So, Tom Daschle has withdrawn, as has Nancy Killefer, both for reason having to do largely with tax evasion issues and other legally questionable practices. Timothy Geithner made it under the wire, though most people admitted that in normal times he might not have made it. Gov. Richardson never even made it to the inauguration. They're falling like flies. 

What does this prove, if anything? It proves that our tax code is absurdly complex, hard to understand, tempting to evade and in dire need of radical simplification. I have never been particularly fond of Mr. Daschle, but the whole idea that he could owe more than $250,000 just for the use of a car service seems absurd on the face of it. As for Nancy Killefer, I sympathize with anyone who has to deal with DC government bureaucrats over anything, let alone taxes.

The bigger picture, however, is even more frustrating. I believe President Obama has been sincere all along in wanting to attack the transactional K-Street politics that has destroyed good government in this country. But I think he has been terribly naive in supposing that just changing the ethics laws and banning lobbyists from an administration could really solve the problem. 

Had he understood better what the real situation was, and here a new book by Robert G. Kaiser of the Washington Post, So Damned Much Money, might be illuminating, he would have known that a stimulus package could not avoid getting tangled up in the web of lobbyists who pollute this city. The talk here in town has been about whether a stimulus package could simultaneously be used to jump-start some needed reform. Rahm Emanuel has supposedly captured this advance spirit by commenting on how it's a sin to let a crisis go unused. That's the wrong question. The issue is not whether a bill can stimulate job-creation and jump-start reform simultaneously, but whether it can stimulate job-creation and strangle the transactional morass simultaneously. Apparently, it can't. Apparently, some of the would-be stranglers need to be strangled themselves.

As for jump-starting real reform, whether in education, energy policy, health policy and so forth, what really stands forth from what we've seen in the past few weeks is that the Democratic members of our political class have no new ideas. And that includes the President, as I've said before. Almost nothing in the stimulus package that is supposed to be reform-engendering is new, and way too much of it may be fairly described as rancid old pork. What have these people been doing for eight years in opposition, anyway, that when their chance to make a difference in the midst of a crisis lands right in their lap, they can't think their way out of a Seven-Eleven?

It's not because there aren't ideas out there either. Liberal think-tanks and magazines have had and have propagated some good ideas over recent years, and some centrist and conservative groups have done so, too. The American Interest, for example, has promoted the idea of a Baby Bond-Service culture, along with CityYear and others. Now that's an idea that would really make a difference, sort of like a second GI Bill but wider and bigger. There are lots of ideas out there, some of them well developed and promising--why doesn't President Obama or the Democratic leadership in the Congress seem to know about them? Don't they read? This I find a lot more disturbing, and depressing, than what has happened to Mr. Daschle, Ms. Killefer and may happen to still others.