A huge “must” for President-elect Barack Obama is cleaning up the corruption and cronyism so loved and embraced by the Bush administration.

And then he has to ensure that it doesn’t happen again on his watch.

This means that people will go to jail. This means that Obama will get knocked for being vengeful and partisan and it means that maybe the stimulus money doesn’t get, figuratively speaking, dumped out of an airplane to get lost in the wind like that first $350 billion did. If Obama doesn’t act — if no-bid contracts continue to be awarded to friends and campaign contributors, then corruption becomes institutionalized. We may never be able to recover from that.