"Foley Sees Parallels in Daschle's Defeat": The AP has this fascinating report. Excerpt:
For Tom Foley, Election Night was a bitter replay of a moment he would rather forget.
Ten years after the former Democratic House speaker was turned out of office in a humiliating defeat, Foley watched as Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle was vanquished in a race with parallels to his own.
In each case, voters more conservative than the veteran lawmaker representing them punished a leader they perceived as more in touch with the capital than his home state.
If anyone understands Daschle's pain, it is Foley. His 1994 defeat made him the first sitting House speaker since 1862 to lose a bid for re-election. Daschle, D-S.D., was the first party leader in the Senate to lose re-election in more than 50 years....
Foley said Daschle, who lost to former Rep. John Thune, suffered from many of the factors that ultimately felled him: Voters either did not appreciate or understand the value of service as party leader, a role that sometimes caused both men to act in ways contrary to their own political survival.
"I think sometimes there's a difficulty in understanding what a state receives from having a majority leader in the Senate or a speaker of the House - or that those things viewed as not as important as they once were," Foley said....
The twin defeats - a decade apart - offer Democrats a sobering lesson, Foley said.
"When I lost the principal problem was in the rural counties," just as it was for Daschle, he said. "That's the thing that Democrats have to be concerned about around the country: the growing split between rural and urban.
"We need to examine how it was are responding to this division ... particularly the sense in some rural areas that the Democratic Party is not a party that respects faith or family or has respect for values. I think that's wrong, but it's a dangerous perception if it develops as it has," he said.
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