Prestowitz: William Daley is not a businessman

The New York Times and others are portraying the appointment of William Daley to the post of chief of staff as a matter of a widely-experienced corporate executive bringing badly needed business experience to the White House.

The notion is that as a top executive of J.P. Morgan Chase Bank and a director of Boeing and Abbot Labs, as well as a former secretary of commerce, Daley will help the White House mend its ties with business while improving cooperation with the supposedly business-friendly new Republican House of Representatives, and bringing new ideas for stimulating the economy.

In announcing the appointment, Obama said that "few Americans can boast the breadth of experience that Bill brings to this job," and added that he was convinced that "he’ll help us in our mission of growing the economy and moving America forward." U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donahue who has been a bitter opponent of the Obama administration and a strong supporter of the successful Republican effort to take over control of the House of Representatives said he thought it was a "very, very strong choice" and added that "Daley is a business person who understands politics.

Now, here’s what’s puzzling me. I always thought a business person was someone who made or bought or sold things or who provided some service like giving haircuts or lending money or delivering things or cleaning clothes or did something that made your life better in some way. Daley hasn’t done any of those things.

Sure, he now works for a bank, but he doesn’t have anything to do with lending money. Before that he worked for a telecommunications company, but he didn’t have anything to do with telecommunications aside from making telephone calls. He’s on the boards of Boeing and Abbott Labs but has nothing to do with making, buying, inventing, or selling airplanes and pharmaceuticals. Indeed, those boards include many members of law firms and university professors who would not for a moment call themselves or be called businesspeople. Nor is Daley is businessperson. Donahue has it backwards: Daley is not a business person who understands politics. He’s a political operative who works for businesses; a lobbyist, in other words. That, of course, is what Donahue is, as well, and probably explains why he got his statement backwards.

As for the president’s notion that Daley will know how to help grow the economy and move America forward, there is no evidence to back this up at all. Sure he was secretary of commerce, but that is just my point. The job of commerce secretary is almost always given by both political parties as a payoff to fund raisers and other political operators. We haven’t had a secretary of commerce since the Reagan administration’s Malcolm Baldrige who was a real business CEO and knew something about creating economic growth.

Don’t get me wrong. Daley is not a bad guy and lobbyists might even occasionally do something that helps people. Daley may well help mend fences between Obama and business, and he may well facilitate better cooperation between the White House and the Republicans in Congress, and he may well be a superb political operator. But let’s drop the whole businessman thing. Daley was born into a political family and has made his way as a political operator. If you admit that up front, there’s nothing wrong with it.

But, still, for Obama the appointment does present a bit of complexity. I mean, Obama was the guy who wasn’t going to have lobbyists in his administration and he wasn’t going to let Washington be run by Wall Street instead of Main Street. Remember? He was going to give us change we could believe in. Well, this appointment tells you that Obama has now been completely captured by Washington. In the person of Bill Daley, the lobbyists and Wall Street are back big time.