WILLIAM DALEY TO STEP DOWN AS OBAMA’S CHIEF OF STAFF: “Budget director Jack Lew is taking over the President Obama’s team as it heads into a tough election year, senior administration officials say,” the L.A. Times reports. “Daley gave his letter of resignation to the president in a private meeting in the Oval Office last week, recounting the administration’s successes of his one year on the job and saying it was time for him to return to his hometown of Chicago.”

Which successes were those?

Meanwhile, Ace asks, “So… no adult in the room again, huh?”

FLASHBACK: Jim Geraghty tweets a link to this New York magazine profile of Obama after the midterms:

Emanuel’s ad-hocracy, meanwhile, didn’t faze Obama. The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.”

Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter.

Or as Joshua Green of Business Week tweets today, “Obama rapidly approaching Michele Bachmann-level of # of CoS.”

UPDATE: Thanks to Daley’s resignation, Heather Higginbottom, “appointee blocked for 10 months by GOP for lack of qualifications” is now in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, Amanda Carpenter tweets.