I was surprised to wake up this morning and find out that (a) Tom Daschle had withdrawn his candidacy to be Sec'y of HHS, and (b) the story was reported in the Washington Post but not yet up here on the VC!! In any event, he is gone -- and I think Obama made the right call jettisoning his candidacy ("Did I screw up in this situation? Absolutely" he told Brian Williams of NBC yesterday). It wasn't just the taxes -- it was the fact that Daschle, who moved into an insanely high-paying lobbying job right out of the Senate, was just the sort of guy Obama promised to rid us of, and I'm not at all sorry to see him disappear from the scene. DGP