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SDP is keeping track of Thune's appearances on Lou Dobbs, Paula Zahn, Kudlow & Cramer etc...so I'll leave that to him. But note that Thune will be the guest on the "Capital Gang" tonight on CNN (6:00 PM Sioux Falls time). I plan to Tivo it. Now off to the library.
One Senate Republican is hoping that the Daschle defeat will end the Senate gridlock:
Beyond providing Republicans with a larger majority of 55 votes in the Senate, last week's vote sends a clear message that voters are frustrated with the now-famous obstructionism that led people from all around the country to descend on South Dakota and unseat a sitting party leader for the first time since Barry Goldwater upset Ernest McFarland.
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle had spearheaded a strategy of stalling judicial nominations and filibustering key legislation. It was largely successful, since accomplishing virtually anything in the Senate requires either unanimous consent or a super-majority of 60 votes for cloture, which is required to end debate.
In February 2003, Daschle launched the first filibuster designed to permanently deny an up-or-down vote on a judicial nomination. The target was Miguel Estrada, a Honduran immigrant and Harvard Law School graduate nominated to serve on the overworked D.C. Circuit. After two years, more than 100 hours of debate, and 7 failed cloture votes, Mr. Estrada withdrew in exasperation.
In the past session of Congress, 20 cloture votes were lost, on nominees Estrada, Priscilla Owen, Charles Pickering, Carolyn Kuhl, Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, Bill Myers, Henry Saad, Richard Griffin, and David McKeague (all of whom had bipartisan, majority support and would have been confirmed by a simple majority vote). Only 69% of President Bush's nominees to the appeals courts have received up-or-down votes. By last summer, pending judicial nominees had been waiting an average of more than 18 months for an up-or-down vote, and appeals court nominees more than 25 months.
Read the whole thing.
On p. 3B of today's Argus is the wonderful article by Denise Ross (not online, apparently) about George McGovern's WWII bomber that appeared in yesterday's Rapid City Journal. The people at Ellsworth Air Force base named a bomber after McGovern's WWII B-24 bomber, the "Dakota Queen." Great little story. But here's the point. Remember all those good stories by Ross about the Giago controversy or that huge Kevin Woster story about Daschle and abortion? They could have appeared in the Argus just like this McGovern story did this morning. But they didn't. Someone exercised some discretion and made a choice not to expose Argus readers to that information. That was a mistake.
Rapid City Journal reporter Denise Ross is sticking to her argument that Daschle's campaign failed him, according to this post on the RCJ blog:
I meant what I said and said what I meant when I said Daschle’s campaign team failed him. (My column that ran Tuesday.)
Looks like the humility isn’t flowing too freely back at Daschle campaign HQ. Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report penned a letter to the editor to object to my analysis of the, shall we call them missed opportunities. It’s possible she found my column without the help of Daschle Inc., but my money goes the other way.
I’m not sure when Duffy’s letter will appear on the RCJ editorial pages, but here is the heart of her complaint. This has not been edited, unless I inadvertantly inject typos: “Ross suggests that the campaign staff should have flushed out Daschle’s problems on abortion. But, the fact that the campaign went on the air with TV ads 16 months before Election Day and had spent heavily in 2003 provides ample evidence that Daschle’s position was too weak to sustain the fall out from the revelation that perhaps he is not as pro-life as South Dakota voters had been led to believe.”
Ross argues that if the Daschle campaign knew they were in serious jeopardy of losing from the get-go (the reason they ran ads for a year prior to Thune running a single ad) they should have done something to address Daschle's vulnerability on the abortion front:
If they started an ad campaign 16 months before the Big Day because they knew their candidate was weak on abortion, they knew their candidate was in peril SIXTEEN MONTHS BEFORE ELECTION DAY. (sorry, I know some of you don’t like caps.) One might think that left plenty of time to devise a strategy on abortion.
***
Daschle stuck to an unsatisfactory statement on abortion and turned combative when Kevin Woster pressed him for a better answer. (BTW, combative is my word. Kevin’s official description: terse and impatient.) Had Daschle’s campaign confronted the abortion problem early, say in June, Woster and the senator would never have had their interview. Daschle would have already answered those tough questions. Painful as it might have been in, say June, it certainly was worse later.
The problem, it seems to me, is that I don't know how the Daschle campaign could have "confronted the abortion problem early," as Denise suggests. The evidence indicates that Daschle was pro-life earlier in his career, as Kevin's post about Daschle's 1984 race yesterday and the 1978 "abhorent" and 1986 "murder" statements indicate (in addition to the use of the nuns and the minister). But in recent years, as Denise says, Daschle's votes on partial-birth abortion and the NARAL and Emily's List work contradicted his earlier positions. I'm not sure what exactly could be done to "confront" this. As Thune said in one debate, "facts are stubborn things." These chickens couldn't be erased from public memory. They came home to roost and there wasn't much the Daschle campaign could do about it.
From Tim Wostal's column on TCS:
American newspapers, as you will note, are generally one town monopolies. Yes, the really big places might still have two papers or more, yet even then there is one that is the main establishment. We have also noted that these papers are, by and large, drearily similar. In outlook, as we have been complaining these past months, but also in content. The same columnists, comics, wire reports are wrapped around a little local news with a new masthead and a classifieds section. I would claim that this came from the inevitable limitations of dead tree printing and communications networks. The distances of America simply meant that you could not publish one paper and distribute it across the country leading to the local monopolies we see. The costs of local distribution also militated in favor of a monopoly as did those above mentioned classifieds sections. Once one paper got a reputation as the place to look for an apartment, a car, to get rid of a kid's bike, which would then snowball, in just the same way that e-Bay has done. The largest most liquid market will win the battle for market share. (As an example of the importance of classifieds and their local nature, note that USAToday, the first real attempt at a national paper, doesn't really carry them.)
I think we would all agree that dead tree printing of newspapers is on its way out. It might take a decade or five for the public to finally give up the ghost but despite Robert Maxwell's comment (he said that computers would never replace newspapers because you couldn't read them on the toilet), give it up it will. So what will happen to US newspapers when all are delivered electronically? I think we'll see a mixture of disintermediation, disaggregation and competition by political or social bias.
Disintermediation is the economist's fancy word for doing it yourself. Instead of allowing some priestly caste (professional journalists?) to decide what we should read or what are the current talking points, we'll do it for ourselves. As we do now with blogging, but there will be hundreds of millions doing it, not just us switched on types. Disaggregation is an allied concept, that we won't want bundles of things, but to be able to choose and pick that selection that we actually want. RSS feeds, XML and all the blogging tools I don't understand will give you an idea of what is meant here. The truly personalized newspaper has been tried recently to varying shades of success yet I have no doubt that it will become the norm.
Here's my favorite part. Note the newspaper market in the UK, in contrast to the monopoly market in Sioux Falls:
The UK has been a national market for newspapers since the 1900 -1920 period when it became possible to print one paper for the entire country and move it overnight by railroad to every corner of the Kingdom. This isn't quite the same as the cheapness of electronic delivery but it does give us a clue as to what might happen if the US ever became such a national market. There are 14 national newspapers in the UK (This figure comes from the pack of such that each Cabinet Minister receives each morning. I've delivered these myself before now, including once to the Queen herself on a visit to Moscow. You can now paint yourself a portrait of your correspondent trudging across Red Square
in a blizzard to deliver HRM's set of tomorrow's fish wrap.) and their declared political and social leanings are obvious. The Telegraph is for the conservative upper and middle classes, the Guardian for progressive such, the Independent for confused ones, the Times for, well, providing Rupert Murdoch with social respectability? The Mail and Express fight for the middle ground (the Mail from the right, the Express not very hard recently). The Sun for right-wing working class, the Mirror for left such, the Star for those who find two syllable words too tough and the Daily Worker (if it still exists) for Communist Party supporters. All of these attributes are made quite clear and plain to readers and no one is in the least hoodwinked into thinking they have an impartial and unbiased report of what is happening in the world.
The Argus Leader needs some serious competition. It can then be the Democratic paper, instead of this chronic pretense of objectivity, and another paper can fill a different role.
From today's editorial on the election by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal:
Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority.
Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party's candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer.
The prominent case studies here are Dan Rather's failed National Guard story on CBS and the front page the past year of the New York Times (a proxy for many large dailies). Add in as well Big Media's handling of Abu Ghraib, a real story that got blown into a monthlong bonfire that obviously was intended to burn down the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. I think many people thought the over-the-top Abu Ghraib coverage, amid a war, was the media shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Authority can be a function of raw power, but among free people it is sustained by esteem and trust. Should esteem and trust falter, the public will start to contest an institution's authority. It happens all the time to political figures. It happened here to the American Catholic Church and to the legal profession, thanks to plaintiff-bar abuse. And now the public is beginning to contest the decades-old authority of the mainstream media.
Two months ago, Gallup reported that public belief in the media's ability to report news accurately and fairly had fallen to 44%--what Gallup called a significant drop from 54% just a year ago. The larger media outlets have been pushing the edge of the partisanship envelope for a long time. People have kvetched about "spin" for years but then largely internalized it. Not in 2004. Big Media chose precisely the wrong moment to give itself over to an apparent compulsion to overthrow the Bush presidency.
From the Roll Call profile of Thune:
As the latest giant killer, Thune is likely to be treated like a celebrity in the Senate, having eked out a win over Republicans’ top enemy in Congress — Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D).
In a way, Thune never stopped campaigning after losing his 2002 Senate bid against Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson by just 524 votes. But this time the narrow margin came out in Thune’s favor — and as a bigger political win for Republicans.
In a state that voted overwhelmingly for President Bush, Thune painted Daschle as the chief architect of a campaign to obstruct Bush’s legislative agenda. Thune repeatedly cast Daschle as a Washington, D.C., insider more worried about the concerns of liberal Senators, such as Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), than he was about “making South Dakota a priority.”
Thune also hammered Daschle over the Senate’s failure to pass an energy policy bill, which contained provisions important to South Dakota corn farmers seeking to make more money by producing the fuel additive ethanol. Though Daschle voted for the energy measure, it fell two votes short of the 60 needed to avert a filibuster. Saying Daschle “failed to provide leadership,” Thune pointed to the 32 Democrats that Daschle was unable to convince to support the bill. Of course, seven Republicans also participated in the filibuster.
That AP story about how Thune did better on the reservations this year is running in today's Rapid City Journal.
Just today, I finished reading all your emails from the days surrounding the election and reviewing all your thoughts on the book about this race. Let me say thank you again. And I apologize for not getting back to everyone. Anyway, from the pile of emails I printed, here are 3 of the lines which made me laugh the most:
(1) Daschle is to South Dakota what a crooked toupee is to a movie star. He hasn't worn well.
(2) Politics: it used to be like Bridge, and now it's chess. You can lie about your intentions, but you can no longer lie about where you are...or where you live.
(3) Bloggers have changed politics the way that Video Killed The Radio Star.
If you've ever gone to law school, you've had the pleasure of reading the famous torts case Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad, which involved a woman, Mrs. Palsgraf, who was injured when some scales fell on her while standing on a railroad platform. The scales fell after a man was rushing to jump on a departing train, railroad workers were trying to aid his jump to the train, and the man dropped a package of fireworks, which then went off, and then the scales fell on poor Mrs. Palsgraf. So, dear reader, did the railroad's agents "cause" the injuries to Mrs. Palsgraf? That's the big question law students have agonized over since 1928. To be found negligent and therefore liable for the injuries, the Railroad must have "caused" the injuries. I was thinking about the thousands of tort law cases on "causation" while working on an article about Why Thune Won/Why Daschle Lost. It's not a simple matter, which is why I've enlisted your help. I recently listed 13 factors that I think were important. Here are a few more.
(14) GUNS: This is related to Daschle's ridiculous hunting ad, but deserves additional emphasis. Daschle got an "F" from the NRA while his fellow Democrat Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth had their endorsement. That contrast hurt, especially when the NRA reminded voters in the final weeks with ads about the "F." They also noted how, in the past, Daschle said he opposed all gun control. So this factor relates to Daschle's liberal votes in recent years, the "gone Washington" argument, the "say anything necessary" to win sentiment, and, once again, the chickens.
(15) HERSETH: As noted above, she didn't help Daschle. In addition to guns, she supported the flag burning amendment and the gay marriage amendment, both of which Daschle opposed, creating a contrast that didn't help Daschle. There was also a poll last summer showing that 20% of voters were also less likely to vote for Daschle because the SD delegation was all Democratic.
(15) INDIAN VOTE: While Daschle got 1,000 more votes in Shannon County, home to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, than Johnson did in 2002, Thune more than doubled his vote from 2002, from 248 to 564. His 6 trips to Pine Ridge helped, as his vote went from 8% in 2002 to 13% in 2004. Thune's vote in Todd County, home of Rosebud Indian Reservation, went from 19% in 2002 to 21% in 2004. While Daschle won more raw votes than 2002, Thune showed some respectable gains percentage-wise. Noting the extra votes Thune won, the AP said today "If Thune had received those 628 extra votes two years ago, he already would be a senator. Johnson defeated him by 524 votes statewide." Here's another story from the AP today about Daschle's efforts on election day in Pine Ridge, where he was hoping for 60% turnout (with the help of radio broadcasts from Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Jesse Jackson, what one observer called a "Democratic takeover" of the airwaves). Actual turnout was 57%.
(16) BLOGS: There have been lots of emails about the impact of blogs on the race. I'll leave that up to you to judge, but I'd still like your comments on them.
(17) WADHAMS: What I also failed to mentioned earlier was the steady leadership of Thune's campaign manager Dick Wadhams, who has received enormous praise for his work.
(18) GIAGO: Denise Ross of the Rapid City Journal noted the Giago factor in one of her post-election pieces:
When Daschle met with Indian newspaper publisher and would-be Senate candidate Tim Giago in April, the Daschle campaign let Giago make all the public statements about what transpired during that meeting. By the time the two met with tribal and congressional leaders in a closed-door session Sept. 25, buzz that crossed racial lines enveloped the state. People remembered that Giago had intimated big promises from Daschle, and they didn't like being shut out of the Sept. 25 gathering. By then, the buzz drowned out Daschle's assertions that he had not promised Giago anything.
This is one of the stories, by the way, that the Argus Leader systematically ignored, but it did get some attention West River.
Again, these factors are difficult to measure and it's hard to say precisely what "caused" Thune's win, but they all seem important and worthy of discussion. Keep your thoughts coming.
