The Weekly Standard has a review of Jon Lauck's new book, Daschle Vs. Thune: Anatomy of a High-Plains Senate Race. Here it is in full:
It seemed almost a miracle. Tom Daschle, the South Dakotan who rose to lead the Democrats in the Senate, performed perhaps his greatest political feat in 2002, when he worked and schemed, cajoled and threatened, and eventually dragged to victory Tim Johnson, the Democrat running for South Dakota's second Senate seat.
That 2002 race had almost everything a political junkie could want. A razor-thin finish of 524 votes. A lead for the Republican, John Thune, that disappeared hours after the polls closed in a flurry of questionable ballots from the Indian reservations. A threat of lawsuits, a roar of outrage from the Republicans, a smug victory announcement from the Democrats--and presiding over it all, the elfin figure of Tom Daschle, smiling like a mischievous sprite as he coerced donations, manipulated the political machines on the reservations, and pulled his candidate home.
Funny thing: Tom Daschle's worst political error came during that same campaign, for it was on Election Day in 2002, as he celebrated his friend's victory, that Daschle began the campaign that would end with the loss of his own Senate seat two years later. He saved Tim Johnson, but along the way, he infuriated voters in a Republican-majority state, created a subculture of bloggers determined to bring him down, and freed to run against himself the hungriest, most-attractive young Republican candidate in the state. If Thune had beaten Johnson, Tom Daschle would still be a senator today, for the Republicans had no one else with much chance against him. Instead, Thune lost to Johnson in 2002--and then sent Daschle down to defeat in 2004.
Not that it looked likely at the time. The Daschle-Thune race was routinely cited as the most important Senate campaign of 2004, second only to the presidential race in national significance. And the question of those days was simple: If John Thune couldn't beat the weaker candidate in Johnson, how was he supposed to beat the stronger candidate in Daschle? For how he managed it, there's no better account than Daschle vs. Thune: Anatomy of a High-Plains Senate Race, the new study from the Sioux Falls political activist Jon K. Lauck.
Every analyst tends to push the part of the answer he knows best. Bob Mercer, for example--a reporter in Pierre and one of the state's most astute political writers--had worked as a press secretary for the four-term Republican governor Bill Janklow. And during that 2004 election, Mercer insisted on the role played by Janklow, particularly Janklow's friendship with Daschle and the ancient rivalries between Janklow and Thune's mentor, James Abdnor (the Republican senator defeated by Daschle after Janklow had weakened him with a 1986 primary challenge).
So, for another example, David Krantz, the longtime political analyst for the state's largest paper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, repeatedly leaned toward the explanation from history and state psychology: South Dakota's unwillingness (evidenced by George McGovern's defeat by Jim Abdnor in 1980) to reelect a senator whose national importance suggests he's become more of a Washingtonian than a Dakotan.
Jon Lauck was a blogger--perhaps the state's key blogger--during the 2004 campaign, and so in Daschle vs. Thune he emphasizes the blogging explanation: The web provided, for the first time, a statewide source of news and commentary besides the local television stations, which did little serious reporting, and the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, which was widely perceived to be in Daschle's corner, both on its editorial pages and in its news coverage.
Lauck's thesis is right, and yet, it isn't. With a near monopoly as the state's only paper of record, the Argus Leader was unused to criticism. Much of that criticism was well deserved, and when the attacks from local blogs were picked up by national bloggers (and then began appearing in such national publications as the Wall Street Journal and National Review), the paper reacted badly, snarling, as Lauck remarks, that blogs are "places where the views of the 'pinheaded' on the 'political fringes' with 'nutty opinions' can 'spew forth.'" Indeed, the Argus Leader's editor added, "If Hitler were alive today, he'd have his own blog." It all made for great Internet theater, and though they mostly spoke to readers who were already Thune supporters, the blogs certainly cost Tom Daschle some votes.
But only some. In truth, Daschle lost not because of any large factor but because each small factor cost him a handful of voters, and when they all totaled up, they amounted to a 4,508-vote win for Thune.
Daschle filed for a homestead tax credit on his $1.9 million house in Washington (which required declaring himself a permanent resident of the District of Columbia) and a few South Dakota voters decided the time had come to vote for Thune. The Republicans recaptured control of the Senate in 2002, and another small set of voters decided that Daschle's leadership wasn't needed any more. The Republican's get-out-the-vote effort failed Thune in the practice run of 2002, but worked for him in 2004. Daschle's two-faced stand on legalized abortion--for it in Washington and against it in South Dakota--burned away some votes. The Democrats' failed lawsuit to ban Republican poll-watchers on the reservations alienated a few more.
And bit by bit, county by county, Daschle's margin of victory dribbled away. The details of Thune's election are all present here, down to the exact length (29 seconds) of Daschle's 3:00 A.M. telephone call conceding defeat. Through the central chapters of the book, Jon Lauck has written what should be required reading for anyone interested in how to win--and how to lose--a modern senatorial campaign.
Apart from that, however, who gives a hoot any more about Tom Daschle's lost chances? We're almost three years past the election, John Thune is now an accepted figure in the Republican party, and without a Senate majority leader from the state, national interest in South Dakota politics has dropped to its usual level: somewhere between nearly nonexistent and completely nonexistent.
Lauck clearly recognizes the why-bother aspect of his work, and he devotes a concluding chapter to what he calls "Daschle versus Thune as Synecdoche," a big-think attempt to tie the campaign to the struggle between the 1970s left and the 1980s right--the decades-long battle between the followers of George McGovern and the forces of Ronald Reagan. In the end, Daschle's attempts to pose himself as a Reagan Democrat at home and a McGovern Democrat in Washington were doomed--in part, Lauck argues--because there is no peace to be made between the two camps. In the long tide of American political history, one side must lose.
That's right, and yet, again, it isn't. Thune won the election, after all, and if his victory is a synecdoche for a general trend in American politics, then we have no explanation for the results of the next national election, in 2006, when McGovernism came roaring back. Lauck adds an epilogue that admits the point, but can't quite bring himself to see that it requires a complete rethinking of his thesis.
Still, Daschle vs. Thune is a model for tight, detailed election coverage--even if so many of the figures it details are fading with astonishing speed. Tim Johnson has suffered a stroke and remains too ill for his full Senate duties. Bill Janklow, driving at his usual reckless rate, plowed a borrowed car into a motorcyclist and resigned his House seat when manslaughter charges were filed. Tom Daschle seems to have settled back on the comfortable income he and his wife make as Washington lobbyists. Where are the politicians of yesteryear?
Tom Daschle is one of the figures who dominated politics in South Dakota for a generation. But hunted down at last by Hubris, the avenging spirit that waits hungrily to punish arrogance, they are all gone now, victims of the very things that made them so successful. To read Daschle vs. Thune is to understand why the best response is: Good riddance.
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