needed to improve the lives of working people."

Justin Ruben, executive director of the liberal MoveOn.org, was equally skeptical. "With Wall Street reporting record profits while middle-class Americans continue to struggle in a deep recession, the announcement that William Daley, who has close ties to the Big Banks and Big Business, will now lead the White House staff is troubling and sends the wrong message to the American people," Ruben said in a statement.

Daley's selection drew applause from Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue. "This is a strong appointment," he said in a statement. "Bill Daley is a man of stature and extraordinary experience in government, business, trade negotiations, and global affairs. He's an accomplished manager and strong leader. We look forward to working with him to accelerate our recovery, grow the economy, create jobs, and tackle America's global challenges."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was also enthusiastic about the Daley pick. He told reporters on Thursday, "I, frankly, think it's kind of a hopeful sign. He has a business background. You know, we used to -- I used to say the last two years -- I don't know whether it's technically true or not -- but that there was nobody down at the White House who had ever even run a lemonade stand. You know, they were all college professors . . . former elected officials. This is a guy who's actually been out in the private sector, been a part of business. Frankly, my first reaction is: That sounds like a good idea."

Like Emanuel, Daley is a Democratic centrist. In a December Washington Post column taking stock of the big Democratic loss in the November elections, Daley gave liberals some tough love:

"All that is required for the Democratic Party to recover its political footing is to 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, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.

"For liberals to accept that inescapable reality is not to concede permanent defeat. Rather, let them take it as a sign that they must continue the hard work of slowly and steadily persuading their fellow citizens to embrace their perspective. In the meantime, liberals -- and, indeed, all of us -- should have the humility to recognize that there is no monopoly on good ideas, as well as the long-term perspective to know that intra-party warfare will only relegate the Democrats to minority status, which would be disastrous for the very constituents they seek to represent," Daley wrote.

Last year, Daley joined the board of a moderate group called the Third Way, whose president, Jonathan Cowan, said in a statement, "His selection sends a clear signal that he intends to govern and campaign from the center over the next two years.

"In selecting Daley, President Obama has hit the trifecta – a top-notch manager, a pro-growth business leader and a moderate Democrat who knows how to work across the aisle."

"Bill Daley is an experienced manager who has run agencies and presidential campaigns," said Cowan. "He has the business credentials to help the White House continue to heal the breach between the administration and the private sector; and he is committed to a big-tent politics for the Democratic Party."

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Dean on Daley: give him a chance - DNC chair, Howard Dean, explains his support for President Obama's choice of William Daley for chief-of-staff despite Daley's ties to Wall Street Banks.

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Bill Daley's to-do list - Josh Gerstein and Carol E. Lee - POLITICO.com

Bill Daley's to-do list - Josh Gerstein and Carol E. Lee - POLITICO.com

A change in White House chief of staff often marks the beginning of a new phase in a presidency, and that’s certainly true for Barack Obama. His choice of former Commerce Secretary Bill Daley comes as Obama must confront newly emboldened congressional Republicans and gear up for his own reelection campaign in 2012.

For Daley, it is a daunting task, even for someone born and raised in politics who cut his teeth in a Clinton White House facing a divided Washington. And before he even gets to those long-term problems he has some tasks he will need to confront immediately.

Win over the White House staff

When Daley reports to work for the first time in the West Wing, he will be the lone outsider in a tightknit group that’s already unnerved by the sudden power shift. Many White House staffers worked on Obama’s presidential campaign, were familiar with interim chief of staff Pete Rouse and hardly know Daley, who isn’t close to the president, either.

At the same time, Daley will have a mandate from Obama and possibly a blueprint for staff restructuring from Rouse, who has spent considerable time studying how the White House operates and should function over the next two years. (See: Daley takes Obama back to the future)

Daley will make some changes to the current staff and bring in his own people, sources say, including David Lane, who served as his chief of staff when he was in the Clinton Cabinet.

That’s already stirring anxiety in the West Wing. One White House staffer whose trust Daley will need to gain immediately is Rouse, the president’s senior adviser, who was equivocating over the chief of staff job and then saw Obama choose Daley.

“He’ll want to weigh in on the press secretary decision. He’ll want to look at the structure and the team and have some say about how things get structured,” said one Democrat close to the White House.

Martha Kumar, a Towson University political scientist who studies the operations of the White House, said Daley is the right person for this particular time in the Obama presidency, and the staff will understand that.

“They have enacted a great deal of policy, and now it is time to implement their initiatives. Once the staff realizes Daley has the experiences and relationships to bring about their goals, they will line up with him. He has a broad reach outside the White House and within the communities the president needs to reach. He will bring long-range planning to a White House where it was in short supply.”

But former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), whom Rouse consulted several times as he worked on staff restructuring, said Daley needs to worry less about winning over White House staffers than those staffers need to worry about winning over him. (See: Liberals scoff at Daley's new job)

“One of the things I was concerned about was the White House was too insular and too filled with people who’d been involved with the campaign,” Graham said. “They work for him now. Since he’s the boss, they have more the responsibility of selling themselves to him than he does selling Bill Daley to the staff.”

Another major question left unanswered by Daley’s arrival: What becomes of senior adviser and longtime Obama friend Valerie Jarrett? (See: Obama introduces new chief of staff)

Jarrett is not expected to leave the White House, but there’s no avoiding the fact that Daley will, to some extent or another, be taking over her portfolio managing Obama’s relationship with the business community. Many in the business world may welcome that change, but Daley will need to figure out how to rearrange Jarrett’s responsibilities in a way that doesn’t seem like a snub and doesn’t lead to a recurrence of the stories about tensions between Jarrett and the previous chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Calm the liberals

The first reports about the Daley pick provoked an outcry from many liberal groups, who are already angry over being marginalized by Emanuel. Daley will have to spend some time clarifying his views on things like health care reform (he was against the public option) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (he opposed it) as well as his work on the North American Free Trade Agreement during the Clinton administration.

“As a pragmatic person he understands how important the base is to a reelection,” said a Democrat close to the White House. “I think there will be an attempt to shift the dynamic so that it’s more positive.”

Chris Lehane, who worked under Daley when he was chairman of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, pointed out that it was at Daley’s urging that Gore became a populist candidate. “Remember ‘People, not the powerful?’” Lehane said.

“And at the end of the day, while he knows Wall Street and K Street, he is still a Daley, which means he ‘gets’ Main Street,” added Lehane, who says “Obama is getting a bare-knuckled manager — and by that I mean he is the Bill Belichick of chiefs of staff.”

Daley has already picked up some unexpected and highly influential allies in the liberal camp, including former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Dean and Reich could do a lot to tamp down liberal heartburn over Daley’s appointment.

Make the most of his business background

Obama went out of his way Thursday during his East Room announcement to describe Daley’s business experience. “He’s led major corporations,” the president said. “He possesses a deep understanding of how jobs are created and how to grow our economy. “

What Obama did not mention was the seven years Daley has spent as a top official of JPMorgan Chase. Given the Obama administration’s past antipathy toward the big banks — and the level of public outrage at them — this could prove embarrassing, especially with the inevitable reports on Daley’s compensation. The New York Times got the ball rolling on this line of reporting, when it quoted a person with knowledge of his compensation as saying Daley has made between $3 million and $5 million a year from JPMorgan Chase, while also picking up handsome checks for board service at Boeing, Abbott Laboratories and other companies.

But from the White House’s viewpoint, Daley’s banking ties and his experience in the corporate world are basically just what it’s been looking for in its effort to repair ties with the business community.

“His business background will, I think, be of assistance to the president as he reaches out to that community,” said Graham.

Build a relationship with Obama

Despite their Chicago connection, Obama and Daley are not longtime allies. Daley broke his deep ties with the Clintons to support Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, but the two men are not particularly close. They operated mostly in separate circles in Chicago politics, although Daley is close to Obama allies Jarrett, Emanuel and outgoing senior adviser David Axelrod.

Before Thursday’s announcement, Obama and Daley spoke several times on the phone about the job. They met in person on Wednesday afternoon in the Oval Office, although Obama didn’t offer Daley the job at the time and only informed his aides of his decision at a 10:30 a.m. staff meeting Thursday, just four hours before his East Room announcement. Part of the reason Obama waited until this week to announce his decision was to get more familiar with Daley.

“They’ll have to figure out what their relationship is going to be, in terms of how they deal with each other,” said a Democrat close to the White House.

Obama and Daley have a bit of a head start because Daley worked on the president’s transition. And Obama paid homage to Daley’s political pedigree in his remarks Thursday, joking about his “smidgen of awareness of how our system of government and politics works.”

“You might say it is a genetic trait,” Obama quipped.

Deal with Congress

Both of Daley’s predecessors, Emanuel and Rouse, worked on Capitol Hill and had close connections with Democrats but not particularly good ones with Republicans. As chief of staff in a White House with a scaled-back legislative agenda, Daley won’t have to interact with Congress as much as his predecessors did, but he’ll still need to mend some fences.

In his previous life in the Clinton administration, Daley’s closest interaction with Congress was when he helped pass the North American Free Trade Agreement. Though that won’t stand him in good stead with many Democrats, who still are unhappy with the deal, it should help him with free-trade Republicans. And in fact, GOP leaders reacted enthusiastically to his selection.

“I, frankly, think it’s kind of a hopeful sign,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “He has a business background. You know, we used to, I used to say the last two years — I don’t know whether it’s technically true or not — but that there was nobody down at the White House who had ever even run a lemonade stand. You know, they were all college professors … former elected officials. This is a guy who’s actually been out in the private sector, been a part of business.”

And while Daley hasn’t been much seen on Capitol Hill since 2000, he still goes back with many members.

“In his business and political activity, my guess is that Bill knew more than 100 current House Democrats and has maintained contact with them,” said Jim Jaffe, a former spokesman for the late Rep. Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois.

And, Jaffe added, “the very qualities that offend some liberals about him will make it easier for him to get along with [John] Boehner and the Republicans.”

Richard E. Cohen contributed to this report.

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