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Daschle vs. Thune
Anatomy of a High-Plains Senate Race
By Jon K. Lauck UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2007 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5507-4
CHAPTER 1
THE CANDIDATES AND THEIR TIMES
The sixties have preoccupied late twentieth-century America as much as the Civil War preoccupied late nineteenth-century America.
— John B. Judis
The events of November 21, 2003, became the clincher. On that morning, fifty-eight U.S. senators voted for cloture, or to proceed to a final vote, on the Bush administration's sweeping energy bill. A Democratic filibuster necessitated a cloture vote, which required sixty affirmative votes from the Senate's one hundred members. The successful filibuster symbolized the partisanship that divided the Senate during the 108th Congress. For the South Dakota Senate race, the consequential section of the long-stalled energy bill included a provision boosting the usage of ethanol, the corn-based fuel additive popular in the Corn Belt. Thune called the bill "the holy grail for the ethanol industry." Daschle reluctantly voted for the bill, according to Congressional Quarterly, but he did not work for its passage. The New York Times similarly noted that Daschle twisted no Democratic arms. The day before the vote, Congress Daily reported that Daschle would not use his leadership "position to press wavering Democrats into supporting the bill." A Democratic source said that Daschle did not owe Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist anything. The personal enmity between the Senate leaders would propel Frist to South Dakota in the spring of 2004 to campaign against his fellow leader, prompting wails of denunciation for such partisan impudence.
Daschle's handling of the ethanol measure bewildered political observers. Back in South Dakota, Daschle had run television and radio ads during the summer of 2003 touting his leadership on ethanol legislation. The day before the vote on the energy bill, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader also called for passage. The Argus, however, ran a misleading headline referencing Daschle's vaunted Washington power on the same day he refused to press his fellow senators to vote for the law: "Daschle Lends Clout to Energy Bill." Daschle's press spokesman blamed Republicans who "went and wrote this bill behind closed doors" and left Daschle out of the negotiations, betraying one of the reasons Daschle did not promote passage of the measure. Other Democrats said that they opposed the bill because it exempted manufacturers of the fuel additive MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) from certain lawsuits, a measure the pro-Democratic trial lawyer lobby opposed. After the removal of the MTBE provision, however, Senate Democrats still filibustered the energy bill.
The 2004 South Dakota Senate race crystallized on the day of the energy bill impasse. Daschle's obligation to his Senate caucus had helped undermine a major piece of legislation important to farmers in South Dakota. Daschle faced a difficult choice: he could serve as the partisan leader of the Senate Democrats, thrust and parry with Senator Frist, and serve as the loyal opposition to President Bush in an age of partisan bickering, or he could fully represent his state's interests. But he could not do both. John Thune would spend the next twelve months criticizing Daschle for serving incompatible masters. The filibuster of the ethanol bill became Exhibit A in Thune's case against Daschle's Senate, where GOP legislation often languished.
The day after the energy bill vote, the Minnehaha County Lincoln Day dinner featured Virginia senator George Allen, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Minnehaha County is the most populous county in South Dakota and the home of Sioux Falls, the state's largest city, named for the picturesque cascade of Big Sioux River rapids gushing through exposed pink quartzite bedrock on the city's northern edge. "Minnehaha" is Sioux for "water that laughs." At the end of his speech, Senator Allen said that Daschle had been signing copies of his new book in Allen's home state of Virginia the night before the energy bill failed by two votes. The Sioux Falls Argus Leader, which tended to filter damaging news to Daschle from the public, ignored the news about Daschle's promotion of his book, the publication of which signaled his presidential ambitions. But to those who heard about the revelation, it provided hard evidence that Daschle's priorities could cost his constituents. In the final crucial months of the campaign, Thune persistently jabbed Daschle for being "out signing autographs" when the ethanol bill was "on the one-yard line."
On the day of the energy bill vote, some advisors from the National Republican Senatorial Committee landed in Sioux Falls to reveal the latest polling information on a possible match-up between Daschle and Thune. Their poll showed Thune trailing by five percentage points, an optimistic assessment that aided the Senate committee's effort to persuade Thune to run. Thune and his wife, Kimberley, were upbeat but wary of another arduous year in the campaign trenches battling the nation's most powerful Democrat, who had access to the deepest Democratic pockets in the country. A more realistic poll conducted by the Republican National Committee showed Thune trailing Daschle by eight points. Thune also considered a possible run for South Dakota's lone House seat, held by the state's former four-term GOP governor, Bill Janklow. A few months before, Janklow had driven through a stop sign and killed a motorcyclist. His trial on manslaughter charges would begin in December. Many observers concluded that Janklow would not run again, could not run another effective campaign, or might even go to jail. Polling showed that Thune could easily win back his former House seat. If he entered the Senate race, however, his personal pollster believed that he had only a three-in-ten chance against Daschle. But Thune could not believe that Daschle, a master of farm-state politics, had refused to push for the ethanol bill. It clinched Thune's decision to defy the electoral odds.
Daschle's failure to orchestrate Democratic support for the ethanol bill caused a stir for several days. In early December, the state GOP ran an ad on farm radio stations needling Daschle for the ethanol bill's failure. The ad focused on Daschle's unwillingness to use his oft-touted "clout" and featured the state GOP chairman, a farmer who served on the board of an ethanol plant. Some Republicans thought that focusing on the "clout" issue presented dangers, because Daschle's leadership position served as his biggest political weapon. They wanted to concentrate on Daschle's allegiances within his caucus, which had prevented him from pushing through the ethanol bill. Daschle worried more, those critics argued, about alienating Senators Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and the core of his caucus than about delivering for South Dakota farmers. The campaign would ultimately focus on who benefited from the exercise of Daschle's power.
On December 8, 2003, twelve jurors found Congressman Bill Janklow guilty of manslaughter for colliding with and killing a motorcyclist in rural Moody County four months earlier. The defense characterized manslaughter as an absurd charge and argued that had Janklow suffered a diabetic reaction at the time of the collision. Prosecutors tried to cast doubt on Janklow's defense by presenting evidence of his proclivity for speeding across the state's wide prairies. In a strange moment, Daschle even testified as a character witness for Janklow, shaking his hand on the way into the courtroom. Janklow had long been a fixture of South Dakota politics and renowned for his spellbinding speeches. A populist but pragmatic ex-marine, Janklow started his career as a legal aide lawyer defending Indians on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the 1960s. He inherited his legal prowess from his father, who had prosecuted Nazis at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II. Janklow first became well known for prosecuting the leaders of the American Indian Movement, who led violent protests in South Dakota in the 1970s. After serving as South Dakota's attorney general, Janklow became a domineering four-term governor with a magnetic personality, either attracting or repelling. His advisors said that 30 percent of the people he met on the street hated him, 40 percent loved him, and the rest decided the election.
The end of the Age of Janklow scrambled South Dakota politics in an odd way. In 1986, Janklow had challenged sitting Republican senator James Abdnor for the Republican nomination and the right to challenge Daschle, who sought to make the leap from the House to the Senate. Janklow lost a close primary, Daschle won in the fall, and the rifts within the GOP between the Janklow and Abdnor factions persisted for years. The Wall Street Journal called the Janklow-Abdnor primary a "blood feud." In the mid-1990s, when Janklow returned to the governor's mansion for another two terms, a Janklow-Daschle entente developed. The alliance began when Janklow defended Daschle's involvement in a plane crash investigation in which Daschle had intervened in the plane safety inspection process to help a friend, an episode that produced a predictably dramatic 60 Minutes segment featuring reporter-dodging and allegations of document shredding. The alliance made political sense because Janklow and Daschle had the largest and most powerful competing political networks in the state. A ceasefire would benefit both of them. Daschle planned to showcase his close relationship with Janklow during the 2004 campaign as a sign of his conservative and bipartisan bona fides. Rather counterintuitively, the end of Janklow's career also undermined the Daschle campaign.
Rumors also circulated in 2003 that Janklow and Daschle had made a deal in which Daschle would retire and aid Janklow's efforts to acquire his Senate seat, ostensibly precluding a Thune bid. According to one scenario, Daschle would take a poll in August that would presumably show his political strength and then Daschle would announce his retirement and take a valedictory lap around the state. The poll would signal to voters that Daschle was not retiring because he thought he was in political peril. Janklow also pressured the Republican Senatorial Committee to remain neutral and refrain from supporting a Thune candidacy, indicating that Janklow planned to make a Senate bid. Reports also circulated about Janklow running as an independent if he could not secure the Republican nomination. Some insiders dismissed a Daschle-Janklow "deal" as a ridiculous conspiracy as vigorously as others accepted it as a fait accompli: they argued that Daschle could do little to pressure rank-and-file Democrats into supporting Janklow, that Janklow could not beat Thune in a GOP primary, and that the odds of an independent bid by Janklow were long. The degree of truth in such rumors remains unknown, but speculation in political and journalistic circles remained intense during the summer of 2003. Despite the announcement of his intent to seek reelection to the Senate in January 2003, Daschle later conceded that he did not fully commit to seeking reelection until the late summer. The August car accident ended the rumors of a Janklow Senate bid and sent Janklow to jail for 100 days.
Thune's advisors held different views about the wisdom of a bid against Daschle, but none doubted the grandiosity of such a race. Too many political races in the country, given the power of incumbency, can be predetermined in the absence of an anti-incumbent wave. During the 2002 and 2004 federal election cycles, only nine incumbents were defeated, the fewest in all of U.S. history. Politics benefits from nip-and-tuck Senate races over grand issues that draw young people into the political process and offer voters a substantive choice. The intensity of the Daschle-Thune race paralleled the famous 1952 John Kennedy–Henry Cabot Lodge Senate race in Massachusetts. Kennedy, an ambitious three-term congressman, challenged a legend of Massachusetts politics and a national icon but did not obsess over his defeat. Family patriarch Joe Kennedy pressed the challenge: "When you've beaten him, you've beaten the best. Why try for something less?" Kennedy prevailed over Lodge in 1952, the last year in which a leader in the Senate went down to defeat.
Similar to the situation in which Senator Lodge found himself in 1952, Daschle's obligations to his national party became a burden in 2004, one that he had skillfully avoided earlier in his career. In the early 1980s, Stuart Rothenberg noted that Daschle had "taken pains not to be identified as a classic Kennedy-McGovern liberal." But Daschle's accommodation of the Reagan revolution of the 1980s obscured his political roots. Daschle grew up the grandson of poor German immigrants in Aberdeen, South Dakota, the state's third-largest city (just to the north, immigrant Germans were drawn by the flattering decision of a North Dakota city to adopt the name of the German "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck). Germans were the largest ethnic group to immigrate to South Dakota; many of them, including Daschle's grandparents, had left Russia after 1871, when the Russian czars revoked the German immigrants' exemption from military service, which had first lured them to the agricultural heartland surrounding Odessa. During the socialist vogue of the early twentieth century, Brown County became one of the state's strongest outposts of reform sentiment. Father Robert Haire became a legend in Brown County for his charitable works, for organizing Catholic churches, and for his embrace of the socialist cause. Haire became a charter member of the Socialist local, and in 1900 he even served as an elector for Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, reflecting the growing convergence between Catholicism and economic reform movements. The Yale historian Howard Lamar remembered Haire as "the radical Catholic priest who advocated socialism." Brown County also became a center of Populist ferment, and Aberdeen hosted massive rallies for William Jennings Bryan in 1896.
Daschle's father, Sebastian "Dash" Daschle, was a teacher who later became an owner of Nelson Auto Electric, but he was "an artist at heart," according to one account. Daschle's mother, Betty, was an Aberdeen homemaker and Avon lady. The Daschles were Catholic, a religious subculture that tended to clump together in South Dakota and unite ethnically diverse groups of Germans, Irish, and Bohemians (unlike Lutherans, who divided into German Lutheran churches and Norwegian Lutheran churches). Daschle attended Sacred Heart Catholic grade school and, as with most Catholics of the time, naturally became a Democrat and a JFK-ophile in a Democratic Age. In public high school, Daschle overcame his shyness and fear of heights and became socially active, singing in the choir, joining the Young Cosmopolitans and the Young Democrats, playing tennis, and running and winning a race for senior class president. In 1963, Daschle's geometry teacher announced to the class that Daschle's idol, President Kennedy, had been assassinated. Despite the tragedy, Daschle announced during his high school years that he intended to enter politics: "I have a dream. I'd love to be a United States Senator someday."
The Age of JFK nurtured young Catholic Democrats with reformist spirits. Presidential scholar James McGregor Burns argued at the time, "This is as surely a liberal epoch as the late nineteenth century was a conservative one." In 1964, South Dakota even voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, the only exception to the state's preference for GOP presidential candidates in the past seven decades. The crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, along with the social disorders of the late 1960s, laid the groundwork for the future ascendancy of political conservatism, which would torment Daschle when he began to pursue his high school dream. The term "conservative" first entered the popular discourse when embraced by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, the year in which Daschle's political hero had won the presidency.
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Excerpted from Daschle vs. Thune by Jon K. Lauck. Copyright © 2007 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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