To anyone who has followed politics in Washington in recent years, the image of a sitting President admitting error is a striking shift. The presidencies of George W Bush and Bill Clinton were marked by the resistance of both men to confessing mistakes.

But there was President Obama on Tuesday night, pleading guilty in a succession of TV interviews to mishandling the collapsed nomination of Tom Daschle to his Cabinet. “I screwed up,” he said.

To a certain extent, Obama had little choice but to admit the obvious. Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer had been forced to withdraw because they had not paid all their taxes. This came after Timothy F Geithner weathered scrutiny of his own tax problems before winning confirmation as Treasury Secretary. Republicans suddenly sensed vulnerability in this new President.

Obama’s advisors said his admission showed how this presidency would by stylistically different. But the episode was revealing for reasons that go deeper than mere style. It reflected concern in Obama’s top circles that the President and his aides had put at risk his carefully cultivated political image.

It was hard for Obama to be chastising Wall Street executives for living by a different set of rules when people he was appointing into Government were perceived as doing much the same thing.

“There were two words: not just ‘mistake’, but ‘responsibility’,” Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, said in an interview.

“People like the fact that he said he made a mistake,” Emanuel said. “They hadn’t heard it from anybody in office for a long time. They heard excuses and denials.”

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