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Open in TheBrain

Daschle, T SEN

targetted? gannon  CoC, am renewal

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Broken

https://www.c-span.org/video/?417834-8/tom-daschle-trent-lott-discuss-bipartisanship

NOVEMBER 10, 2016

Bipartisanship and the Trump Presidency Former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle(D) and Trent Lott (R) offered suggestions for bipartisanship in the upcoming Congress and Trump presidency.

“Beyond the Crisis Point with Former Senators Tom Daschleand Trent Lott” was the closing general session of the Roll Call Live 2016 Election Impact Conference.

secret task force report led to bills:

Haliburton gave 1 mil gop 97-02, and all soft money 1/2 mil to gop ; incentive to

pollute added to rep.bill, tho O'N says does not cost more to do right.

conservation a private virtue, not basis of public policy DC TO speech mo before

rep released 107  but 1 mpg increase = ANWR  2.6 = iraq and kuwait import, 8 all

of ME 108  JC cafe up 7.5, shortage --> glut p108, 86 rolled by RR; lovens says if

not, we need no persian gulf oil after 86; no need for wars; since 1990 80 mil car

$ , cancelled tax ded for green cars, less effic st'ds $100K tax break hummers etc.

result worst effic in 20 yrs 109  tax cuts to offset energy prices [basically

another subsidy !?]  bill ~ Daschle but end-run, by june 02  3/4 of 105 recs in

place

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rfk2:

ch 8

dascle held energy bill 18 mos till gop got both houses in 1/2003  Delay and

energy comm chair Billy Tauzin passed, but know it cd not pass, so bait

and switched: passed dem bill then rewrote it w/o dems 145, just energy lobby

; released the bill Sat night, 3 days to review 1200 pages 147 damage env and add

to debt (100B tax breaks McC: no lobbyist left behind"  for Hooters and Polluters.

Halib tax break to frack ; worst bill for envir in 25 yrs (back to newt Reg reform")

More for oil, more ghg.ethanol subsid peeled off demos, incl daschle and harkin;

DC and lobbists worked hard; even WSJ deplored pork for votes 149

House passed Domenicionmibus? bill [same as energy bill?], but sen filibuster.

WSJ "cornucopia of special interst payoffs" 151 some gop sununu held out, big debt

and MTBE outrage (delay, tauzin and barton)"Major Threat to Better Earnings' etc  

shell jokes; used b/c lobby tho more $ than ethanol 155 cost to clean cd be $29-46

billion, co try to dodge .

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tom_Daschle

Thomas Andrew "Tom" Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota, lost his seat in the U.S. Senate in November 2004 to John Thune. [1] He was the first "Senate leader in half a century to be voted out of office." Reuters reported July 3, 2006.

Daschle is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, focusing "on health care policy and global economic, security and health issues." Daschle is also "a member of the Global Alliances' steering committee, an international coalition of progressive leaders dedicated to the development and exchange of progressive policy ideas.

"In addition to his work at the Center, Senator Daschle is also a visiting professor at the Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute, conducting student seminars, guest lectures in classrooms, and holding public discussions related to politics and policymaking." [2]

He is married to Linda Hall Daschle.

Contents

[hide]

Profile

Daschle was Democratic Leader in the U.S. Senate from 1994 to 2004 and is "the third longest serving Senate leader in party history." Daschle was born December 9, 1947, in Aberdeen, South Dakota, "raised in a working class family and is the eldest of four brothers. He became the first person in his family to graduate from college when he earned a degree from South Dakota State University in 1969. After serving three years as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, Daschle spent five years as an aide to South Dakota Senator James Abourezk. He was elected to Congress for the first time in 1978 and served a total of four terms in the House. Daschle served 18 years in the Senate after winning election to that office in 1986." [3]

Records and controversies

Iraq War

Daschle voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq in Oct. 2002.

For more information see the chart of U.S. Senate votes on the Iraq War.

Timeline

According to the Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress [4], Daschle:

2008

Daschle was weighing a campaign comeback he hoped would propel him into the White House in 2008, Reuters reported July 3, 2006.

Associations

New Leadership for America

Daschle is chairman of New Leadership for America, a political action committee which he established in 2005 to help Democratic leaders to public office. [5]

Published works by Tom Daschle

"Like No Other Time", Random House, August 24, 2004, Trade Paperback, ISBN 9781400053759.

Related SourceWatch resources

References

  1. ↑ Advisory Board, Bipartisan Policy Center, accessed February 3, 2009.

External links

Profiles

Resources

Articles by Tom Daschle

Speeches & statements by Tom Daschle

Interviews

Articles & commentary

2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006

Categories: 

In 2001, the shocking party-switch of Republican Jim Jeffords gave Democrats control of the Senate. Daschle presided as Majority Leader until the bruising 2002 midterm elections, when Republicans retook the chamber.

Daschle is criticized by some Democrats as being too busy worrying about his own political vulnerabilities in representing a conservative state to deal with what is best for the Democratic Party, or the nation, as a whole. There has been some speculation that Daschle will step down from the Democratic Leader post in 2005. However, that point became moot after Daschle lost the toughest reelection campaign of his career to former House rep John Thune. Jeff Gannon, also known as James D. Guckert, played a large role in Daschle's defeat as a paid GOP blogger in the smear campaign against Daschle.

Daschle's 2004 campaign website

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Since taking the Chamber's helm, Donohue has developed a powerful lobbying group within the organization, created a for-profit company, tackled tort reform and helped the trade association's PAC aggressively support pro-business candidates for Congress. The chamber has also gone to extreme lengths to oust lawmakers it deems hurtful to business interests, playing a major role in then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's (D-S.D.) reelection defeat in 2004.

==

The Guns of November 2004 Campaign Setup Dairy -Cope 15:42, 28 Oct 2004 (PDT)

targeted by American Renewal/FRC

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/frcaction

Withdrawal

On January 30, 2009, it was reported that Daschle's friendship and business partnership with businessman Leo Hindery could cause problems for Daschle's Senate confirmation. Daschle has been a paid consultant and advisor to Hindery's InterMedia Partners since 2005, during which time hereceived from Hindery access to a limousine and chauffeur.Daschle reportedly did not declare this service on his annual tax forms as required by law. A spokeswoman for Daschle said that he "simply and probably naively" considered the use of the car and driver "a generous offer" from Hindery, "a longtime friend".[31]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-washingtonposttaxes-31)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-cnntaxes-41)41]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-cnntaxes-41)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-abctaxes-43)43]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-abctaxes-43)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-wsjtaxes-44)44]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-wsjtaxes-44) Daschle told the Senate Finance Committee that in June 2008—just as he was letting the press know he would like to be HHS secretary in an Obama administration[37]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-nationaljournalhhs-37) -- that "something made him think that the car service might be taxable" and he began seeking to remedy the situation.[45]

Daschle reportedly also did not pay taxes on an additional $83,333 that he earned as a consultant to InterMedia Partnersin 2007; this was discovered by Senator Daschle's accountant in December 2008.[45]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-wsjtaxes2-45) According to ABC News, Daschle also took tax deductions for $14,963 in donations that he made between 2005 and 2007 to charitable organizations that did not meet the requirements for being tax deductible.[46]

The former Senator paid the three years of owed taxes and interest—an amount totaling $140,167—in January 2009,[43]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-abctaxes-43)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-wsjtaxes-44)44]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-wsjtaxes-44)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-wsjtaxes2-45)45]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-wsjtaxes2-45)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-abctaxes2-47)47]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-abctaxes2-47) but still reportedly owed "Medicare taxes equal to 2.9 percent" of the value of the car service he received, amounting to "thousands of dollars in additional unpaid taxes".[48]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-nyttaxes-48)

On Tuesday, February 3, 2009, Daschle withdrew his nomination,[49]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-telegraph.co.uk-49) saying that he did not wish to be a "distraction" to the Obama agenda.[3]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-daschlewithdrawl-3) He was forced to withdraw because, even though he had a sufficient number of Democratic votes for nomination, he became an untenable political liability for the President.[49]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle#cite_note-telegraph.co.uk-49)

[edit] Health policy

Former Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD) makes well over $2.1 million as an unregistered lobbyist in addition to earning several hundred thousand a year in speaking fees and consulting gigs. When Daschle lost his seat in the Senate, he went work for the lobbying/law firm Alston & Bird, while also providing advice to lobbying firms like the Glover Park Group, AHIP, the health insurance lobbying association, and several well-connected private equity and medical device companies. Although Daschle never registered to lobby, his sky-high income became public when President Obama unsuccessfully nominated the former Democratic majority leader to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Daschle now works at DLA Piper, another major law/lobbying firm, where he likely makes far more than his Alston & Bird salary of $2.1 million given Daschle’s significant role in crafting President Obama’s health reform proposals. Not counting the speaking fees, Daschle achieved a 1228% salary increase by moving through the revolving door.

http://www.republicreport.org/2012/make-it-rain-revolving-door/

mooney 2001

The producers who brought you Doggygate and the brouhaha over Al Gore's alleged claim that he invented the Internet are at work on a brand new project: the destruction of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Comments from a recent discussion thread on the right wing websiteFreeRepublic.com demonstrate the budding smear efforts: "Please help me flesh out various scandals that Daschle is involved in," writes one contributor. "There is something about his wife's employment I think that might be a conflict of interest. Maybe not," suggests another. (Daschle's wife, Linda, is a transportation lobbyist for the firm Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell.)

The website *Spinsanity.com*, which tracks and critiques political rhetoric, has been monitoring Daschle-bashing, recently noting a *Washington Times* articlethat mentions a "coordinated" attack on the senator by right-wingers. Thanks in part to Spinsanity, it's possible to trace many of the key motifs and rhetorical techniques in this spin war -- a project that reveals striking continuities across a range of different conservative media outlets.

Here is a short list of some burgeoning Daschle-bashing techniques:

"Puff Daschle"

This is Rush Limbaugh's moniker for the South Dakota senator; Limbaugh, wit that he is, also came up with "'Little Dick' Gephardt." From a spin perspective, Limbaugh's coinage is brilliant, equating Daschle with "Puff Daddy," the singer recently acquitted on weapons charges relating to a 1999 nightclub shooting. Not surprisingly considering its ad hominem nature, this nickname doesn't appear to have made its way into the mainstream media. But below the surface, on right wing websites like FreeRepublic and *Newsmax.com*, "Puff Daschle" has become a standard way of referring to the Senate majority leader -- not unlike "Slick Willy" as a nickname for Bill Clinton, or the venomous "Hillabitch" for Hillary Clinton.

Mt. Rushmore: Tom Daschle's Buddhist Temple

But the right doesn't just have nicknames for Daschle; it has scandal narratives-in-progress, stories that can be made out to seem shady when told the right way -- thus giving the impression that the Senate majority leader has an inclination for dirty dealings. So far, the most prominent of these involves a 1997 trip to the top of Mt. Rushmore for roughly 100 Daschle friends, supporters and campaign contributors. Regular tourists aren't allowed to make the climb, but the park's superintendent escorted Daschle's gang -- suggesting a special favor for donors.

In 1997 The Washington Post ran a story on the affair, and the paper's editorial page rebuked Daschle, though it also observed that "As such things go, the Daschle event may not have been any worse than the many similar festivities put on by his colleagues to raise money from people who want their ear." And then, at least for the moment, that was it for Rushmore-Gate. But on NBC's Meet the Press last May, shortly after Jim Jeffords' defection from the Republican Party, Tim Russert asked Daschle about the trip. He responded, "Well, I haven't done it since. And I'm disappointed that it was interpreted [as a reward for donors]. But to avoid interpretation, you're right. I've made mistakes. I admit them. I'll go on and try not to make them again."

This admission wasn't enough for the National Review Online, however. On June 1st, the site posted an anonymous note titled "Daschle's Rushmore Problem," which began: "Did Tom Daschle lie to Tim Russert on Meet the Press last Sunday? It certainly looks that way." The short article seized on Daschle's comment to Russert that "You can go to the top of Mt. Rushmore regularly. People do that almost every week. I'm sure they're doing it today." According to both The Washington Post and the National Review Online, this is not actually the case. Whether Daschle was lying to Russert about it is another matter, and the National Review Online's commentary doesn't come within miles of proving it.

Tom Daschle Wants to Poison Your Children

As early as last April, when Tom Daschle was the most visible elected Democrat but not yet Senate majority leader, Rush Limbaugh and the National Review's Rich Lowry also hit on another attack strategy. Last October, they noted, Daschle joined 18 other Democratic senators in voting to delay the Environmental Protection Agency's implementation of Clinton's proposed rules lowering arsenic levels in drinking water. But when the Bush administration suggested doing basically the same thing, Daschle upbraided the president.

It's certainly fair game to point out this contradiction. But the way Rich Lowry highlighted Daschle's re-positioning on arsenic was designed for maximum smear-effect: His *National Review Online* article was titled "Daschle's Love Affair With Arsenic," and subtitled "Does Tom Daschle enjoy poisoning the nation's children?"

Daschle fired off a letter to the National Review Online criticizing Lowry's rhetoric; in response, Lowry quibbled, but finally conceded the point: "I'm willing to admit that my accusation in last week's piece that Daschle wants to poison the nation's children was not serious, just a way to make a point." But what Lowry didn't admit was that the framing of his article helped create an easily recyclable Daschle trope: one that equates Daschle and poisoning children. (If Lowry knows what's best for his party, he might want to abandon this line of attack; it's President Bush who is associated with arsenic poisoning in the public's mind, and no amount of spin will undo that.) After his false apology Lowry immediately went on, introducing another key tactic in the spin war against Tom Daschle: "Daschle will never admit the same about his anti-Bush charges because . . . well, because partisan demagoguery is what he does for a living."

Tom Daschle, Ferocious Partisan

Lowry's labeling Daschle a "partisan" was a sign of things to come. After Jim Jeffords defected from the Republican Party and Daschle replaced Trent Lott as majority leader at the end of May, conservatives furiously seized on this word as an adjective to describe Daschle. Commenting in the National Review Online, John Fund, a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, observed:

There is much irony in Sen. Daschle ascending to the post of majority leader. He was elected to the Senate in 1986, and quickly became a protégé of George Mitchell, the most partisan majority leader of the last century. Mitchell delighted in throwing sand into the gears of George Bush's administration . . . Now his equally partisan protégé, Tom Daschle, will have the opportunity to bedevil a new president named Bush. Let's hope the younger, tougher, more conservative George W. has better luck maneuvering around a fiercely partisan Democratic Senate than his father did.

Fund appears to have liked his new epithet for Daschle quite a bit. Subsequently, a May 31st Wall Street Journal editorial termed the South Dakota senator, "the hyper-partisan Mr. Daschle." Strikingly, this was just words away from a May 24th op-ed by New York Times righty William Safire, which referred to "the ultra-partisan Tom Daschle." In newspaper reports around the same time, meanwhile, Daschle was dubbed a "partisan" by, among others, Republican Senators Pete Domenici and Rick Santorum and GOP operatives John Weaver and Ed Gillespie. Finally, a May 31st Republican National Committee press release made the whole strategy the official party line. Ironically, it was Jim Gilmore, the Republican Party's chairman (the most partisan post of all) who said, "I hope Senator Daschle leaves partisanship at the door as he assumes his new role as Majority Leader."

There's much thought behind this phrasing. Calling Tom Daschle "partisan" (or "ultra-partisan" or "hyper-partisan") is a clever strategy, for it is at once extremely negative and virtually irrefutable. (It is one of the media's conceits that partisanship is inherently evil, and bipartisanship -- regardless of the issue -- inherently good.) The charge is also utterly comic: The parties are virtually always at odds, each "partisanly" opposed to the other's positions. By definition, party leaders are partisans. But if Republicans are able to implement their strategy effectively, they can spin their position as the baseline and the Democrats' alternate position as the partisan one.

And it's not just the word "partisan." As Daschle-bashing grows and involves, conservatives continually co-opt new negative adjectives to describe the Senate majority leader, according to Daschle staffers who have been monitoring attacks on their boss. "There's 'inflexible' and 'autocratic' now, and of course the always popular 'obstructionist'," says Daschle spokesperson Anita Dunn.

Tom Daschle, Illegitimate Usurper

Also around the time of the Senate switch, many conservatives began to label Tom Daschle's assumption of the position of Senate majority leader "illegitimate," arguing that the American public voted last November for a Republican-controlled Senate, making Jeffords' defection and Daschle's ascent a "coup." This Swiss-cheese logic can be easily debunked; for an extensive critique see a previous Rightwatch. What's more interesting about the argument, however, is its political lineage.*Spinsanity* traces the "illegitimacy" attack from its apparent origins with Rush Limbaugh to The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes, who repeated it on Fox News on May 24th. From there, the claim entered the political ether, repeated by Tucker Carlson on CNN's "Crossfire," as well as by The Wall Street Journal editorial page -- not to mention in a now-notorious memo issued by the outgoing Senate majority leader Trent Lott.

These five examples don't exhaust the only strategies out there for attacking Tom Daschle. They are only some of the most prominent so far, and it's hard to tell which, if any, will ultimately stick. But what's most striking about these approaches is how deliberate some of them seem.

Last year, in a revealing column, National Review founder William F. Buckley referred to an "off-the-record meeting of 20 right-wing editors, writers and diverse others . . . to inquire how enthusiastically should American conservatives labor for the election of George W. Bush." Are conservative pundits currently strategizing about ways of smearing Tom Daschle? Who knows. What's clear, though, is that quite a lot of them are working hard to jack up his negative ratings -- and that their constituents, who listen to Rush Limbaugh and post on FreeRepublic.com, are hungry for more.