Remember Mr. Nice Guy's "Republicans in the back seat?" "We won?" The GOP was told in 2009, in no uncertain terms, that they weren't part of the picture any more, and cheering Democrats were celebrating what they hoped would be a generation of single-party rule.

"Three years?" Aren't you forgetting two of them?

Two years where Obama got his own way on almost everything in legislation, and the only real opposition he got was generated by people in his own party who wouldn't go along with it?

Obama didn't want or need a "reach out" before the election of 2010. Which is exactly when Daley was hired, January 2011.

Do try to remember Obama's first chief of staff during those first two years: Rahm "Rahmbo" Emanuel, whose primary characteristic was "reaching out" and coming back with one of your organs in his hand. A partisan political hit-man who has left to be anointed Mayor of the Democratic Republic of Chicago.

Now there's Jack Lew, and good Democrats will wipe his history out of their brain as obediently as they do everything else.

Imagine their response to a Republican picking a Chief of Staff who made money at Citigroup on the housing collapse.