On Tuesday former Sen. Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services. If you haven't kept up with the latest "What's Obama gonna do next" news, Daschle withdrew his nomination because he didn't pay his taxes.
According to news sources like CNN and others, Daschle knew about his tax problems way back in June of last year, and he didn't pay them back until after he was nominated. Now come on, how in the world did he think he was going to pull that off? Clearly, Al Capone was caught on taxes when the authorities couldn't catch him on anything else. Also the Obama team should have known better, but we all make mistakes, right?
One could argue that, but in the world of public relations, it seemed as if they were trying to get over on the system. It seemed as if Sen. Daschle had no intentions whatsoever to pay back his taxes. This breaks one of the codes of ethics: honesty. I guess it's like in the movie Frost/Nixon when Pres. Nixon said, "When the president does it, it's not illegal." WRONG! And it's illegal for senators too. Sorry, Tom.
All though this is a PR no-no, President Obama did the right thing by taking responsibility of the appointees to his administration. Really he had no choice, this was the second person to step down due to unpaid taxes. The first was Nancy Killefer, who was appointed as the chief of performance officer, a new post in administration. The right thing would have been to get that cleared up immediately before it's discovered by anyone else. The moral of the story is you can hide, but you can't run. Whenever one is not honest upfront, the dog will come back to bite you in the behind.As a PR practitioner, what would you have done in order to keep this issue from blowing up in the media.
-Marlon Williams
