

President Obama walked with David Simas at a NATO Summit in Lisbon, Portugal in 2010. Simas is of Portuguese descent. (Boston Globe)

The Obama White House named longtime aide David Simas as director of the new “Office of Political Strategy and Outreach.”

The Politico reported:

Democratic campaign operatives have been getting worried that the White House wasn’t doing enough to help them in the midterms, and that President Barack Obama didn’t care enough to change that.

Friday, Obama responded: David Simas, a longtime aide who returned to the White House after running polling and focus groups for the reelection campaign, was named director of a new Office of Political Strategy and Outreach.

The re-establishment of an internal political operation marks a significant shift for the White House, and the latest step in a 2014 West Wing reorientation that’s aimed at quickly making up for years of lost time, both on Capitol Hill and around the country.

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Repeatedly, in public and private, Obama has been calling the November elections a top priority. He knows what’s at stake: Democrats losing the Senate would mean a daily barrage of misery for him and the effective death of his agenda. Winning the House — long shot though it is — could allow him to completely transform his legacy in his final two years.

But one month into the year and a third of the way through the first fundraising quarter, Democratic operatives on campaigns and at the central campaign committees were still waiting to hear what that would amount to.