dashcle planted the seed in february 2007

Are you surprised that Daschle has been offered a cabinet position for H&HS?

You shouldn’t be. Daschle through himself in with Obama almost two years ago:

Daschle’s unusually early endorsement of Obama last February [2007] gave the newcomer desperately-needed instant clout among insiders who were resigned to the inevitability of Hillary Clinton, but praying for an alternative. “What Daschle brought was credibility,” said an insider close to both men, “and now they have developed a good personal relationship.” The two men share a similar approach to both the process and substance of politics: a certain soft-spoken meticulousness, and a desire to blunt the sharp edges of partisanship.

It seems that Obama is stocking himself full of dems. So much for post-partisanship. This, too, is not a basis for surprise.

His position on dems was made clear in a PAC he created in November 2005 called the Hopefund. The website became a redirect to his presidential site a year or so later, but the Internet Archive has the old pages – this one included (quoting the About Us link):

At Hopefund, we believe that to cultivate hope, to place it within the grasp of every American, we must elect more Democrats to public office. That is why Senator Obama formed Hopefund -- a political committee whose purpose is to elect Democrats, in both red and blue states, who share these beliefs.

So hope = dems. Very clear. Just as clearly “partisanship” without the antecedent “post.”