Denise Ross on The Victory

Denise Ross of the Rapid City Journal takes a stab at analyzing the monumental defeat of Senator Daschle today in a piece headlined "Campaign's responses fell short." Excerpt:

A National Abortion Rights Action League fund-raising pitch signed by [Senator Daschle] and featuring a letterhead with his picture next to the words "pro-choice leadership in the Senate" circulated far and wide as soon as it went out in the fall of 2002. Video of a forceful speech he gave that same year to California Democrats, in which he promised to defend the "sacred ground of a woman's constitutional right to choose," surfaced later. That evidence, along with Daschle's criticism of President Bush's buildup to war in Iraq, the new $1.9 million house and the "I'm a D.C. resident" tape, was lying around like an unguarded ammunitions pile in Iraq. John Thune needed only to pick up the grenades, pull the pins and throw them. Some would produce flesh wounds. Others would prove life threatening. Daschle's team knew that ammunitions pile was there. They couldn't stop Thune from firing away, but they could have flushed him out earlier. The conventional wisdom of campaigns is to get the bad news out of the way early. Not only did the Daschle team not do that, but they mounted no identifiable defense against the incoming fire that rained down late in the campaign. It's understandable that Daschle, being human, would not want to confront those difficult and personal issues in the context of a campaign. His staff was duty-bound to force him to do so and to devise a strategy, probably one in which Thune would not have been allowed to define the debate.

The thing is, a strategy was devised. The Daschle camp attempted to condition voters to believe that any fact-based criticism of Daschle was a "negative attack" and whined about "John Thune's negative ads" even when Thune had not run a single ad that even mentioned Tom Daschle. Daschle knew he was in trouble if his record became a topic for discussion, so he tried to condition voters to ignore any scrutiny of his record. Obviously, that strategy failed. But it seems to me that strategy was the only option the Daschle camp had. If there was to be any discussion of taxes and cultural issues in an ultra-red state like South Dakota, Daschle was automatically losing. The best strategy was to take advantage of the Midwestern notion to believe the best about everyone by portraying any scrutiny, even non-existent scrutiny, as a mean, nasty, negative attack, and hope the voters would be adequately conditioned to simply ignore any scrutiny of his record. If voters ignored scrutiny of Daschle's record, he could get away with saying things like "I am adamantly opposed to abortion on demand" despite penning a fundraising letter for NARAL; saying "I am a strong proponent of the Second Amendment" despite getting an "F" from the NRA; saying "I'm not in favor of raising anybody's taxes" despite fighting tooth and nail against making the Bush tax cuts permanent. It was a good strategy, but it could only hold back the dam for so long. I think Ross is wrong about Daschle "allowing" Thune to define the debate. Daschle was trying to keep a debate from even happening, or, to continue the analogy, trying to make it impossible for Thune to fire away with all of the ammo at his disposal.