In a Politico profile, White House chief of staff Bill Daley describes what the president needs to do to get reelected, and the bar appears pretty high. In speaking with Roger Simon, Daley, who plans on leaving his post whether the president wins or loses in 2012, added a little levity when describing the president's slumping poll numbers ("He doesn’t know why he’s as high as 44 percent," he joked) and offered this candid assessment of winning in 2012:

“It’s been a brutal three years,” he says. “It’s been a very, very difficult three years, an incredible three years. And we are doing all this under the overhang of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. F—k! It wasn’t like all this was happening in good times.”

But good times — well, better times — are possible before November 2012, Daley says. And all President Obama has to do to achieve this is make a startling end run around not just the Republicans but also the Democrats, in Congress.

All he has to do, Daley says, is operate in domestic affairs with the same speed, power and independence that he possesses in foreign and military affairs.

That’s all.

So, to get reelected, Obama would need to conjure up the stateside equivalent of, among other things: 1) Making the call to take out Osama bin-Laden. 2) Bringing home all troops from Iraq by the holidays. 3) Helping to depose a trenchant dictator in Libya without a prolonged American occupation.

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Erik Hayden