Jon Lauck's Daschle Vs. Thune: The Anatomy of a High Plains Senate Race is reviewed in today's Capitol Hill newspaper, The Hill. Excerpt:
Lauck is clearly willing to endure howls of outrage from fellow academics by purporting to write an unbiased book when he obviously favors one of the candidates. Lauck will not endear himself to historians by quoting conservative historian Leo Ribuffo that the “tendency toward glib moralizing from a left liberal or radical perspective has affected American historical writing for the worse.”
Nevertheless, Lauck pulls off his audacious task by producing a book that is generally even-handed, meticulously researched and historically illuminating.
For my part, I’m willing to let historians fight among themselves over Lauck’s book while I savor his engrossing account of the hard-fought Daschle-Thune face-off, which The New York Times called “the other big race of 2004” after the presidential election.
Lauck accurately places the Daschle-Thune battle in a historical context of the post-Reagan era, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and in the midst of the greatest projection of American military power since Vietnam.
“The 2004 South Dakota Senate race was fought over the scarred battlefields left by the 1960s and the Reagan revolution, with Daschle defending a remnant of the old order while Thune carried the banner of Reaganism,” he writes.
His detailed description of the two candidates’ personal and political background and their parallel struggles to achieve power makes for fascinating reading. Daschle, who became majority leader in 2001 when Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords defected from the GOP, and then minority leader again when Republicans regained the majority in January 2002, was handicapped by his obligation to his Senate conference, Lauck writes.
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