Low-Key Daschle Leading Party Into a Pivotal Year

Call him the unlikely gladiator.

Tom Daschle is by acclamation one of the most likable, low-key members of the U.S. Senate. He is chronically self-deprecating in a place riddled with pomposity. Even in the middle of raucous debate, he speaks in tones so soothing he could be reading a bedtime story. And even after years as the Senate’s Democratic leader, he was so little-known just a year ago that he could do his own grocery shopping in Washington without attracting much attention.

No more. Daschle has emerged as the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, catapulted into the political spotlight by circumstances that have put him toe-to-toe with President Bush.

His rise to prominence has been fueled by the animosity of his adversaries. Republicans have mounted a full-dress campaign--scathing political ads in South Dakota, television appearances by Daschle critics, a new Web site created by conservative activists--to brand him an obstructionist. Their message: Beneath his beguiling, soft-spoken veneer lurks a hardened partisan.

This much is certain--as Senate majority leader, Daschle has more power than any other Democrat to counter Bush’s domestic agenda. And to the delight of many Democrats and the frustration of the GOP, he has used it. Daschle has almost single-handedly blocked or slowed Bush’s proposals on energy policy, tax cuts and other issues.

“I can’t think of any higher form of flattery than the fact that the Republicans have decided to put him in their cross hairs,” said Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.).

Now, major challenges loom for Daschle as Congress reconvenes this week. How he flexes his muscles in the coming year will be a key factor in whether Bush can turn his wartime popularity into legislative success on the domestic front. That, in turn, could determine which party controls the Senate after the 2002 elections--and whether Daschle can present himself as a credible challenger to Bush in the 2004 presidential election.

In the meantime, Daschle personifies the conundrum his party faces in its relationship with Bush. He has struggled to balance his support for the president’s war on terrorism against growing efforts to fight Bush on issues such as taxes and health policy that cut to the core of the differences between the parties they head.

“It’s ticklish,” said Peter Fenn, a Democratic political consultant. “Everyone realizes that criticizing the president . . . is very delicate.”

Also ticklish is the task of leading a divided party as Democrats continue to grope for bearings in the post-Clinton era. That challenge became clear following Daschle’s much-publicized speech this month in which he blamed much of the country’s fiscal woes on the Bush-backed tax cut--yet stopped short of calling for a repeal or rollback of the law.

Some of the 12 moderate Senate Democrats who voted for the tax cut bridled at Daschle’s intensified criticism of it. But some party liberals thought he did not go far enough, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) upped the ante in the tax cut debate by proposing changes to the law.

“We are clearly in a transitional period,” said Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrats Network. “It still remains to be seen who’s going to define the next Democratic Party.”

Daschle’s relationship with Bush took on new significance and visibility in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. As part of his effort to build a bipartisan war coalition, Bush began weekly breakfast meetings with Daschle and the other congressional leaders. In his speech to Congress shortly after the attacks, Bush greeted Daschle with a bear hug on the floor of the House--a nationally televised moment that became an emblem of the post-Sept. 11 rapprochement between the parties.

Relations Strained With Administration

But that embrace may have obscured a relationship rife with tension and rivalry. Last spring, Bush irked Daschle by launching a campaign-style tour for his tax cut in South Dakota. Adding to the irritation, the White House recruited GOP Rep. John Thune to run this year against South Dakota’s other Democratic senator, Tim Johnson, a Daschle protege.

For his part, Daschle annoyed the administration in July when he bluntly criticized Bush’s foreign policy just as the president was launching a trip abroad.

And last fall, Daschle moved decisively to block Bush’s proposal to open a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. When the drilling plan appeared to have the votes needed to pass the Senate Energy Committee, Daschle snatched the bill away from the panel and said he would bring a leadership-backed bill to the Senate floor--but not for months.

Bush’s political aides have always viewed Daschle with suspicion. They see him in the mold of his mentor, former Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Maine), who made legislative life miserable for the administration of Bush’s father.

That suspicion festered when Bush and Daschle faced off in a pitched year-end battle over legislation to stimulate the economy. The battle, which ended in a stalemate, laid bare a political reality unchanged by Sept. 11: Daschle and Bush are fundamentally at odds over key elements of domestic policy.

Bush himself has never attacked Daschle by name. He even put his arm around him at one of the White House breakfasts and tried to distance himself from the anti-Daschle ads running in South Dakota, according to a Daschle confidant.

Still, the GOP onslaught seems to be getting under Daschle’s skin. “You have to go back a long way to find a situation where a presidential administration and Republicans have so aggressively and in such an organized fashion attacked the leader of another party,” Daschle said in a recent interview.

The GOP campaign is reminiscent of the Democratic effort in the mid-1990s to depict then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) as the personification of controversial elements of the Republican agenda. But analysts in both parties say it will likely prove hard to demonize Daschle, who lacks Gingrich’s abrasiveness.

“He’s always been able to come across as a sensible centrist,” said Marshall Wittmann, a conservative analyst at the Hudson Institute. “The problem for Republicans is that Daschle by temperament is not a polarizing figure.”

But Republicans are right that behind Daschle’s mild manner exists a tough, determined side that he displays not only in fighting GOP initiatives, but occasionally to other Democrats.

When Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) joined Republicans as a sponsor of Bush’s tax cut bill last year, a blindsided Daschle summoned him to his office for a scolding. When Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) cut a deal and threw his support behind the tax bill, Daschle responded sternly. “He laid it on heavy,” said a source familiar with the call.

Nor is Daschle shy about helping South Dakota, a conservative state where his attention to local interests has given him a secure political base despite his liberal leanings. Just recently, he helped muscle into a year-end spending bill a provision to help turn an abandoned South Dakota gold mine into an underground science lab.

Run for White House Could Be in the Cards

Daschle’s heightened profile was most evident by the attention generated by the speech in which he lambasted Bush’s economic policy, arguing that the 10-year, $1.35-trillion tax cut enacted last year was the principal reason why the federal budget surplus has vanished, and that it probably worsened the recession.

It was a speech welcomed by many Democrats, who fear the party has been too wary of engaging Bush in fights on domestic policy.

But Daschle came under fire for offering an analysis of fiscal problems without endorsing a possible solution, such as rolling back or delaying the tax cut.

And even some Democrats questioned the political wisdom of the speech, given that the tax cut issue so deeply divides his own party. Some also argued that the public cares more about restoring the economy than about assigning political blame for the loss of the surplus.

“People . . . are more concerned about the future than the past,” said one House Democratic leadership aide.

Republicans viewed the speech as a clear sign of Daschle’s presidential ambitions. When asked, Daschle does not rule out running for president, but insists he has not focused on it. “I’ve really made an effort to block out any consideration of other political plans until after this election,” he said.