In taking blame for the taxing problem of Tom Daschle, the defunct nominee for secretary of health and human services, President Barack Obama said the American people cannot be told one standard exists for them, while another exists in Washington.

It was a consummate political statement – humble, regretful and populist. Yet while it was a good line about the crashing nomination (which not even Capt. Sullenberger could have saved in the end) it wasn’t entirely accurate. While double standards like that shouldn’t exist, they do.

And shorting or screwing up taxes isn’t one of them. Not paying their fair share is one thing people and politicians do equally well.

Donald L. Bartlett and James L. Steele, the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of “The Great American Tax Dodge,” have estimated that if all Americans paid all the taxes they actually owed the government, this fiscal honesty would generate an additional $600 billion per year. (Other goverment estimates say this “tax gap” is actually closer to $350 billion.)

This revenue is lost, Bartlett and Steele said, through tax fraud and avoidance, the exact sins Cabinet nominees Timothy Geithner and Daschle, respectively, were guilty of committing.

And for which they were pilloried. In Daschle, this perceived double standard has cost the country the service of a most capable person to direct the sprawling federal HHS while also addressing the so-far-impossible task of reforming health care.

Now Daschle’s hypocrisy – he once touted driving his own car around Washington in a campaign advertisement, then took free limousine rides from a well-heeled friend in reality – is a real double standard worthy of censure.

The juicier question is whether Daschle’s tax transgressions should have cost him his nomination, because of a reputed double standard on taxes that is more idyllic than realistic.

When politicians tout paying taxes – either as policy or patriotism – the public can react as if they were committing treason. When Vice President Joe Biden says paying more taxes is a “patriotic duty,” he is scorned by the right, despite that side’s support of policies – such as the Bush tax cuts – to ensure patriotic Americans with the greatest ability to pay more taxes don’t.

The message? Nobody wants to pay more taxes, which is arguably the first true American tradition and remains the sacred cause of its most fervent revolutionaries to this day.

Look at Maine. Nothing raises tempers more than taxes, as shown by the stream of ballot initiatives that some think will destroy government to slake the thirst of paying less for it.

This sentiment manifests itself everywhere, even Congress, which Steele and Bartlett think should shoulder most of the blame. The body stands to judge Geithner and Daschle, yet it has also chronically kept the Internal Revenue Service from growing into an enforcement agency that can do its job, by cutting staff and program funding.

This doesn’t make what Geithner and Daschle did or didn’t do about their taxes appropriate or defensible. They did stupid things and deserve all the repudiation they get.

But let’s be real – the only double standard is that Daschle is out and Geithner is in, for doing something ordinary Americans often get away with.