Obama’s perilous move

You can tell that the president is in massive reinvention mode when Daily Kos,
the mouthpiece of the furthest-left elements of the Democratic Party, derides
the appointment of the new White House chief of staff.

While the extreme left doesn’t have anywhere to go in the general election, the
appointment of former Clinton Commerce Secretary Bill Daley is particularly
perplexing in that it will make it much harder for the president to connect
with the blue-collar workers he needs in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. These
workers’ votes played a major role in his 2008 victory.

These workers have been trained (inaccurately, in my opinion) to almost
reflexively blame NAFTA for the decline of their union jobs. Unions blame NAFTA
rather than themselves for pricing these workers’ jobs out of the world
economic marketplace. Now Bill Daley, the Clinton administration’s chief NAFTA
salesman, will be running the show at 1600.

It is not hard to imagine the targeted mail pieces to union households
reminding them that when Obama’s political fortunes hit bottom, he turned to
the very person who was responsible for pushing the hated NAFTA through
Congress over their objections. It isn’t hard to envision the closing ad
tagline, “When Obama was in trouble, he turned to the guy who sent your job
overseas. Now who are YOU going to turn to?”

Once again, let me re-emphasize that I don’t agree that NAFTA is the root of
all evil; however, anyone who has ever visited a private employer union hall
knows that these five letters set off more vitriol than Pat Robertson at a
private screening of the movie “Milk.”

While Daley is by all accounts a masterful political campaign manager who
should stabilize the Obama White House, his history of disdain for Obama’s
left-wing base, as well as the NAFTA history, could embolden Russ Feingold to
push forward with a primary challenge, as well as disconnecting Obama from the
core class warfare economic arguments that he will depend upon to defeat any
Republican challenger.

It will be interesting to see if Obama’s attempted move to the middle
irreparably separates him from those very voters who played a major role in his
general-election victory just two years ago.

Rick Manning is the communications director of Americans for Limited
Government. Follow him on Twitter @rmanning957.