Suppose the preparers-to-the-elite, being well-informed, view their job as knowing which dodges and “mistakes” are likely to ease by. Then these rules are applied with hardly even the need for the usual winks and nudges.

Chiselling taxes is the great middle-class (particularly upper-middle-class) pursuit. Leona Helmsley’s mistake was that she said it (or was alleged to have said it) out loud.

Suppose the preparers-to-the-elite, being well-informed, view their job as knowing which dodges and “mistakes” are likely to ease by. Then these rules are applied with hardly even the need for the usual winks and nudges.

Perhaps a naïf unaware of what needs to be communicated to one’s preparer could be caught out thereby; however I must say that, though Daschle doesn’t strike me as an exceptionally bad sort, I doubt that he is a naïf.

But then if such means of handling one’s business really is so pervasive, it does suggest that a great many potential appointees could have such objections thrown in their paths, but the ones to which it actually happens might be chosen strategically; the hampered process that led to Janet Reno’s ambushing echoes loudly here to me too.

And Obama’s people might want to start vetting people a little more carefully, assuming they didn’t know about this stuff ahead of time. If they DID know it ahead of time, you’ve got to wonder what they were thinking to let it dribble out a drop at a time. This kind of stuff needs to be part of the discussion from the beginning if you’re going to try to ride a nomination with issues through.

As I said, it’s straight out of High School Gossip 101, and Woodward just wants to show that he’s in the center of all that’s going on.

Others, perhaps, were trying to run down the story to be able to release it properly. Woodward, OTOH, is just trying to boost his own ego. Life must be rough, poor guy, now that he doesn’t have his access to life with Bush, Rove, and Co.