Daschle Postmortem

By Brian Beutler

Ezra Klein grapples with Tom Daschle’s withdrawal. I think there’s a lot of truth to what he writes. Whether Barack Obama actually pushed Daschle out behind the scenes or not, what you witnessed yesterday was a genuine manifestation of the idea that words matter. Obama promised change*, and just hoped everybody would ignore the giant asterisk. He set up two different definitions of vetting: One for people outside the family, who had to be squeaky clean, and one for people inside the family and people he was stuck with (Hillary), who didn’t. For the latter group, vetting meant digging up the embarrassing details of their pasts and then cooking up talking points in the event that the press sniffed some of it out. And that wasn’t going to fly forever.

Which isn’t to say Obama’s a huge hypocrite or just another corrupt hack. I think he was up against an extremely difficult task and began to feel the tension between setting up a working administration quickly and smoothly, and making sure all of its members met a standard of ethics that’s difficult to obtain in politics. He promised both, though, and so he had to deliver both–or at least appear to be trying to deliver both. Daschle made it look like he wasn’t even trying.

Someday, I’m sure, the real story will be revealed in someone’s memoir.

As an aside for those who reacted to the news by knocking the double standard that exists for Democratic and Republican appointees: I agree it’s frustrating. But that’s Democrats’ fault as much as it is anyone’s. If Democrats wanted to make a stink about Tommy Thompson or Hank Paulson, they should have, and the media would have followed. And on the flipside, if the progressive movement is at its core a project meant to bring progressive policies to the country, then at some point the hardball politics have to be for something, and its hard for me to imagine that rallying to the cause of a man who made his fortune by helping insurance companies game Washington is essential to the cause of health care reform in America.