Daschle: Driving Force Behind Democrats’ Power

While training for a marathon, Tom Daschle was a paragon of determination, running up to 20 miles a day, a water bottle strapped to each hip and tape-player phones over each ear.

Even after congressional business kept him from running the race back home in South Dakota last fall, the Senate Democratic leader kept on training, clearing his daily schedule from 5 to 8 a.m. to prepare for the next one.

Months later, Daschle ran the Philadelphia marathon, his first.

Such perseverance also has been the hallmark of Daschle’s four-year reign as leader of the Senate Democratic minority.

To an unexpected degree, the soft-spoken but hard-working Daschle has stamped his trademark discipline upon the ideologically diverse and often fractious Democratic caucus, giving it disproportionate power in a chamber where Republicans outnumber Democrats, 55 to 45.

The latest show of force came Wednesday as all but one Democrat voted to dismiss the impeachment case against President Clinton. Although the vote fell short, its import was clear. As Daschle proclaimed afterward: “The president will not be removed from office.”

Even if every GOP senator voted to convict Clinton, Republicans would still need 12 Democrats to form the two-thirds majority required to remove the president. Yet even Wisconsin’s Russell D. Feingold, the lone Democrat who opposed “short-circuiting” the trial, said that his opposition to a dismissal “does not mean that I would vote to convict the president.”

Such Democratic antipathy to Clinton’s ouster has remained the one immutable and dominant factor throughout the impeachment process--spreading a sense of futility among Republicans and spurring both parties to search for an exit strategy.

And if the president indeed is acquitted, no one will have done more to earn his gratitude than Daschle--”a man with steel in his spine, despite his reasonable and modest demeanor,” in the words of Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), a onetime Daschle critic.

Daschle Credited With Party Success

To be sure, partisan GOP tactics have helped unite Democrats. But Democrats also say that Daschle’s stamina, patience and consultative style are the true secrets to his, and their, success.

“Inclusion--that has a lot to do with the cohesion we’ve been able to acquire,” Daschle, 51, said in an interview Thursday.

“It all comes down to our caucus feeling the need, and having the opportunity, for inclusion. [Democratic senators] really need to be able to hear what is the current set of circumstances and they need to be able to express themselves,” he added.

Daschle’s leadership style has been evident throughout the yearlong Monica S. Lewinsky controversy, particularly at critical junctures when the president’s standing among Democrats seemed especially precarious.

One such point came last August as Clinton was taking a public relations drubbing after finally admitting his affair with the onetime White House intern.

As they began trickling back into town after the summer recess, many Senate Democrats were livid at the president and some were ready to lash out, as Daschle learned.

“My concern at that point was that we might be fractured and find a lot of different views,” Daschle recalled.

Quickly, he began meeting with his colleagues, first individually and then in small groups. As it turned out, everyone stayed in the fold in those critical days when all of Washington was watching for key Senate Democrats to break with Clinton, perhaps causing a stampede.

Building Consensus Is a Key Priority

“Daschle has a unique management style that has worked well,” said Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

“He’s a person who doesn’t free-lance things” Reid said. “He has his leadership group. He runs things through them. If he has bad ideas, they are dropped. If they are good, he takes them to senior members. Then he takes them to the full caucus. But if it doesn’t fly, he drops it there.”

To keep his fingers on the pulse of his caucus over the holidays, as the impeachment trial approached, Daschle conferred by telephone with all 44 of his Democratic colleagues. “Some talked for an hour,” Reid recalled.

“He listens to everybody’s points of view, and appears to be interested in what they say,” added Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.). “But he still has in the back of his mind a gyroscope that knows where he’s trying to get to.”

Daschle on Thursday took umbrage at a report in a Capitol Hill newspaper that he had exerted “heavy pressure” on four Senate Democrats not to vote on Wednesday with Republicans who opposed dismissal of the case and called for witnesses.

“I had made my best case, but I never intervene,” Daschle said. “That’s just not my style.”

He said that the “absolutely false” report was “especially unfortunate for the two freshmen [named in the report] who are just trying to figure all this out.” Now, he said, they must explain to constituents that they had simply voted their consciences and not succumbed to pressure from Daschle.

Although the minority leader has fiercely fought against impeachment, he has deftly avoided the appearance of being too cozy with the White House.

After Clinton in August admitted his affair with Lewinsky, Daschle did not conceal his anger or disappointment. Later he criticized White House lawyers for “legal hair-splitting.” Daschle also has argued for censure of the president in the likely event that he is acquitted.

But even as he has encouraged the search for a bipartisan way to expeditiously end the trial, Daschle has assiduously refused to concede procedural issues to Republicans that might give them an edge in the impeachment proceedings.

Daschle and his GOP counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, consult daily, often repeatedly as the day wears on. They are said to have maintained a good working relationship, despite the recent strains of the impeachment imbroglio.

‘A Loyal Soldier to the President’

“He’s been a loyal soldier to the president,” Graham said of Daschle. “But he hasn’t let that loyalty rise above his ultimate loyalty to the Democratic caucus, the Senate as an institution and his own conscience.”

Daschle’s effectiveness has surprised even some Democrats, 23 of whom had voted for Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) for leader more than four years ago.

“He has done a magnificent job,” Dodd said of the man who edged him out in that election by one vote.

“Daschle entered the 104th Congress in a tenuous position, the unproven leader of a newly disenfranchised minority,” according to the 1998 edition of Politics in America. “But he surprised skeptics by skillfully uniting his caucus not only to thwart many GOP initiatives but to push several Democratic priorities into law.”

By the time Daschle stood for reelection as leader two years later, he was unopposed--and nominated by Byrd, who confessed to fellow Democrats:

“I did not think he was tough enough to deal with the likes of Bob Dole. I am here today to tell you that I was totally wrong about this young man.”

Indeed, none other than Dole, a legislative mastermind, found out just how tough a rival Daschle can be after sewing up the GOP presidential nomination in 1996.

Resorting to filibusters and other legislative ploys, Daschle repeatedly stymied Dole’s attempts to advance Republican legislation.

“I have to be certain that the Senate floor doesn’t become the presidential campaign megaphone for Bob Dole,” Daschle explained at the time. When Dole complained, Daschle told the then-GOP majority leader: “Welcome to the Senate, Sen. Dole.”

But such hardball tactics mask another side of Daschle, according to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

“Tom Daschle is the most gentle and patient man I’ve ever met in politics,” she said.