THE DAILY BLADE: Is Daschle’s Nomination DOA?
Tom Daschle, Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, may be that proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Timothy Geithner’s chiseling was overlooked by a Senate more driven by fear that they won’t be re-elected if their constituents are all jobless than by disgust that a man who consciously avoided paying his fair share of taxes for years will be running the I.R.S. Then Obama immediately made exceptions to his executive order barring lobbyists from the executive branch by tapping Raytheon lobbyist William J. Lynn III to be Deputy Secretary of Defense and anti-tobacco lobbyist William Corr as Deputy Secretary at Health and Human Services.
Daschle not only had serious - but innocent and unintentional, he claims - tax problems but he also has significant conflict of interest problems – as does Corr, his second-in-command. With Corr promising to recuse himself from matters involving such clients as UnitedHealth - which claims to provide private coverage to one in five Medicare recipients - how can the American public have any confidence that this duo will “finally deliver real health care reform for the American people" and will “do a superb job in helping us fix our healthcare system,” as Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and John Kerry (D-MA) insist?
Americans know that had a parade of Repub nominees been presented to the Senate with the baggage these men are carrying, none of them would have made it past the confirmation hearing – particularly when Daschle was the Dem Senate leader, notes The Wall Street Journal:
This one is going to be fascinating to watch, less for what it says about Mr. Daschle than what it will reveal about Democratic standards. Every Republican in America knows that if Mr. Daschle were a Reagan or Bush nominee he'd now be headed back to private life faster than you can say John Tower. That's the way Democrats have treated GOP nominees who were accused of far lesser transgressions than Mr. Daschle's tax, er, avoidance. The question is whether Democrats are going to treat Mr. Daschle according to the standard that Mr. Daschle set when he was running the Senate.
And what standard was that? Well, on taxes, you may recall that Mr. Daschle's Senate Democrats led the campaign against "Benedict Arnold corporations" that earn too much income overseas. …
Then there was the assault on legal tax shelters, led in the Daschle Senate by Democrat Carl Levin. The Levin hearings encouraged the Justice Department to prosecute employees who sold tax shelters for KPMG, though no tax court had found them illegal. Most of the KPMG charges were later thrown out of court …
If nothing else, a vote to confirm Mr. Daschle will expose the insincerity of Democratic tax populism.
You can bet on it. Finance Committee member Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) tells The New York Times, “We wish this didn’t happen, but [Obama’s] chosen such quality people that nobody minds taking a bit of an extra step to help get them in.” Well, several Repubs do seem to mind: In a CNN interview Sen. Susan Collins (ME) said "This is a legitimate issue. … It's an awful lot of money."
And more than a few were taken aback at the unseemly haste with which Daschle was able to monetize his insider status (“in just four years an influential former senator was able to make $5 million and live a lavish lifestyle by dint of his name, connections and knowledge of the town’s inner workings,” according to The New York Times). In this Washington Post op-ed, Slate.com contributor Emily Yoffe casts a gimlet eye on Daschle’s post-Senate career and wonders just what he did - exactly - to earn those big bucks:
Like many Americans whose steady, reliable job has suddenly disappeared, Thomas Daschle cobbled together a bunch of gigs when he was laid off in 2004 by the people of South Dakota after more than two decades of representing them in Congress.
There was the day job at the law firm Alston & Bird that must have been blessedly free of the kind of dull legal minutiae that make up many a billable hour, since Daschle is not a lawyer. That paid $2.1 million over the past two years. The consulting position at InterMedia Advisors, a private equity firm, paid him $1 million a year. A senior partner there told The Post that Daschle did "a lot of helpful work," which he declined to enumerate. A stream of speeches to businesses that had business with the government earned Daschle $500,000 during the past two years. There were directorships on several boards - BP Corp. alone paid him $250,000. …
[T]he really interesting question that arises from all this - What in the world did Tom Daschle do to earn all that money? - will probably be left unanswered.
The Second Coming
Both represent the triumph of passion over reason. Both are intolerant of dissent. Those wallowing in Bush hatred and those reveling in Obama euphoria frequently regard those who do not share their passion as contemptible and beyond the reach of civilized discussion. …
Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they thrive in and have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.
From the avalanche of vehement and ignorant attacks on Bush v. Gore and the oft-made and oft-refuted allegation that the Bush administration lied about WMD in Iraq, to the remarkable lack of interest in Mr. Obama's career in Illinois politics and the determined indifference to his wrongness about the surge, wide swaths of the media and the academy have concentrated on stoking passions rather than appealing to reason.
What Berkowitz calls euphoria could also be described as rapture – and it is bordering on religious, as evidenced by the series of drawings about Barack Obama’s inauguration by illustrator Maira Kalman published in The New York Times, the first one of which is titled “Hallelujah” and carries the caption, "The Angels are singing on this glorious day":
This is all getting to be altogether too much for The Heel, an Ivy-educated attorney and occasional contributor to this blog. With apologies to William Butler Yeats, he mocks Kalman and her ilk:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. …
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Washington to be born?
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz suggests that Obama can the holier-than-us bit, and stop making “pronouncements that range between the rational and the otherworldly.”
If there is one and only one nomination that ought to be voted down Tom D. is the one.
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I strongly recommend Marcia Angell, MD for HHS Secretary. She is a physician, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and now Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Angell is highly respected and has worked hard for ethics, scientific integrity, and health policy her entire career. In 1997, Time magazine named Marcia Angell one of the 25 most influential Americans.
Marcia is a supporter of women’s issues. Her book, Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case (1996) received critical acclaim.
Marcia is not afraid to speak out, and has criticized our current healthcare system and the pharmaceutical industry. She wrote the book: The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.
I can think of no better person to be HHS Secretary! She is eminently qualified, and would bring ethics and integrity to the office. If you agree, let Obama know at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ and ask your friends and colleagues to do the same.
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I love the hypocrisy, can I get a butter knife?
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