"Brother Bill: A Look at William Daley"

[Clio the Leo]

(from 2005)

Brother Bill: A Look at William Daley
BY CAROL FELSENTHAL

Last May, William M. Daley, the mayor’s youngest brother, took a new job as the top Midwest executive of J. P. Morgan Chase & Company, and for the first time in more than two decades, he did not play an active role in the Presidential campaign. Nonetheless, Daley’s experience and reputation for political shrewdness kept him in demand, and Jim Johnson, a top John Kerry adviser, called for counsel when the Kerry camp was negotiating the format for the Presidential debates. Above all, Kerry’s people wanted three debates—three chances to show up President Bush and to introduce Kerry to voters. The Bush camp wanted as few debates as possible and would agree to three only if the Democrats acceded to certain arrangements—among them, that the first debate would focus on national security, and lights and buzzers would be used to keep Kerry to a strict time limit. But Kerry’s aides opposed the Bush demands. Enter Bill Daley, whose response was quick and sharp: “Every single thing that the Bush side wants is good for Kerry. If I were you, I would take the third debate and agree to everything and end the negotiations in five minutes.”

Excellent advice. Kerry won the first debate—the lights and buzzers helped keep him on point—and his floundering campaign reaped a desperately needed lift. “Bill makes no traditional assumptions—what’s possible, what’s not possible,” Johnson says today. He’s “willing to take risks that many people won’t imagine.”

A first-string team of politicians and campaign operatives say much the same thing about the youngest of the seven children of the late Richard J. and Eleanor “Sis” Daley. Indeed, Bill Daley’s particular brand of intelligence presents a curious case: He was never a top student (and he suffered embarrassment 30 years ago when—apparently without his knowledge—a state employee changed Daley’s answers to help him pass the insurance broker’s exam). He maneuvered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the U.S. Congress and lobbied on behalf of the telecommunications giant SBC, but his supporters say that he probably never mastered the details of those operations. Still, people who have worked with him (and against him) credit Daley with remarkable savvy. “If you asked Bill the difference between Cicero and Plato, he wouldn’t know,” says the Chicago lawyer and Democratic stalwart Wayne Whalen, but he possesses a “keen intelligence” on how to plot strategy, to predict how people will behave in a given situation, to see beyond conventional wisdom.

More...
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/February-2005/Brother-Bill-A-Look-at-William-Daley/index.php?cparticle=1&siarticle=0#artanc

[boppers]

1. What an odd choice.

Long on Savvy, short on Smarts... not a bad counterbalance to Obama, though, who assumes (often to a fault) that everybody is as reasonable and contemplative as himself.

edit: homonym typo

[applegrove]

2. Since he grew up in a political family he must be smart politically. We had a

Canadian PM, Jean Chretien, who had some intellectual deficits but kept winning elections because he was so good at the politics. I'd go with someone like that any day.