This is one issue where the President has the dominant hand. He should play it.

This is one issue where the President has the dominant hand. He should play it.

I mean, when you have people like Bill Daley in the WH, what else are people supposed to think about where Obama's interests lie?  Or is this another case, as in Suskind's book, where Obama is not being well-served by his advisors?

From the NYT:

The decision pitted Ms. (EPA Administrator Lisa) Jackson, a Princeton-trained chemical engineer and self-described "New Orleans girl," against the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley, a son and brother of bare-knuckled Chicago mayors who was brought in to help repair relations with business and Congress [...]

Ms. Jackson knew that standard would cause political heartburn at the White House, so before submitting it she met with Mr. Daley at least three times in June to try to deal with any concerns. Mr. Daley, rightly sensing the uproar from business and local governments at the cost of meeting such a standard, sharply questioned the costs and burdens as well as the timing of the new rule but never explicitly asked her to hold off or pull back [...]

Against all this, there was no one lobbying strongly within the White House for the tougher standard. Carol M. Browner, a former E.P.A. administrator who had served as the White House coordinator for energy and environmental policy, left earlier this year as Mr. Daley was taking over because she sensed those issues were taking a back seat to economic and political concerns.

Mr. Daley abolished her job, leaving no one in the current White House who speaks as forcefully on environmental issues as she did.

David Dayen:

Daley ran interference on Jackson before even getting the decision to the President, and he knee-capped the White House of its environmental advisors so nobody the President trusted would have his ear after the fact. The coup de grace here comes in a meeting with the head of American Lung Association, a childhood friend of Daley's. By this time, Daley had already taken a meeting with business lobbyists, and he clearly just parroted them:

Charles D. Connor, president of the American Lung Association and a childhood friend of Mr. Daley's, opened by discussing the adverse health impacts of ozone. He introduced Monica Kraft, a pulmonologist at Duke University and the president-elect of the American Thoracic Society.

"I told them that we thought a 70 p.p.b. standard was appropriate for health reasons and laid out the statistics on deaths associated with progressively higher levels of ozone," Dr. Kraft said. She emphasized the damage smog does to the lungs of even healthy young children.

Mr. Daley listened politely, then asked, "What are the health impacts of unemployment?" It was a question straight out of the industry playbook.

[snip]

...Daley was brought in as a fixer. He fixes parking tickets. He listens to exactly what corporate America wants, and he goes out and gets it done. He's their man inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And he's still equipped to do that. As Broder writes, Daley "remains the administration's conduit for business interests."

Everyone suspects it's a dirty table, but it's the only game in town.

The money and muscle behind the gambling house only care about their rake. Thus, Obama only cares about their rake, because that's where his paycheck comes from.

So he's going to work for the owners, and tell the folks playing the crooked game, "Fork you, pay me or leave."  He's been saying that through his minions, like Rahm and dirty hippies, etc.

He's a lap dog, a Pomeranian who wants to be called a pit bull from the comfort of big daddy's protection. But people are wise to this grift.

 Obama doesn't play the grift nearly as well as W Bush did. He's a minnow in a school of piranhas. That's why the republican insane clown posse has a chance in 2012... because Obama caters to the rich, then gets angry and petulant when the rest of us see him putting the button on the wheel and point it out to him that we see it.

This is one issue where the President has the dominant hand. He should play it.