Bill Daley in Profile

President Obama has named Chicago's Bill Daley to be his Chief of Staff. Here are a few snippets from a Chicago Magazine,, February 2005 profile on Daley:

Daley’s friends say, he can pick up the telephone and call almost anyone, from Arizona Republican senator John McCain to the Citigroup chairman, Sandy Weill. At the peak of the election-night chaos in 2000, Daley called his friend Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchor, to trade the latest news on the Florida returns. Many of his best friends are tough-guy players in the mold of Dan Rostenkowski [Note: Rostenkowsi died in August 2010-RW], once considered the most powerful man in Congress. Danny and Billy, as they call each other, share a love of golf and results; they are what Daley calls results rather than process Democrats—people who want to “get something done,” not people who go to Washington “and it’s all about the purity of the process.”...

In 1974, the year before Daley graduated from law school, Joel Weisman, now moderator of WTTW-TV’s Chicago Tonight: The Week in Review and then working for the Chicago Sun-Times, reported that answers had been changed on the insurance broker’s exam that Daley had taken three years before. No evidence ever emerged that Bill had had anything to do with it. Ultimately, the man charged with altering the answers was convicted of perjury, but the conviction was later overturned...

...Bill decided after his brother was elected mayor that he wanted to show he had the stuff to run a business. He took  the job as the vice chairman, and later president, of the Amalgamated Bank...Amalgamated, with its roots in the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union, was known as a bank hospitable to politicians and unions, and it has long carried, fairly or not, an air of unsavoriness.

In a somewhat alternative view, when announcing the Daley appointmnet, President Obama said, Daley "possesses a deep understanding of how jobs are created." Obama called him “a man of stature and extraordinary experience in government, business, trade negotiations, and global affairs,” and also said, "But most of all, I know Bill to be somebody who cares deeply about this country, believes in its promise and considers no calling higher and more important than serving the American people."