The Argus Leader has a story today headlined "Group: Wife of candidate not fair game." The story quotes a Daschle surrogate presuming to tell us that the time to debate conflicts of interest and the ethics involved in lobbying is not during a political campaign:
Barker acknowledged that issues on lobbying are not fully resolved.
"It is a discussion," she said. "You can discuss conflicts of interest and the ethics involved but not the last two weeks of a hotly contested Senate campaign."
It's interesting to note that many observers simply assume that South Dakotans will have an opportunity to decide whether they have a problem with the fact that Linda Daschle's work as a lobbyist means corporations can legally put money into Tom Daschle's bank account. Clearly, if Daschle were to have his way, South Dakotans wouldn't know about it in the first place.
According to the Argus Leader story today, Daschle supporters say Republicans have long made a public issue of Linda Daschle's lobbying. In fact, the reverse is true. The Washington Monthly, hardly an arm of the Republican Party, published a devastating article on Linda Daschle's lobbying in January of 2002 headlined "Tom Daschle's Hillary Problem" noting that "[t]he landmines in Linda Daschle's professional portfolio will make Hillary Clinton's pork futures and law-firm billings look like mousetraps." Doug Ireland, a writer for The Nation, obviously about as far from being a Republican operative as it's possible to be, wrote a piece in January of 2003 for LA Weekly headlined "I'm Linda, Fly Me." Clearly, scrutiny of the Daschles' gravy train has not been voiced solely by Republicans.
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