Behind Obama's salmon joke: serious business

WASHINGTON - It was a big laugh line in President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech: "The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater. I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked."

Behind the joke was an ambitious promise to tame and reorganize segments of the federal bureaucracy. If Obama's new chief of staff, Bill Daley, wields any influence, a primary target will be Commerce.

Its 38,000 employees oversee a diverse portfolio, from helping businesses and conducting the census to providing accurate weather forecasts and granting patents and trademark protection.

Daley knows the department inside and out. He ran it during the Clinton administration.

Early last month, before Obama named Daley as his top aide, a Democratic-leaning think tank that has been a source of many Obama administration policy ideas laid out a plan to streamline the Commerce Department and sharpen its focus on making U.S. businesses more competitive - the new clarion call at the White House.

Seated with the leaders of the Center for American Progress that day was Daley, who once observed that because the department oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the commerce chief "spent 60 percent of his time dealing with fish." Indeed, Daley provided the salmon anecdote to the White House, just as he did earlier to center researchers who included it in their Dec. 1 report. - AP