The last thing I'll say about Daschle

One Friday evening, when I was a staffer in the Texas Legislature, AT&T sponsored a little booze cruise on Town Lake in Austin. Open bar, food, music; a party for staffers. For some reason I couldn’t go – something kept me at work – but it wasn’t because I didn’t think it was ethical. I think most staffers didn’t think about the conflict of interest inherent in accepting what amounted to a gift, and those who did could shrug it off because of course nothing was asked of us, either explicitly or implicitly. But anyone who thought they wouldn’t feel obligated to sneak an AT&T lobbyist onto their boss’ schedule should the favor be asked for was, I think, kidding themselves.

I was just reading Harold Nicholson’s “Peacemaking 1919” for a class. Looking back from 1933 on the Paris Peace Conference, and trying to make sense of how they went so wrong when they started with such high-minded ideals, Nicholson writes “The historian, with every justification, will come to the conclusion that we were very stupid men. I think we were. Yet I also think that the factor of stupidity is inseparable from all human affairs. It is too often disregarded as an inevitable concomitant of human behavior; it is too often employed merely as a term of personal affront.”

Tom Daschle is a good man with the right ideals and ideas about what it means to be a public servant. I’m almost sure of it. But one of the biggest and most persistent fallacies that keeps a big democracy like ours from functioning properly is that when anti-democratic things happen it’s because people do irresponsible or unethical things, or because they intend to subvert the public interest.

The tax thing, as I’ve said, is pretty bewildering, but on its own probably shouldn’t have stopped his confirmation. The conflict of interest problem – having advised (and profited from) the companies who, as part of national health reform, must be convinced or forced to swallow some bitter pills – is the more problematic one. As much as I regret the blow to health reform and the loss of a high profile and influential champion, I think Obama is getting it right when he says that we can’t have two Americas, to borrow a phrase. The entrenchment of power in the hands of a ruling class – which is so much the cause of so many of our problems – is not dreamed of in shadowy places in the minds of bad men. It is the equilibrium condition of governments and those who run them and those who orbit around them; and it is what democracy was invented to combat. The rules are there not to protect us from the abuses of the worst, they are there to protect us from the abuses of the powerful. We’ve lost a good leader – the right person – in Tom Daschle, but this is probably the true face of change.