He’s baaaaaaaaaaack…and it’s good news for Rush Limbaugh (Rush will get lots of material out of it) and bad news for Senator Hillary Clinton (because this guy will help get her chief opponent lots of financial material).
Former Majority Leader Tom Daschle is back in the political saddle again…in a vital behind the scenes role, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reports:
Three years ago, it took a nasty, industrial-strength assault by Karl Rove & Co. to oust Democratic leader Tom Daschle from his Senate seat. But if Republicans thought they had seen the last of the resilient South Dakotan, they were wrong. He’s back, this time behind the scenes, as a sort of secret sauce in the surging presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.
Daschle spent 30 years on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide, House member, senator and ultimately Democratic Senate leader. Now he is providing newcomer Obama with valuable endorsements, staff, fundraising lists and brotherly advice. “He brings an unrivaled mix of policy knowledge and political expertise,� said Steven Hildebrand, an Obama senior campaign advisor. He ought to know: a fellow South Dakotan, he ran Daschle’s last Senate campaign.
Money talks and Daschle knows the language. Although three years distant from the Hill (he is now a law firm consultant and lecturer at Georgetown), Daschle has carefully maintained his mailing list of 85,000 donors, and he is renting it to only one candidate – Obama. I am told that Daschle is about to do a fundraising letter for the campaign as well. “He is incredibly well-liked by Democrats,� said Hildebrand. “He really doesn’t have any enemies in the party.�
That can’t be welcome news to Hillary Clinton’s camp at all. MORE:
Daschle’s unusually early endorsement of Obama last February gave the newcomer desperately-needed instant clout among insiders who were resigned to the inevitability of Hillary Clinton, but praying for an alternative. “What Daschle brought was credibility,� said an insider close to both men, “and now they have developed a good personal relationship.� The two men share a similar approach to both the process and substance of politics: a certain soft-spoken meticulousness, and a desire to blunt the sharp edges of partisanship.
Interestingly – tellingly – it was Obama who reached out to Daschle. In 2004, Obama was cruising to an easy victory in the Illinois Senate race, and had a lot of unused cash on hand. He gave a lot of it – some $85,000, according to Hildebrand – to Daschle, who was under White House siege in South Dakota. Even before he was sworn in, Obama knew who he wanted for his chief of staff: Rouse. Ironically, Daschle advised Rouse, a veteran with 30 years service on the Hill, to leave the Congress and take a lucrative lobbying position. But Obama sold Rouse, and in the process began the task of wooing Rouse’s boss.
This report as so many others underscores a key fact: Ms. Clinton’s camp has not succeeded in fostering a sense of inevitability about her prospective Presidential candidacy. If anything, she seems in a battle royal on several fronts — against Obama and against a re-energized John Edwards. Ms. Clinton’s key strength has been her overwhelming bank roll. Increasingly, that is being called into question — and will be called into question even more if Daschle has anything to say about it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.