WASHINGTON — Nobody got fired — at least, not outright — when William M. Daley arrived in Nashville in the summer of 2000 to impose order on Al Gore ’s foundering presidential campaign. Aides were bickering, the candidate seemed demoralized and strategy sessions had deteriorated into what Chris Lehane, a Gore adviser, called a “salon-like atmosphere” of endless talk and no decisions. 
 
 In marched Mr. Daley as campaign chairman, with his crisp suits and management style to match, fresh from Washington, where he had stepped down as commerce secretary to President Bill Clinton. Suddenly, strategy sessions topped out at 30 minutes. Decisions were made, and adhered to. And once Mr. Daley sized people up, some discovered they had, ahem, fresh assignments. 
 
 “He was and is a bare-knuckles administrator, and by that I mean someone who not only makes the trains run on time, he makes them run ahead of time,” Mr. Lehane said. “He walked into a situation where there were disparate voices and disparate viewpoints and he quickly brought order to the house. He held people accountable. He was not afraid to make decisions.” 
 
 Now Mr. Daley — lawyer, business executive, campaign strategist, scion of Chicago’s famed political dynasty and President Obama’s new chief of staff — will bring his discipline and critical eye to the White House, which many Democrats say is in need of fresh blood. Blunt yet charming, he is a skilled negotiator and smoother around the edges than his older brother Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, or his in-your-face predecessor, Rahm Emanuel. 
 
 “He’s tough, but he’s not a bully,” said Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who relied on Mr. Daley as an “adviser and a troubleshooter” when he ran for president in 1984. 
 
 Mr. Daley takes over next week from the interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, one of Mr. Obama’s most trusted advisers; on Friday, they attended a White House senior staff meeting together for a torch passing of sorts. Mr. Daley is unlikely to engineer a wholesale remaking of the White House, and is likely to move cautiously at first. 
 
 “His nature is not to rush things,” said Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader. 
 
 But Mr. Daley has been openly critical of some administration decisions, and he is expected to make significant changes in both tone and substance. 
 
 Unlike the exceedingly shy Mr. Rouse, who disdains the press, Mr. Daley will be a face of the administration, serving as a “public surrogate” for Mr. Obama in meetings and on television, said David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser. 
 
 Mr. Obama has other jobs to fill — the deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina, is leaving, as is the press secretary, Robert Gibbs — and Mr. Daley may prod the president to reach beyond his inner circle. He has told associates he would like to see a woman as press secretary. Many Democrats expect David Lane, who was Mr. Daley’s chief of staff at the Commerce Department and currently runs ONE, the antipoverty global advocacy group, to join him at the White House. 
 
 “Will he bring some people in? I’m sure that he will,” said Mr. Axelrod, who is also leaving. He said Mr. Daley would build on “the very strong core here.” 
 
 It has been widely reported that Mr. Obama was seeking Mr. Daley, a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, to strengthen ties with business. But Democrats close to the president say Mr. Obama was also looking for a skilled manager. And for all the talk of Mr. Daley’s centrist bent — liberals are up in arms over his assertions that Democrats must “move to the center” and that Mr. Obama “miscalculated on health care” — those who know him well say he is more pragmatist than ideologue. 
 
 As President Clinton’s “Nafta czar,” Mr. Daley helped shepherd the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress — a crowning achievement of the Clinton administration but one that still rankles liberals and union leaders. Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, the Illinois Democrat who had relied on Mr. Daley to raise money for his first Congressional campaign, fought him on it. After the vote, they never spoke of Nafta again. Mr. Daley had moved on. 
 
 “He thinks about the moment, and how he can overcome the obstacle of the moment,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “I see him as the kind of person who gets to the office, and says, ‘That pile of paper won’t be there at the end of the day, I’m going to take care of it.’ And at the end of the day, his work is done.” 
 
 At 62, Mr. Daley is the youngest of seven children of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley and his wife, known as Sis. He might have been the baby of the family, but did not carry himself that way, said his brother John, a Cook County commissioner. “He would try to lead people along — he just seemed older,” John Daley said. 
 
 In Chicago, Mr. Daley, who goes by Bill, is sometimes called “the brains of the Daley family” for his political acumen. In 1983, after Richard was trounced in his first campaign for mayor, Mr. Daley recognized the family could not win solely on the strength of its name and contacts. He brought in Mr. Axelrod for the next campaign. 
 
 “It was Bill who kind of technocratized the Daley operation,” said Ric Munoz, a Chicago city alderman. And while Mr. Daley remains a close adviser to his brother — “They don’t make any big-picture decisions without each other,” Mr. Munoz said — he has maintained enough distance to be spared criticism over the family’s well-greased political machine. 
 
 “He’s not on the whole been organizing patronage work or getting contracts for cronies excessively,” said Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman and longtime critic of the Daleys. “It’s not that he’s not part of that world, he’s just not at City Hall doing it.” 
 
 Politics may be in his genes, but Mr. Daley has never run for elective office, though he did consider a bid for Illinois governor in 2001. He had just gotten divorced (he recently remarried) and felt the timing was not right for his family. And he feared voters would not tolerate an expansion of the Daley political empire. 
 
 Mickey Kantor, a close friend who preceded Mr. Daley as commerce secretary, said he suspected Mr. Daley enjoyed having “the freedom that being in public office doesn’t allow you.” 
 
 Now Mr. Daley will give up a certain measure of freedom — not to mention his banker’s income, estimated at up to $5 million annually — to apply his political skills on behalf of the president. Although he backed Mr. Obama and advised his transition, the two have never been close. But Mr. Daley is close to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; he worked on Mr. Biden’s short-lived 1988 presidential bid. 
 
 As chief of staff, he will keep one eye on Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign and the other on governing, including helping the president forge new alliances in a divided Congress. 
 
 During the Nafta debate, Mr. Daley helped deliver more than 100 Democratic votes — a feat some thought impossible. David E. Bonior, a former Democratic congressman from Michigan who led the opposition to the pact, recalls how Mr. Daley outmaneuvered him. 
 
 “He just found out what people’s interests were, what they needed in terms of their districts,” Mr. Bonior said. “He was very good at getting what he needed done at our expense.” 

 The appointment of Bill Daley to the top staff job in the Obama White House has dealt the final blow to a dearly held fantasy of parts of the left: that a truly liberal president has been ill-served and misinterpreted by Rahm Emanuel and other center-right aides. 
 
 The sounds of hearts finally breaking come from key quadrants of the Democratic Party — labor, ethnic groups and the gay community — who had tried to convince themselves for two years that President Barack Obama was still the liberal crusader they had come to believe he was during the 2008 campaign; it was just that his West Wing staff wouldn’t let Obama be Obama. 
 
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 With the ascension of a renowned centrist and Clinton administration veteran to the post as White House chief of staff, the left now finally acknowledges that Obama’s decisions are actually being made by Obama — and they seem to veer perilously toward the center time and time again. 
 
 “First, when progressives were disappointed, they blamed it on Rahm. Then (interim chief of staff Pete) Rouse came in and they had the same problems,” said one senior labor official. “It’s going to be the same thing with Daley, but folks don’t see the point in trashing him, because it’s going to be the same pattern [of] decisions from the top.” 
 
 “There’s a sense of resignation and fatalism,” the official said. 
 
 Since Obama’s campaign for president, a debate has raged in progressive circles — as on the right — about who he really is. Elements of his biography and his style — his roots as a community organizer, his early romance with Chicago Mayor Harold Washington (an independent and a liberal), and above all his opposition to the Iraq war — made him easy to see as a man of the left, the heir of George McGovern, not Bill Clinton. 
 
 His Democratic primary rivals, led by former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, and some liberal bloggers, made the case in vain that Obama was clearly positioning himself as a conciliatory man of the center, not a hero of the left. But his core of support among left-leaning elements of the party — young people and African-Americans — cemented the perception in some circles that he was a liberal Democrat, and conservative commentators worked overtime to make the label stick. 
 
 But for progressives, Obama’s presidency has often brought little beside heartache. In his first two years, he took health care and other policies as far left as he thought Joe Lieberman and other Senate moderates would let him — but made no effort to transform the nation with his bully pulpit, or to turn the power of the presidency into an ideological tool. Daley, meanwhile, has been urging Obama to the right since 2009, when he called on the president to pursue a “more moderate, centrist course” or risk electoral disaster. And he personally embodies the strain of conservative, white ethnic, urban Democratic Party politics that Obama’s Hyde Park circle once disdained.
– William Daley has terms like "longtime Democratic operative," "former Clinton secretary of commerce" and "Chicago political scion" thrown about him, but the New York Times takes a closer look at President Obama's new right-hand guy. He's “a bare-knuckles administrator ... someone who not only makes the trains run on time, he makes them run ahead of time,” says a veteran of the foundering Gore campaign Daley was called in to resuscitate. “He quickly brought order to the house. He held people accountable.” Daley's the guy who delivered NAFTA, securing some 100 Democratic votes against steep odds in a show of political savvy remarkable for someone who's never held elective office (even though he's known as "the brains" of the Daley political machine). Insiders tell the Times that he's more pragmatist than idealogue, but Politico makes the case that Daley's appointment has finally broken liberals' hearts and illusions that Obama was a left-winger masquerading as a centrist.