Ethics, Petards And Obama

Ezra Klein sees Daschle's departure as a consequence of Obama's campaign rhetoric:

...this coverage would not have existed had Obama not run the campaign he did... [I]t turns out that Obama's words, well, mattered. They made it harder to ignore scandal, as the Bush administration had done. The endlessly long vetting forms forcing deep tax and income transparency, which in turn uncovered embarrassments that would never have emerged under past regimes. This has made for a more troubled transition, but will probably also result in a cleaner administration. For all the embarrassments, this, in a concrete sense, is what change looks like. It's not an administration that decides to be clean so much as one that has little choice in the matter.

Hilzoy concurs.