Latinos And Bill Daley Obama’s New Chief Of Staff

President Barack Obama has appointed Bill Daley — former Clinton Commerce secretary and current JP Morgan’s Midwest Chair and head of corporate responsibility in Chicago — to be his new Chief of Staff. We wrote previously about Obama’s staff shakeup and its lack of Latinos, we also wrote about how former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel seems to be replicating his no-Latino strategy in his run for Chicago mayor.

It’s hard to say exactly how Daley will affect Latinos, although picking him seems to be a way for Obama to project his pro-business policies, which would affect all business owners, Latinos included obviously.

Daley is the brother of Chicago mayor Richard Daley and was partially embroiled in a corruption scandal in 2009 involving jobs-for-support with the Hispanic Democratic Organization. Some of the allegations were that the Daleys and other political operatives rigged city jobs for HDO supporters, Bill Daley was quoted as responding to the allegations, “You’re talking about 20 years ago. Even if it happened—and I’m not saying it did—things were different. There was nothing illegal about that stuff.”

In the end, neither Daley ended up in legal trouble.

Another look at Daley’s record with Latinos are some comments he made in the 1990s after being passed over for a spot he felt he deserved from then-President Bill Clinton. In 1992 he felt like he was going to be named Transportation Secretary, but the job went to former Denver mayor Federico Peña and the reaction on all sides imitated that affirmative action blame game.

“Daley attributes the humiliating rejection to a ‘screwed-up’ Clinton transition. ‘There are 14 Cabinet spots, and God only knows how many hundreds of people want them…They needed a Hispanic.’” Doesn’t seem from those comments that Daley has a whole lot of respect for Latinos in general, but we’ll see how it goes.