According to the exit polling from the 2010 election a plurality of voters — 35 percent —  felt Wall Street bankers were most to blame for our current economic problems. Only 29 percent thought George W. Bush was most to blame and only 24 percent thought that of Barack Obama

Blaming the Wall Street bankers was clearly the “centrist” position. Not surprisingly voters who blamed either president broke along partisan lines. Those who thought Wall Street was to blame leaned slightly toward Democrats at 41 percent and 57 percent leaned toward Republicans. This polling suggests Democrats suffered and will continue to suffer politically from voters perceiving them as too close to Wall Street.

With this in mind, note that President Obama has gone out of his way to show the American people that he really wants to follow the advice of Wall Street bankers when it comes to governing the country by choosing William Daley as his chief of staff.

Daley has served for years on JPMorgan Chase’s Executive Committee where he has been in charge of — not joking — “Corporate Responsibility.”

From a purely political perspective the optics of this choice are just terrible.

And yet the truth is that Obama has made a Wall Street banker his top advisor even though a plurality of voters blame their current economic hardship on Wall Street bankers.