The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel and Paul Gigot discussed the Daschle v. Thune race this weekend on PBS. The segment is entitled "Country Tom and City Tom." Excerpt:
STRASSEL: ...[Daschle's] problem is that his own obstructionism in Washington has hurt his ability to bring home a lot of programs to South Dakota.GIGOT: Why?
STRASSEL: Well, a good example is ethanol. You know, South Dakota's a state, they've got lots of corn farming.
GIGOT: Corn, corn, corn.
STRASSEL: Corn, corn, corn. Ethanol producers. And Tom Daschle, when he was briefly majority leader two years ago, said I'm going to bring you home the ethanol mandate of all time, just as if we were rolling in ethanol money. But he didn't get it passed before the Republicans took over again. So then he found himself between a rock and South Dakota, and he was supposed to obstruct the Republicans putting through their own energy bill, while at the same time get his ethanol mandate passed. He couldn't do both. In the end, his own democratic party filibustered the energy bill, and he hasn't been able to bring home an ethanol mandate. That's not been good for him in the House.
GIGOT: So the fact that there's been very little, kind of relatively little done in the Congress actually hurts his ability to bring home the bacon in South Dakota.
STRASSEL: Sure.
(Emphasis added.) You can watch the video of the segment by clicking HERE and scrolling down. Kimberly Strassel also wrote a piece for the Wall Steet Journal's editorial page a few weeks ago headlined "All About Tom."
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