OS ANGELES - In 1976, when the national Democrats were moving to mend decade-old divisions, Jim Wall, a soft-spoken editor of Christian Century and the Illinois chairman for Jimmy Carter, approached the omnipotent mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, about arranging an alliance with the candidate from Georgia.
''Work it out with Willie,'' the mayor told Wall.
''I didn't know who `Willie' was,'' Wall said the other day, recalling the 24-year-old conversation. ''But when I found out, `Willie' was a very shrewd organizer and a pragmatist.''
''Willie'' was Bill Daley, the mayor's son, and young ''Willie'' helped forge an unlikely relationship between the Chicago machine and the Carter campaign that endured for several years.
These days, Daley, now 52, is working things out as Vice President Al Gore's campaign manager.
From the time he was handing out political leaflets for the machine in Chicago's 11th Ward and traveling with his family to the 1960 national convention here, life seemed to be preparing Daley for the task. After his father's death at the end of 1976, he labored for a dozen years in the venomous politics of Chicago to ensure that his brother, Richard M. Daley, eventually became mayor. Though he submerged his own personal ambitions, Bill Daley's work on his brother's behalf attracted national attention.
''He's the best strategic manager I've ever seen,'' said David Wilhelm, one of Bill Clinton's top aides in 1992. ''He has tremendous political instincts. He's able to look at data and impose structure on a campaign.''
Daley laughs at some of the praise. For his first campaign, he handled his brother's race for a minor party post in their Bridgeport neighborhood in 1969. ''It was not a very difficult race,'' he said. ''Rich was the only candidate.'' When he helped manage Walter F. Mondale's effort in the 1984 Florida primary, Daley remembered, he watched his candidate sink almost overnight from a 20-point lead in the polls to a double-digit loss.
Although the Irish-Catholic Daleys were once closely associated with the Kennedys, Bill Daley led the family organization into conflict with Senator Edward M. Kennedy during a bitter feud in 1980. After Mayor Jane Byrne, regarded by the Daleys as a pretender to their throne, threw her support to Kennedy in the presidential campaign, the Daleys again sided with Carter. The move helped send Kennedy to a critical defeat in the Illinois primary.
His toughest defeat as a manager, Daley said, was his brother's third-place finish in a race to reclaim the mayor's office for the family in 1983. ''The campaign turned on race, and it got pretty ugly,'' he said. Though Daley helped drive Byrne from office, a black Democrat, Harold Washington, prevailed that year. But by the time of Washington's death in 1987, Bill Daley had built the blocks for a Daley restoration, and Rich Daley has presided over the city without major challenge since 1989.
Defeat never deterred Bill Daley. He was deeply involved in Senator Joseph Biden's star-crossed campaign for the 1988 Democratic nomination. Despite the embarrassing outcome, Biden of Delaware has nothing but good memories of Daley. ''He's got an inner gyroscope,'' Biden said. ''He always asks the right questions, and nothing stupid ever happens on his watch.''
After Biden dropped out of the race, a young senator from Tennessee named Al Gore asked Daley ''to play a big role'' in his own unsuccessful campaign for the '88 nomination. ''I just wasn't ready to do it,'' Daley said in an interview last week.
Daley never developed a cozy relationship with either Bill Clinton or Gore in 1992, but he was a loyal party soldier in Illinois. As a result, Daley was interviewed for a Cabinet post in the first Clinton administration. But the job of housing secretary went to Henry Cisneros instead of Daley, and a new term entered the lexicon at the Clinton White House. If a white male were passed over in favor of a woman or a black or a Latino, he was ''Daleyed.''
Daley swallowed his disappointment, and after Clinton asked him to come to Washington and manage his effort to win passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, he helped steer the treaty through the shoals of organized labor's opposition. He won the president's gratitude and solidified his standing by running a successful 1996 convention in Chicago.
With his brother safely ensconced as mayor, Daley became commerce secretary in Clinton's second term, presiding this year over the passage of a controversial China trade bill over union protest.
Asked about his relationship with labor unions, a key element in the Democratic coalition, Daley said, ''I think it's real good.'' Referring to the head of the AFL-CIO, he continued: ''If you talk to John Sweeney and those guys, I think you'd see it's all right. I ran the only bank in Chicago that was unionized.''
When asked to take over Gore's operation earlier this summer, Daley characteristically agreed to give up his Cabinet seat and move to Nashville for the duration of the campaign. But once it is over, he said, he will have no thirst to go back into governent. ''I'd like to go into some form of business,'' he said. ''Probably in Chicago.''
