Posted on 09/09/2004 10:28:27 PM PDT by Agrarian
Watching clips on FOX news from the new POW documentary, I was gratified to see an old South Dakota face: Leo Thorsness. The documentary details the effects that John Kerry's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had on men suffering in North Vietnamese POW camps.
What many FReepers may not know is that former POW Leo Thorness has the distinction of being the first person that Tom Daschle crawled over on his climb to the top. In Daschle's first House race (in the then SD HD 1 -- eastern South Dakota, where most of the Democrats live), he won a highly controversial race against Thorsness, a Medal of Honor winner who suffered for 6 years in Vietnam POW camps.
The margin of victory? 14 votes out of almost 130,000 cast. By the time recounts and challenges were over, Daschle had come up with another 120 or so votes for a final margin of victory of about 135. I was a "West River" kid growing up in the other SD House District, out in cowboy country, but that race smelled all the way to the Montana and Wyoming borders -- you couldn't miss it. Little did we know just what we (and the country) were getting in for. I think perhaps Thorsness was one of the few who did: he was much criticized for fighting and contesting the election so long (over a year), and so hard (it went all the way to the SD Supreme Court.)
One of the great ironies of that race was that in the campaign, Daschle beat Thorsness over the head with the fact that Thorsness had moved only relatively recently to South Dakota, from next-door Minnesota. His argument? Someone not from SD couldn't know or represent the things that South Dakotans care about and believe in. Hard to believe, knowing what we know now.
Anyway, if you have a chance to see this documentary, when Leo Thorness appears, raise a toast to him. One hopes that he will, just by telling the truth this one last time, play a part in what we can only hope will be a Bush tidal wave in SD that will help sweep Tommy boy out to sea and away from SD for good...
Of course, the man who will be most responsible will be the West River Country's current gift to SD politics: John Thune.
The initial "official" results prior to that box being found had Thorsness leading by about 50 votes.
When Senator Johnson happened to come up with just enough votes in the last county to turn in their results (Shannon -- Indian Reservation country) in the 2002 Senate race against Thune, many of us had the feeling that we had been there before...
Thanks for history lesson. I recall (vaguely) Thorsness. So what's your take on Thune? Can he pull enough votes to make it difficult for a sufficient number of "late votes" to suddenly appear?
Daschle is a formidable politician -- look at the way he engineered his selection as minority leader against significant odds. He won that by a single vote (he bought the vote by giving up a committee chairmanship he then held to someone who had been supporting the other guy.) Look at the way he engineered the Jeffords thing. His win for the statewide House seat when reapportionment dropped SD to one seat was very narrow. His win for his Senate seat against a sitting Senator was very close. Both tough races for a Democrat to win.
Thune isn't a firebrand conservative: he's more an across the board conservative who takes a softer approach, except when he's skewering Daschle. That's a plus when trying to unseat an incumbent.
Can he win? Yes, I think he can definitely win. Once a liberal SD senator is exposed on the national stage (ask George McGovern), he becomes vulnerable if the GOP puts up a strong candidate.
The chronic problem in the GOP in SD is that in general they have had such an advantage in registration that they haven't taken the time and effort to identify, groom, and protect good candidates. The Dems never waste an election: they've always got strong candidates who can use the opportunity of a won race to move up to the next level when the opportunity arises.
Bottom line: Thune can do it. I believe that it would help if Bush visited eastern SD and Cheney visited western SD to try to rally the base and boost THEIR margin of victory. Thune would be helped by this passive mobilization of the base more than by direct aggressive campaigning by the President for him, and certainly more than by more TV ads. But there is disagreement on this. Some argue that Bush's visits to SD in the midterms didn't help Thune, and may have hurt him (SD likes their Senators to have the appearance of independence from Presidential control). I think it would be different this time, since Bush could just campaign for himself, and not for Thune or against Daschle.
...mebbe you guys can help me some. I'm tracking down direct connections from Daschle to Moveon.org, ANSWER, and anyone else who isn't on the up and up. What I've been able to find thus far is there, but it is real tenuous. ...as in thin as a shadow... Ol' Tommy Boy's slicker'n cowshit. I haven't finished searching Free Republic, though...
ANY help would be greatly appreciated. I'm looking for mud, but I want big rocks in it, ya know...
Facts...facts...facts...
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/
http://uslaboragainstwar.org/links.php
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/5637/1/143/
http://www.publicintegrity.org/527/search.aspx?act=com&orgid=648
http://www.publicintegrity.org/527/docs/460450996-8872-0012.pdf
http://dbease.argusleader.com/dbEase/cgi-bin/go_get.pl
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0201.mencimer.html
Sorry, I wouldn't know where to start in hunting down these connections. Good luck in your search. BTW, I see on your website that you spent time at Lajes. I was there for 6 weeks with my tanker squadron during the Somalia conflict -- such an incredibly beautiful place, sooo quiet.... War was hell... If I were Roman Catholic, I might have decided to learn Portugese and move there permanently.
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