Tom Daschle, Cheeseburgers, and the Future of Health Care

"In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger."

--Matt Taibbi, 12/2/2008

I hope Taibbi's jab is one of the quotes history will remember once L'affaire Daschle goes into the record books, and it isn't just because cheeseburgers are so fun to eat (even when the cheese is made of polyurethane as in the above photo).

First the basics of what happened, which obviously has to do with former Senator Tom Daschle's withdrawal from consideration as Health and Human Services Secretary and overall health care czar to the Obama administration. Despite his tax problems, most assumed Daschle would get through the confirmation process, in part because he is friends with two-thirds of the Senate. But the negative stories kept coming, and apparently a New York Times editorial led Daschle to conclude that the controversy would only get worse and that it was necessary to step aside (he deserves credit for that I suppose).

Right now most of the attention is focused on what a blow this is to Obama, and undoubtedly there is signicant truth to that. Obama has already admitted that he "screwed up" with respect to the Daschle appointment, and the national political conversation is now off the crucial topic of the stimulus package and on to concerns about ethics and transparency in the new administration. The whole vetting process is now being called into question given the past problems with Tim Geithner and Bill Richardson, and any future issues with Obama appointees will only add to that.

Additionally, the Obama people are now working without a script when it comes to health care, one of their key campaign issues. It seems it was decided quite some time ago that Daschle would spearhead the push for health care change, and as David Axelrod has admitted, “there was no Plan B." The New York Times suggests that his withdrawal "could slow the president’s drive to reshape the nation’s health care system as the White House searches for a replacement."



But back to the delicious quote from Matt Taibbi and to the other reason Daschle withdrew beyond the tax problems. I'm sure like most others, I had paid little or no attention to Daschle's career after his 2004 loss in his Senate re-election campaign, but he seems to have been utterly shameless in his efforts to profit off of his political connections once the voters of South Dakota rejected him.

Glenn Greenwald's brief on the activities of Daschle and his wife makes for sobering reading, particularly since the former has made a point of peddling his influence to the health care industry. As Taibbi wrote in December, by picking Daschle "Obama is essentially announcing that he has no intention of seriously reforming the health care industry." Progressives have been increasingly angry about the nomination in the last couple of days as a result of these revelations, and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich (who thinks Daschle would have been effective) has referenced a "populist revolt" among Americans facing job loss and debt who understandably don't have any sympathy for a dude with his own chauffeur.

Folks like Reich who think Daschle would have done well say it's his deep connections in industry and in government that would have allowed him to get the job done in terms of reforming health care. Maybe, but I'm fairly skeptical of that and tend to agree with one writer at The Health Care Blog who noted that Daschle "had a structural conflict of interest that would have made it very difficult for him to do his job" and "that any effort to pursue serious health care reform this year would run into allegations that his financial relationships influenced the administration's decisions."

Obviously the attention now turns to who Obama will nominate for HHS secretary and health care czar in the White House (the positions will now likely be split). Many progressive are hoping for Howard Dean, but that seems exceedingly unlikely given his reputation for partisanship, his poor relationship with Rahm Emanuel, and the fact that "the scream" from his 2004 campaign is still on videotape as far as I know.

Sam Stein's suggestion that former presidential candidate Bill Bradley is a likely choice is an interesting one. It would probably be a relative crowd pleaser (I myself vastly preferred Bradley to Gore in 2000 as did many on the left) and Bradley knows a thing or two about DC politics. I'm not sure where he's at with health care these days, but his plan back in 2000 was pretty not so good. If he appointed Bradley, however, Obama would get to make a fun joke about how he just wanted someone to play basketball with, and that opportunity for humor in these grim economic times perhaps in and of itself makes him a good choice.