From last night’s All Stars.

On the fallout over Daschle’s withdrawal:

Well, it looks bad, but I think Obama handled it rather well.
Look, he came in with two attributes — competence and cleanliness. And he ran a campaign that has a reputation of being flawless. He pulled off a miracle. And on the competence issue he has taken a lot of hits. He has withdrawn a lot of nominees, and he’s looked bad.
But he preferred to take a hit on competence rather than on cleanliness, because that was the great attraction he had over the last year in the campaign. He was the guy who was from the outside. He would undo the ways of Washington. He would redo them and clean them up.
I think what killed Daschle was, obviously, his taxes, but, as Mike Kinsley once said, the scandal in Washington is never what is illegal. It’s what is legal.
Geithner, at least, had a history of being a humble civil servant who got medium wages and worked for a living. Well, Daschle had been out of office for four years. He made a huge amount of money.
And how did he do it? He worked for a firm, a law firm, in which he made over a million dollars. He’s not a lawyer, and he didn’t register as a lobbyist.
So what did he do? Obviously, he didn’t instruct the partners on how a markup happens in the Senate. He picked up the phone and he peddled influence.
And that’s what Obama came into town to abolish. He couldn’t have a guy like that in his cabinet.

On the waning support for the stimulus bill:

Explaining what’s in there and understanding what’s in there is precisely why public opinion is turning against it. It’s having a look inside the sausage factory, which has disgusted the vast majority of the American people.
Obama is being hurt on this more than he is on his appointments. And the reason is that the bill that came out of the House is essentially deceptive. It uses an emergency where everybody is saying, “OK, spend as you will. You’re not going to have to account for any of this spending. It’s going to be something new, but it’s an emergency.”
And when you then look in the bill and you see all the stuff that Democrats in the House have shoehorned in, which is not stimulus at all, it ends up as an act of deception in a time of national emergency.
And that, I think, is what’s hurting Obama, because he has his name on the bill.
The only answer is to do what Alice Rivlin, who worked in the Clinton administration, who advocated stripping out the stimulus, add that as a separate bill that is perhaps a fifth of the bill. It’s manageable, it’s understandable, and it would have support, and do all the other stuff on a longer, slower track.