Dasching* Obama's Hopes for a Change

Courtesy Instapundit, an article from the LA Times on The wondrous ways Obama's Washington works--and doesn't get it.

Ask anyone in, say, Sparks, Neb., if they think it's OK for someone who didn't pay $34,000 taxes over several years to be in charge of the Internal Revenue Service because he's so smart, good with finances and familiar to power brokers. And, after he's caught, everyone agrees he didn't really mean to do it. (Also ask them if they think they'd get away with the unintentional excuse in their own tax case defense.)

Ask anyone in central Indiana if it passes the smell test that a defeated senator immediately gets hired for $1 million a year plus free car and driver to advise a guy who's already very rich and then makes about $5 million in two years from industries doing business with the federal government, including one he's now asked to reform by a new president who's been elected as an avowed reformer.

Even Obama, the Great Change Agent who's keeping his home on Chicago's South Side and spent most of his partial Senate term outside Washington campaigning for a different job, didn't see or smell the hypocrisy in that. Obama was all over TV last night doing the stand-up (and politically savvy) thing to cauterize the wound, accepting full responsibility for the Tom Daschle Cabinet fiasco.

The article makes clear that it is not entirely The Messiah's fault; that is, the fact that he swore "No lobbyists in my cabinet" and then appointed ten or more, that he has lost three appointees to tax dodges, but one tax-dodger slipped through to be appointed to be the head of the tax-dodger-hunters--those things are his fault, and his responsibility, but Washington DC ("The Other Washington" we call it out here) has been like this for a long time.

In fact, while it is common to moan about "The 24-Hour News Cycle" and how it drives events, the article also points out that, even ten years ago, Daschle probably would have been appointed anyway, rather than becoming such an obvious case of "someone screwed up" that he had to step down.

Also note that what he stepped down for, and what Obama says was the "mistake" that was made, was Daschle's "being a distraction", not any wrong-doing.

This is not the Change I was Hoping for.


*Get it? Daschle? Dasching? Sometimes I just crack me up...