Tom Daschle and His Wife are BOTH Lobbyists
Remember back during the campaign when Obama said:
“I have done more to take on lobbyists than any other candidate in this race – and I’ve won. I don’t take a dime of their money, and when I am President, they won’t find a job in my White House.”
While we’ve already seen that this apparently no longer applies, the list of lobbyists being brought into the White House fold just continues to grow and grow.
First we learned that Obama’s choice to play role # 2 at the pentagon is a lobbyist, then we found out that tax cheat Tim Geithner tapped a lobbyist to be his chief of staff.
Now, Obama is trying to appoint Tom Daschle as his “health czar” and while most people know Tom Daschle from his senate career, many people don’t know that Daschle was also a lobbyist.
From Politico:
“Tom Daschle, tapped to be President Obama’s health czar, was paid more than $200,000 by the health-care industry in the past two years, according to documents obtained by Politico.”
And it turns out, Tom’s wife Linda Hall Daschle is ALSO a lobbyist. The Washington Post reported on this back in November:
“Daschle’s new position might be complicated by his wife, Linda Hall Daschle, who is a registered lobbyist with the Washington firm of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz.”
Oh and by the way, Tom Daschle is also a tax cheat.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air makes a great point on the willingness of the American media to look the other way:
“If the Bush administration had publicly imposed such a restriction on itself and then quietly ignored it, we’d hear endless editorials about Bush’s hypocrisy and the influence of the rich and powerful on his administration.”
