Right's sights on Daschle; Writer calls S.D. senator 'target No. 1'

The Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate had just finished scrubbing dead insects from the windshield of his rented Ford Taurus when he returned to the highways of South Dakota to make another stop on an annual summertime journey to protect his political future.

There is, perhaps, not a Democrat anywhere in America who is more hunted than Sen. Tom Daschle.

The White House, the Republican Party and a collection of conservative groups are working tenaciously behind the scenes and in public to end Daschle's 25-year run as a Democratic icon in one of the most Republican states in the nation.

That's one reason the senator drove to Elk Point, and to other places across the state this month, hoping to counter the television ads, the telephone calls and the series of mailings designed to convince voters it's high time to dump Daschle.

The depth of his Catholic faith has been questioned. Two days before the Iraq war, a group called the Daschle Accountability Project sent a letter throughout the state not so gently comparing him to French President Jacques Chirac.

In March, a few hours before Daschle arrived in Spearfish, a man was arrested after coldly declaring over a pay phone: ''We're going to kill Sen. Daschle today.'' Two years ago, Daschle's office was among those in Washington targeted with deadly anthrax spores.

''I try not to think about it. I'm very fatalistic, but I don't believe you can live your life in fear,'' Daschle said. ''I don't consider myself immune from criticism or hyperbolic rhetoric. That's probably just part of politics today.''

In South Dakota, recent political races have indeed become bare-knuckle affairs.

Few elections were nastier than one that ended here last fall when Daschle's protege, Sen. Tim Johnson, beat Republican rival John Thune by 524 votes in a contest in which more than $6 million was spent. Nationally, it was a rare bright spot for Democrats. Locally, the race still is heavily disputed and allegations of vote-buying remain prevalent.

All of that, not to mention Daschle's lightning-rod post as the leader of his party in the Senate, sets the stage for an even more contentious race. His is one of at least four seats Republicans believe they stand a chance of winning in the 2004 congressional election season, a period that even some Democrats fear may be bleak.

Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative Washington group that is weighing in on the South Dakota race, puts it this way:

''There are two Tom Daschles: the Tom Daschle with a very liberal voting record who has become part of the Washington establishment and the Tom Daschle that masquerades as a prairie state populist, pumping gas for people during his August recess.''

Who will run against Daschle is unknown. But the South Dakota political landscape became unexpectedly more complicated during this month's congressional break, when legislators traditionally leave Washington to spend time in their home districts.

The state's only House member, Republican Bill Janklow, had not ruled out challenging Daschle. But now he may face criminal charges for his role in a fatal traffic accident Aug. 16. And Thune, a former congressman who narrowly lost the Senate seat last year, has not said whether he will challenge Daschle, fill Janklow's seat if it becomes open or sit out the 2004 election season entirely.

But the opening barrage of negative attacks on Daschle has been under way since May.

The Club for Growth, which seeks to elect candidates who support President Ronald Reagan's hallmark of limited government and lower taxes, first ran an advertisement attacking Daschle's position on taxes. This month the criticism is far more personal and features Daschle's new home in Washington.

''It's a long way from Aberdeen to Foxhall Road,'' the ad says, showing pictures of the senator's new home. ''This is Tom Daschle's new $2 million house on Washington's ritzy Foxhall Road. It's a great place to entertain Hollywood liberals, politicians and lobbyists.''

The Daschle campaign asked local television stations to consider not airing the commercial, but the senator himself said he wasn't overly concerned about the juxtaposition between his native Aberdeen and Washington, where he has spent considerable time since first being elected to the House in 1978.

''It's not lost on a lot of people that those who are criticizing me don't even live in South Dakota,'' Daschle said. ''They are out-of-staters with deep pockets and they want to tell South Dakotans how to vote and how to think. I don't think South Dakotans buy that.''

I’m Linda, Fly Me
(Tom Daschle: Ambitions grounded by his wife’s baggage)
laweekly | 01/17/2003 | by Doug Ireland

The real reason Tom Daschle didn’t run for president.

The national press corps didn’t bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats’ Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated
that he couldn’t survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda Daschle has been one of the airline industry’s top lobbyists for two decades — when she wasn’t busy running the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which explains why, just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks, her husband rushed through the Democratic Senate,
which he controlled, the $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, a notorious taxpayer rip-off.

Right after then-Congressman Tom Daschle dumped his first wife for a younger, prettier one, the former Miss Kansas Linda Daschle went to work as chief lobbyist for the Air
Transport Association the airline industry’s main lobby; she then became the senior vice president of the American Association of Airport Executives; and these days hangs her
hat at the pricey top Washington law/lobby shop Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell, headed by former GOP Senate leader and ex–Reagan chief of staff Howard Baker —
where she peddles influence on behalf of a long list of lucrative aviation clients.

The clients for whom Linda lobbied brought more than $5.86 million into Baker, Donelson in one three-year period, including Northwest Airlines ($870,000 from 1997
through 2001) and American Airlines ($1.26 million in fees).

Northwest was already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy even before 9/11. American, which has had six fatal crashes since 1994 (not counting 9/11) and has been repeatedly fined by the FAA for a skein of safety violations, had the reputation as the most unsafe major U.S. carrier.

Yet these two clients of Linda Daschle’s got nearly $1 billion from the airline bailout her husband pushed into law — thanks to which Northwest (which was the second largest contributor to Senator Daschle’s 1998 campaign, and which scooped up $404 million in government cash) actually posted a $19 million profit in the third quarter after the twin-towers attacks. And, as the lone senator to vote against the bailout, Illinois GOPer Peter Fitzgerald, decried, “The only people who got bailed out were the shareholders.

The 1 million airline employees were left twisting in the wind.” So much for the populist noises that occasionally come from Senator Daschle’s mouth. The Daschles also made
sure that the bailout exempted American (which has consistently lobbied against tougher airline safety standards) and other carriers with lousy safety records from any real liability to lawsuits from the families of 9/11 victims.

Moreover, the General Accounting Office found that the airline industry’s representations to Congress to secure the bailout overstated its anticipated losses from 9/11 by as much as $5 billion.

Before 9/11, Senator Daschle pushed through the sleazy deal in the backrooms of Capitol Hill that forced the FAA to buy defective baggage scanners from one of Linda’s other
clients, L-3 International (from which Linda’s firm raked in $440,000 in the ’97–’01 period).

Under a provision Linda’s husband had slipped into the 2000 budget for the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the FAA was required to buy one of L-3’s scanners for every one it purchased from the company’s competitors.

The L-3 scanners were found to be substandard by DOT’s inspector general; FAA tests of the scanners showed high
failure rates; and most have not yet been installed because of their defects (the one at the Dallas–Fort Worth airport — another of Linda’s clients — leaked radiation), which is a
major reason DOT says it won’t be able to screen all luggage for explosives for years to come.

In one of those corporate-coddling moves for which the Clinton administration became infamous, President Bubba appointed Linda Daschle deputy administrator of the FAA,
putting her in charge of regulating her once-and-future clients; and she wound up running the agency as acting administrator. This, of course, significantly boosted the Daschle family income by hyping the amount Linda could charge her clients when she left government service.

She didn’t wait long to cash in. Example: While running the FAA, she awarded Loral Space Technologies (headed by Bernie Schwartz who sold US tech to the Chinese and a major Democratic contributor that figured in the ’96 campaign-finance scandals) a nearly $1 billion contract from the federal government; after Linda passed through the revolving door to Baker, Donelson, Loral paid the lobby shop $740,000 in 2000-2001 for Linda’s services.

When the FAA was pondering making mandatory a criminal-background check for all airport employees, Linda, who was then running the agency, vigorously opposed this common-sense move — echoing the position of the airline-industry lobby that had previously employed her.

A particularly odiferous episode involved charges that the senator and his wife had tried to sabotage safety inspections of an air-charter firm owned by Murl Bellew, a Daschle family friend who taught Tom how to fly. The scandal erupted and triggered an official investigation when a Bellew small plane chartered by the Indian Health Service crashed in North Dakota, killing the pilot and three doctors en route to an Indian-reservation
clinic.
--SNIP--

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