Steven Pearlstein Illuminates "the Other Side of the Daschle Coin"
Stumbling on Their Sense of Entitlement By Steven Pearlstein Wednesday, February 4, 2009; D01 Tom Daschle still doesn't get it. John Thain never did. Barack Obama gets it sometimes, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner not so much. Corporate executives think they get it but aren't even close. College presidents, governors and union leaders, for the most part, don't have a clue. "It" is an understanding of how fundamentally the political and economic environment has been transformed with the bursting of the bubble economy and how that has jeopardized basic assumptions and expectations and the way we do what we do. Tom Daschle's problem wasn't that he didn't pay his taxes.
It was that he -- along with those who vetted his nomination as health and human services secretary and many of his colleagues in the Senate -- found it perfectly ordinary and acceptable that he would be able to cash in on his time in the Senate by earning more than $5 million over two years as a law-firm rainmaker, equity fundraiser, corporate director and luncheon speaker, all the while being driven around town in a chauffeured town car. Not exactly Cincinnatus returning to the plow.
____________________________________________________ Not much I can add to this perceptively written article, except to encourage you to read the whole thing. Unlike Pearlstein, I'm not entirely sure the American public is yet angry enough to take back the current levers of power. Just a thought. Read the piece--it's worth the read.