The withdrawal of Tom Daschle's nomination to head Health and Human Services is a serious setback. This was an Obama appointment I had liked very much, because Daschle untypically combines real expertise on health policy with years of Congressional experience. I had also liked the way Obama had named him top White House adviser on health as well as head of the lead agency--thus avoiding the problem of overlapping or ambiguous authority that one sees developing in economic and foreign policy. Daschle, it seemed to me, was the very man to get things done. Perhaps he is out altogether; perhaps he will be retained as an adviser, and will have to work with whoever gets the job he wanted. In either case, not good.
The New York Times's hard line may have had something to do with it. The paper had also rounded on Tim Geithner, as you may recall, but in that case did not explicitly call for the nominee to be ditched.
Another unhelpful development, from Daschle's point of view: this morning Nancy Killefer withdrew as a candidate for a top job at OMB and "chief performance officer" for the administration--citing tax issues concerning her domestic help. (She is a finance expert who had led an effort to modernise the IRS in the Clinton administration. Subsequently, as a member of the IRS oversight board, she called for more to be spent on bringing cases against high-income tax cheats.) One oddity here is that her seemingly trivial tax issue has been public for weeks. Perhaps there was more.
The problems of Democrats and their difficulty over paying taxes have become the most memorable theme of this transition. The jokes write themselves and much of the derision is well-deserved. But I'm dismayed by Daschle's downfall.
To admit mishandling should be a sure sign of reform / change, I think. There can be a great number of qualified candidates out there.
Let's right now audit everyone in Congress, and out them all for those silly little omissions that every one of them has made at one point or another in their tax returns over the last 20 years. Then give each outed Congressman a choice: (1) admit your malfeasance and resign from office or (2) admit that the tax code was too complex for you to understand, scrap the current system wholesale and adopt a tax system (like a national sales tax) that the biggest idiot could accidentally comply with.
Maybe Tom Daschle should have spent the last couple of years some other way than enriching himself based on his contacts and know-how. The taxes are one issue, but the new image of him as a man just out for money have destroyed his previous sensible image for me. If Obama wants to change the culture of Washington, it turns out that Tom Daschle is a poster child for that culture.