I think most of us would agree, ungodly is an understatement.

(Politico) — It is a sunny day at the White House with bright light streaming through the gauzy curtains that cover the patio doors and many windows of Bill Daley’s corner office in the West Wing. And so I try to find some underlying gloom.

Daley, the White House chief of staff, will twice in the course of our hourlong interview refer to the first three years of Barack Obama’s administration as “ungodly” and once as “brutal.”

So do you think, I ask, that President Obama would be satisfied saying, “We did a good job, we did good stuff,” and if he’s a one-term president, “That’s the verdict of history”?

“Nope, no, absolutely not!” Daley begins, shaking his head and then growing more outraged at the thought of a single term entering the president’s mind. “I think he’d be angry! Pissed! Unhappy! Frustrated! No, if somebody said yes to that, that would be crazy.”

But the polls stink.

“Considering the debacle that he came in with, the tough choices he’s made and how there have been few, if any breaks, he says it himself all the time,” Daley says. “He doesn’t know why he’s as high as 44 percent.”

That is due to many factors, Daley says, and he starts reeling them off: trying to stimulate the economy; trying to save the auto industry; trying to increase the debt ceiling; passing health care legislation; fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and dealing with Syria, North Korea, Egypt and Iran. To name a few.

“It’s been a brutal three years,” he says. “It’s been a very, very difficult three years, an incredible three years. And we are doing all this under the overhang of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. F—k! It wasn’t like all this was happening in good times.”