True North

After another Obama administration nominee has withdrawn her name from consideration because she failed to pay her taxes, my question is whether the vetters thought that cheating on your taxes was preferable. Another question I have is whether there's a different standard applied to high profile cabinet choices (like Timothy Geithner and Tom Daschle) than to lower profile cabinet nominees (like Nancy Killefer).

Nancy Killefer, who failed for a year and a half to pay employment taxes on household help, has withdrawn her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer for the federal government, the White House said Tuesday. Killefer was the second major Obama administration nominee to withdraw and the third to have tax problems complicate their nomination after President Barack Obama announced their selection.

The White House said Obama had accepted Killefer's decision and that the 55-year-old executive with consulting giant McKinsey & Co., would explain her reasons for pulling out later Tuesday.

When her selection was announced by Obama on Jan. 7, The Associated Press disclosed that in 2005 the District of Columbia government had filed a $946.69 tax lien on her home for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help. Since then, administration officials have refused to answer questions about the tax error which she resolved five months after the lien was filed.

Then President-Elect Obama talked about an administration that was long on personal responsibility, ethics and integrity. Instead of getting that, the Obama administration is becoming a haven of tax cheats. A sarcastic argument could be made that cheating on your taxes is a resume-enhancer with Obama's vetters.

Remember Speaker-Elect Pelosi's claim that the 110th Congress would be the most open and most ethical Congress in history? That quickly vanished. President Obama's promise to run an ethical administration are quickly becoming as extinct as the passenger pigeon and Ms. Pelosi's promise to run an open, ethical congress.

Last night, Hannity interviewed Dick Morris. They talked about Mark McKinnon's column in which he said that every day that the current stimulus bill is out there for the public's examination, the more that legislation starts stinking "like a rotting corpse." That's certainly an accurate appraisal of the less-than-stimulating stimulus bill but it's an accurate appraisal of what happens each time President Obama nominates a tax cheat.

A couple of weeks ago, I said that President Obama would, for the first time in his life, be appraised on what he did, not on his blank slate of accomplishments and his image. Fairly or unfairly, he now owns the stimulus bill. It's fair that he owns the cabinet picks who didn't pay taxes until they were picked for a cabinet secretary's position or who short-circuited the pardons process to free terrorists.

If this continues much longer, people will question whether President Obama's image of being the first postpartisan president isn't just smoke and mirrors.

Comments welcome at LFR.