Busted Fatcats Have Everything —Except a Clue

The real problem with Tom Daschle is the $5 million he made on the post-Senate gravy train, not his unpaid taxes, Steven Pearlstein writes in the Washington Post. Daschle, John Thain, and their fellow corporate and government high fliers have run afoul of an American public that's "no longer willing to accept the corruption of the public process and the whole notion of public service."

The fatcats' obliviousness to the change in national mood stems from a wrong-headed sense of entitlement that has been warping judgment throughout American society, Pearlstein argues. "It turns out that those inflated pay stubs weren't really a measure of genuine economic worth but manifestations of the mirage that was the bubble economy," he writes. "Economically, they are no longer sustainable; socially and politically, they are no longer acceptable." (More Tom Daschle stories.)