Early questions in promised change
For someone who made such fanfare about changing Washington, President Obama isn't exactly off to an auspicious start. Ideologically, he put together an interesting mix of cabinet choices, but upon closer scrutiny, at least four of those choices have disclosed serious ethical and legal lapses.
The most serious, of course, is the former Senate majority leader acknowledging that he somehow didn't realize hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free limousine services from a "good friend" amounted to a material gift that needed to be reported for income tax purposes - to the tune of nearly $150,000. In retrospect, it's hard to know which is more disturbing - that Tom Daschle didn't pay taxes he owed or that, as one of the top leaders of the body that writes and approves tax law, he didn't know he owed the money. Mercifully for Obama, he withdrew himself from consideration Tuesday.
Sadly, though, Daschle is not the only notable Obama nominee to depart under an ethics cloud. Nancy Killefer, whom Obama had selected as his chief performance officer, also withdrew after it was disclosed that she had not paid payroll taxes on a member of her household staff. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Obama's nominee for commerce secretary, was the first to withdraw, he because of an investigation involving a state contract awarded to a political donor. Timothy Geithner was approved as the nation's treasury secretary but not before his own income tax problem surfaced - another case in which you would expect someone vying to be the nation's No. 1 financial officer to know better.
In other circumstances, it might be a mere curiosity that Hillary Clinton's nomination sailed so quickly through the Senate despite cursory questions about her husband's potential conflict of interest, but with all these new revelations, one begins to wonder.
In short, it all adds up to serious questions for the Obama administration. One, it has a job to do to explain how, in an era of supposed change in governmental approach, it has turned to so many icons from the past it claims to be eager to leave behind. More important, it should be ready to answer for its seemingly shoddy process of vetting its nominees. Either the administration's team was sloppy in its background investigations or it didn't care about the lapses it found. Neither case speaks well of the administration.
Obama seems to recognize this. Responding to Daschle's withdrawal, he told NBC News he "screwed up" and had to "own up to my mistake". That's a good start, but - like his cabinet itself - it's only a start.
In building his team of advisers and policy makers, President Obama has done a good job of blending ideologies and developing a group that should not be a mere rubber stamp of his own political and social views - including his announcement of Sen. Judd Gregg, the second Republican on his cabinet, to replace Richardson. But with so many of his cabinet nominees already demonstrating questionable judgment on serious legal and ethical grounds, he still has much to prove if he is to convince us that he means what he says about changing the way government works.