Bronx Resident Picked To Run America

Liberal budget director Jack Lew replacing moderate Bill Daley.

Image by Jonathan Ernst / AP

The Los Angeles Times broke the news today that budget director Jack Lew — a low-key, liberal veteran accustomed to the inside game — will replace White House Chief of Staff, a high-profile moderate who never quite fit into the Obama White House.

A little known fact about Lew: He lives with his wife in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and commutes for the week to Washington.

From the POLITICO profile:

Lew, by contrast, is unusually private for a Cabinet member. He lets on reluctantly that he has two grown children, one in New York and one in Washington (and no more detail). It is not widely known that he continues to commute from the prosperous but unglamorous Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale, though he also keeps an apartment in Washington.

Lew grew up, though, as a political activist, not a budgeteer. His roots in local politics are deep, and he spent high school in the trenches of the local reform Democratic movement, before enrolling at Carleton College in Minnesota, where his faculty adviser was a political scientist named Paul Wellstone.