Conrad had been open about his ambivalence about running for another term and those doubts almost certainly increased following a 2010 election that decimated the Democratic party…

Outside interest groups — the conservative American Future Fund and liberal-aligned Commonsense Ten — have already run ads in North Dakota, suggesting that the race would be a major priority for both national parties.

His retirement is bad news for the Democrats — North and South Dakota has reliably voted Republican in presidential elections but elected Democrats to Congress until recently.

For the last eighteen years before the 2010 elections, North Dakota had two Democratic senators and one Democrat at the state’s lone seat in the House of Representatives — dubbed ‘Team North Dakota’ giving the small state more influence on committees (especially the House and Senate Agriculture Committees) than it would have had otherwise. Rep. Earl Pomeroy lost his seat in 2010 after airing a last-ditch ad featuring him showing his driver’s license and saying, “I’m not Nancy Pelosi, I’m not Barack Obama” U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan announced that he would not run for re-election in early 2010 after he faced the possibility of a serious challenge from popular Gov. John Hoeven (R).

South Dakota, too, elected Democrats like Sen. Tom Daschle, Rep. Stephanie Herseth and before them, Sen. George McGovern — all of whom were defeated in big Republican years of 2004, 2010 and 1980, respectively. Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) may well be the last Democrat of the Dakotas after 2012, as he is up for re-election in 2014. (He survived re-election in 2002 by 524 votes.)

The race might not be a foregone conclusion for Democrats as it was in 2010 — dthere isn’t a popular candidate like Gov. Hoeven in the race, and Barack Obama only lost North Dakota by eight points in 2008.

As they did during the health care debate, liberals will probably point out that the Dakotas have four senators, though the states’ cumulative population is only a little larger than that of the Bronx.

Dave Weigel notes that in 1889, congressional Republicans made the Dakotas two states to increase their representation in Congress. Belatedly, that could happen.

The Washington Post, for one, has a lengthy profile that sets up a marked contrast, no doubt aided by a White House looking to present a noticeable sign of change, between the hard charging Emanuel and the conciliatory, “ego-free” Rouse:

Few people outside Washington, and not many inside, have heard the name Pete Rouse. The man President Obama will name as his interim White House chief of staff on Friday is a quiet political player who avoids the spotlight. He does not suit up for the Sunday talk shows; there are no stories about him reducing staff members to tears for their slip-ups.

He is in many ways the opposite of Rahm Emanuel, the brash chief of staff he will replace.

While Emanuel spent nearly two years as a prominent public face of the Obama administration, Rouse sat just around the corner in the West Wing, fixing problems. A trusted adviser dating back to Obama’s first days in the Senate, Rouse helped guide Obama’s Washington rise. Obama once described Rouse as “completely ego-free.”

But the Post’s own Ezra Klein notes, in fact, that lots of people in Washington have heard of Mr. Rouse. Quoting from an old profile he helped author, Klein writes:

Often called “the 101st Senator,” Rouse, an understated 62-year-old with 30-odd years of Capitol Hill experience, had been Tom Daschle’s powerful chief of staff. When Daschle was ejected from the Senate, he hoped Rouse would continue to work with him in the private sector. But Rouse received an expected call from Cassandra Butts, the policy director on Dick Gephardt’s 2004 presidential campaign and an old law school chum of Obama’s. Butts asked Rouse to meet with the newly elected Obama. Grudgingly, Rouse had lunch with the young senator. Obama asked him to sign on as chief of staff–a demotion of sorts, dropping Rouse from the office of the most powerful Senate Democrat to that of the most junior member of the body. Rouse politely declined. Obama kept asking. Eventually, Rouse accepted.

All of which seems to indicate that while he may not plan to bash as many heads as Rahm, his approach to dealing with Congress will likely be quite similar:

The Obama administration has often been criticized for adopting an overly deferential approach to Congress, but it’s staffed by longtime congressional hands who strongly believe that this is the right approach to take to Congress if you actually want to get anything done in it. Rouse’s ascension suggests that little is likely to change in that regard.

Video after the jump:

The details are still up in the air, but administration sources said Clinton would probably speak on Friday, April 9. That’s an auspicious day for arms control: the day before, Presidents Obama and Medvedev will sign the accord to reduce their nuclear stockpiles by 30 percent, and the following week will feature a 43- or 44-nation conference on nuclear security in Washington. The venue will probably the University of Louisville, but that hasn’t been completely nailed down.

It marks the first sign of an aggressive push for Clinton to get the treaty the seven GOP votes needed for ratification. (Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana has already lent New START his vote.) McConnell is an unusual case: He didn’t cast a vote for or against the last nuclear weapons treaty in 2003. And he’s already sounded sour notes about New START over its linkage to missile defense and verification — the administration is adamant that the treaty doesn’t impact missile defense and its verification procedures are way tougher than those in the last couple treaties with the Russians — subsequently raising questions about whether McConnell’s legislative strategy of omnibus obstruction doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. If McConnell ends up siding against the treaty, then he’ll be bucking history. At least the last two arms-reduction accords with Russia have passed with the support of the Senate minority leader, whether it was Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) in 2003 or Bob Dole (R-Kans.) a decade earlier.

Administration officials have expressed confidence that they’ll get New START through the Senate once they start making the case for it on the merits. Clinton’s speech next week effectively represents the beginnings of that effort.

Two bills introduced in Congress recently stake out rival positions on a key issue related to health care reform. Which approach ultimately prevails will help determine whether the pharmaceutical industry maintains the support that Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler voiced Wednesday for President Obama’s plan’s to overhaul the nation’s health care system.

Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) introduced a bill Tuesday that would give manufacturers of new drugs up to 14 years of market exclusivity before generic versions could come onto the market. Earlier this month, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) introduced legislation providing five years market exclusivity. Big Pharma hailed the Eshoo bill while the Obama administration has indicated it prefers the Waxman approach.

Can the drug companies live with shorter exclusivity, which cuts into the big profits margins of popular drugs?

Maybe, says Kindler, who heads the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer. He told CNN, “My guess is that, assuming there is comprehensive health care reform and it’s passed, there will be elements of any bill that any number of participants won’t like, because everybody will undoubtedly have to make compromises and contributions. And I’m sure we will be no exception, nor should we be, by the way.”

In an op-ed that appeared today in The Washington Post, former House Speaker Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) — who withdrew his nomination to be President Obama’s secretary of health and human services earlier this month amid a tax scandal –  said the prospect for comprehensive health care reform has never been better, in part, because “reformers have some new and unlikely allies,” including the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Since his bid to become HHS secretary failed, Daschle has become more of a cheerleader, not a czar. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

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The prospect for following TWI on Twitter has also never been better. Please do so here.

Their recent tax woes — by which we mean their getting caught not paying their (or their spouses’) taxes — mean that the IRS is probably right about (or even underestimating?) the extent to which Americans — both individuals and corporations — cheat on their taxes. (In its latest tally, the IRS estimates that the 2001 tax gap — the chasm between taxes owed and taxes actually collected — was $345 billion.)

Why is that good news? Because much of that could be retrievable.

As Te-Ping Chen at The Center for Public Integrity points out this week, every dollar the IRS spends on tax enforcement returns five dollars. Chen also offers a few reasons why the IRS hasn’t closed the gap in recent years:

One reason is a slump in IRS staffing. Over the past decade, the number of agents that perform audits has dropped by over a third. Meanwhile in 2007, in what the Syracuse University-based Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse calls a “historic collapse,” only 26 percent of corporations holding at least $250 million in assets had their books inspected — compared to more than 70 percent in 1990. (The fact that Congress outsourced debt collection to private agencies in 2004, costing the government $37 million more than such agencies manage to collect, hasn’t helped either.)

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, has been screaming from the rafters for years about how Congress needs to find some way to close the tax gap. Daschle & Co. might just provide the impetus for lawmakers to start trying in earnest.

The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I’d like to offer a suggestion. President Obama should celebrate our success, rather than trying to shame us or cap our pay. But he should also take half of our huge earnings in taxes, instead of the current one-third.

Then, the next time a chief executive earns an eye-popping amount of money, we can cheer that half of it is going to pay for our soldiers, schools and security. Higher taxes on huge pay days can finance opportunity for the next generation of Americans.

Hastings makes the point that other attempts to cap CEO compensation haven’t worked out. His idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds. But I wouldn’t expect other CEOs to line up in support anytime soon. No matter how bad the economy may get, top executives — like most people — aren’t going to enthusiastically embrace paying more taxes. Just ask Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, or maybe former Health and Human Services Secretary-nominee Tom Daschle.

After two of President Obama’s prominent nominees withdrew from consideration because of tax concerns, Robert Gibbs took tough questions from the media at his daily press conference. And he didn’t enjoy a bit of it.

At first, he danced around the questions about the Tom Daschle scandal, even pulling a Blagojevich as he changed the subject to the recent peanut butter contamination. “I thought about it the other day when I was making a sandwich for my son,” he said, to the annoyance of the press.

But when the questions about Daschle’s vetting process continued, a visibly impatient Gibbs began shooting them down. “I’m not gonna spend a lot of time up here looking through the rear-view mirror,” he said on three separate occasions.

Finally, he began to take out his frustration on the press. When NBC’s Chuck Todd interrupted him to ask a follow-up question, Gibbs cut him off. “We need lights like the debates,” he said. “At least wait for mine to turn yellow.”

And a minute later: “You know what I’m gonna do from now on? I’m gonna have you write down your questions.”

He did provide a substantial piece of information, though, in confirming that Daschle had withdrawn from both of his prospective posts: secretary of health and human services and White House “health czar.” He also said of the Daschle debacle, “We all take responsibility. The president takes responsibility.”

All in all, not a fun day for Gibbs. Get this man a whiskey.

Today’s action provides a glimmer of hope for patient-centered health care in America. While the fact that he failed to pay his taxes is completely unacceptable, the greater danger of Mr. Daschle’s nomination was his intent to create a national government-run health care system that would threaten the ability of patients and doctors to make independent medical decisions. I call on President Obama to exercise greater deliberation in choosing his next nominee for this critical post. It is essential that the next Secretary of Health and Human Services holds a meaningful respect for personal, private, quality health care.

I’m sure this was a fun press release to write, but Democrats, like most mammals, don’t react well to salt poured on their wounds.

Following Nancy Killefer’s withdrawal from her chief performance officer post, Daschle is now the second Obama nominee to pull out for tax issues this morning.

Daschle’s decision comes on the heels of a New York Times editorial today calling for his withdrawal. “We believe that Mr. Daschle ought to step aside and let the president choose a less-blemished successor,” the Times editorial board wrote.

It’s still unclear whether he’ll serve in his other expected role as so-called “health czar” in the White House. We’ll have more on this as the story develops.

UPDATE 1:03 PM: Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who led the opposition to Daschle’s nomination, just came on CNN and praised his decision to step aside, calling it “a very good thing that happened to the Obama administration.”