At very least, this ongoing saga goes to show that you simply can’t run for the highest office in the land on a platform of exceptionless adherence to the Rule of Law and purer-than-the-driven-snow ethicality, and then implement that promise on a “well, it’s [supposedly] better than the last guy” basis. Is that business as usual? Absolutely. However, President Obama didn’t run for office on a platform of “business as usual”; rather, he ran on a platform of revolutionizing the entire Washington world, and leaving scandals and errors like these behind forever.

Reading the arguments presented by those defending now-withdrawn HHS nominee Tom Daschle by saying “He only broke the law once, and I really like his policies, so we should ignore that,” and defending Obama by claiming that a better record than the one they assign George W. Bush is the only bar he need clear, is a source of a good bit of humor for me (as an aside, does anybody here remember how many Bush appointees had to withdraw from consideration due to cheating on their taxes or being implicated in pay-to-play scandals? I didn’t think so).

As far as the message this sends about President Obama’s supposed commitment to remaking Washington culture and establishing the “strictest ethics policy in the history of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” as Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs likes to say: This third withdrawal from consideration of a high-profile staff choice, combined with the seventeen-plus exceptions to his own “lobbyists won’t find a job in my White House” rule, appear to confirm that all of the ethics and transparency talk was, in fact, just so much talk — or at very least, that it was only intended to apply to those in the administration who aren’t deemed too vital on the policy front to be held accountable for breaking the law.

In a city legendary for overpromising and underperforming, the Obama administration is setting itself up to reach a new high in terms of inflated expectations and flat delivery. During his campaign, President Obama set impossibly high expectations for himself and his administration, not only in terms of ethics, but in terms of changing the face of the earth as a whole (does anybody else remember the June 3 declaration, made in St. Paul by Obama, that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?). It shouldn’t surprise anybody that the President is unable to live up to ridiculous proclamations like that; however, the growing pattern of senior staff appointments for lawbreakers and myriad exceptions to his own ethics rules send a message that Obama himself may never have taken all that Hope and Change rhetoric so seriously himself.