  Growing evidence indicates that in the continuum limit the rooted staggered
action is in the correct QCD universality class, the non-local terms arising
from taste breaking can be viewed as lattice artifacts. In this paper we
consider the 2-flavor Asqtad staggered action at a lattice spacing of
approximately 0.13 fm and probe the properties of the staggered configurations
by an overlap valence Dirac operator. By comparing the distribution of the
overlap eigenmodes to continuum QCD predictions we investigate if/when the
lattice artifacts are small as a function of the staggered quark mass. We
define a matching overlap quark mass where the lattice corrections are minimal
for the topological susceptibility and from the eigenmode distribution we
predict the 2-flavor chiral condensate. Our results indicate that the staggered
configurations are consistent with 2-flavor continuum QCD up to small lattice
artifacts, and predict a consistent value for the infinite volume chiral
condensate.
