The second week of the Obama Administration was so quickly overtaken by the third week, which began with Tom Daschle’s withdrawal from consideration for health czar and the tough sledding the stimulus package is running into in the Senate, that it is easy to forget the themes of the second week which included, among other things, the passage of the stimulus package in the House of Representatives without a single Republican vote and Obama refusing to declare war on the Republicans for that reason alone. He is still stringing them along, allowing them to present themselves as un-bi-partisan, and he may not pull the noose, for all I know, till the midterm elections when Democratic contenders for Republican held seats can say that their opponents are the ones who voted against the highway project in their county and the pay for teachers and firemen in their cities.

There was also another theme, which was the fallout over the replacements for United States Senators that had to be named by state governors to fill the unexpired terms of people who had moved up to being Constitutional or cabinet officers. This was not the set  of sideshows that Chris Matthews and other commentators see, but a real window into what passes for cynicism in American political life, as that has been bequeathed to us by generations of politicians who did not seem to live up to the idealism of the American people, at least as that is understood, falsely I think, by the American people.

There was a mix of emotions that accompanied the introduction of Carolyn Kennedy’s name into the hopper of those who might be chosen by New York’s Governor, David Patterson, to fill the slot vacated by Hillary Clinton. One of these was that it was a long delayed return of Camelot; another was that by now we had hoped Camelot was gone and buried, no one wanting it resurrected any more. No more shining people, full of presence and money learning enough about public issues to play the role of public figures and not even all that badly. The trouble is that there was too much of noblesse oblige in Carolyn Kennedy declaring that she ready to take on public service as a family duty when politicians in our era are more pleasing when they act as if they really want a job. Moreover, as others have noted, there was just a bit too much of Sarah Palin in Kennedy’s rollout: we want a politician we don’t have to be afraid will embarrass us with ineptitude or the expectation of such. Hillary proved soon enough that she was no lightweight, but Kennedy went into evasive mode from the outset. I don’t blame Patterson for having his aides dump on her by leaking that it was clear from the first interview that she was not up to the job, given that the Kennedy fiasco, thrust upon him and then, ungraciously, left for him to settle, without even a fair-thee-well interview to help him cover his wounds, may have cost him election to a term as governor in his own right.

And then there is the shamefulness of the Kirsten Gillibrand appointment. It is not that Senator Schumer is wrong in thinking that politicians grow in office, expanding their views as they expand their constituencies. It is that she had pursued her provincial issues as general matters of principles. She had not opposed gun legislation just to help hunters, but to enforce the NRA view of the Second Amendment. She was not against immigration reform because her district was against it; she had bought into the whole xenophobic program. Now, she says, she will be flexible, and broaden her views. I would have preferred a long standing liberal from the outset. People whose views become unpopular can go back to making money on Wall Street, because I am sure there is still money to be made there by playing all the regulations for the distribution of federal handouts. Maybe Gillibrand, who actually does know something about Wall Street, can provide a reasonable critique of TARP, though she is unlikely to do that, now that she is on the side of those who support it. A person with no principles remains a person of no principles even when they change principles. Schumer obviously thinks the voters will forget that after she takes the liberal side on enough issues. He may be right.

Then there was that Blagojevich matter. Not that anyone in New York can cast aspersions on any one else's state legislature, but I find appalling the proceedings of the Illinois State Senate that were available on C-Span last week. The Illinois Senate convicted B-rod without any evidence. The verdict came first, the trial some time in the future, if U. S. Attorney Fitzgerald ever gets around to filing an indictment. The damage will already be done: a properly elected governor tossed out on his ear on the basis of allegations. Yes, the governor was a bit sanctimonious in his defense of himself as merely a populist who tried too hard, but he was nowhere as bad as the various state legislators who didn't even try to answer his arguments. Worst was the prosecutor who abandoned all of the self restraint which requires prosecutors not to testify their own beliefs in the guilt of the person they are prosecuting and instead simply vilified the governor to a point so heated that the prosecutor was almost in tears. The legislators all patted themselves on the back for how devoted they were to truth, justice and the American way, and then proceeded to trash all three. I know, everybody is treating the impeachment as if it is for laughs. Chris Matthews things B-rod will get a talk show out of it. What they all forget is that proceduralism is at the heart of a democracy, and so if they want to impeach the governor for his bad hair, they have a right to do that so long as those are the charges in the indictment, the evidence being self-evident, while indicting him and convicting him of corruption without trying him for corruption is very bad news.

And why is it that the deal with the New Hampshire Governor to appoint a Republican to Gregg’s seat, now that he has gone on to the Commerce Department, is not an inappropriate deal, given that he might be considered honor bound to appoint a Democrat, given that people voted for him to be Governor as a Democrat? Is that worse than what Blagojevich did? After all, no one has yet shown that what B-rod wanted was anything other than some political favor from the incoming Administration. Has anyone asked what political favor the New Hampshire Governor asked for or was implicit in the deal? Does the new political morality, much touted by the political commentators who claim to be sick of Washington politics as usual, mean that no deals can be made, even if money doesn’t change hands, or only happens latter on through bundling? Isn’t politics allowed to be political? I like the straightforward way in which Biden reserved his seat for his son, who will, after all, have to run for it to win it, which is the real test of democracy, so long as it is combined with the procedural rectitude which Biden followed but which was not followed by the Illinois legislature.

I don’t know that we want to reform these politics. It gives some play to the system. People trade off interests. That is what Obama is trying to do with the stimulus bill and that is called bi-partisanship. He will give Republicans some tax cuts and eliminate some pork that for all I know was put in the bill so that it could be eliminated in the negotiations. Don’t discourage deal-making. Remember that part of our problem in the Middle East is that Hamas is made up of people of such principle that they won’t bargain away their right to fight to the death of the last Gaza resident.

I had thought, last week, that Obama would push through the Daschle nomination because we are more mature as a nation now than we were when the Zoe Baird nomination for Attorney-General was turned down in the early days of the Clinton Administration. It isn’t just that everybody makes mistakes; it is that the tax code is sufficiently complicated that one can make the case that Daschle was unsure whether the car and driver should be regarded as income and that it is only when the IRS challenges the matter that it becomes necessary to pay up or fight the matter out in court. Otherwise we would all be under the responsibility to pay what we might seem to owe rather than what we do owe. Sure, Daschle should probably have followed Hubert Humphrey’s advice and never challenge an IRS challenge, but at least Humphrey thought you could wait until you were challenged. Instead, we get slobbering, which is an admission that Daschle thought he had been trying to play fast and loose with the tax code—or else, Nixon-like, that if you give your enemies something to hang you with, they will. That, of course, is the lesson of all politics, whether Roman, British or American. Welcome to Washington, President Obama.