Roll Call contributing writer Stuart Rothenberg has a report today on the first ramification of Thune's run against Daschle, headlined "After 'Shotgun Marriage' Will New Blood Help Turn DSCC around?" Excerpt:
The announcement early last week that Andy Grossman would leave his post as executive director and be replaced by David Rudd, a former top aide to outgoing Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.), wasn’t big news in Omaha or Orlando. But it raised more than a few eyebrows on Capitol Hill....After the 2002 elections, Daschle picked Corzine as chairman and Grossman as executive director for the 2003-2004 cycle. Corzine didn’t have input in the choice of Grossman and didn’t have a close relationship with him....
Democrats familiar with the goings on at the DSCC present a picture of a dysfunctional family. Corzine and Grossman didn’t have a good working relationship, even though the executive director tried to get the Senator to work with him. While Daschle and a number of his top aides apparently tried to address the friction between the two men, they failed to improve things....
But things changed recently when former Republican Rep. John Thune entered the Senate race against Daschle on Jan. 5. Daschle found himself in his toughest political fight since he was first elected to the Senate in 1986, guaranteeing that the DSCC’s top fundraiser and Grossman’s strongest advocate would increasingly be spending more time in South Dakota and less on committee work.
The timing of Grossman’s announcement, coming only days after Thune’s entry into the South Dakota race, is hard to ignore.
Interestingly, another of Daschle's staffers, Jay Carson, left the leadership office to work in the Dean campaign, which seems to have imploded after coming in third in Iowa. It seems that Daschle, like Al Gore, is becoming the kiss of death for Democratic campaigns.
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