Last week, the Daschle campaign started running a TV ad attacking Thune for lobbying. Then the Thune campaign sent a mail piece about Linda Daschle's lobbying. Now the Daschle campaign is holding press conferences playing the victim card and running a second TV ad saying Thune is "lying" about Linda Daschle and "hiding behind another man's wife." In other words, the whole lobbying issue has boiled over in the Senate race. Unfortunately, people in South Dakota don't have the necessary facts on this matter. The Argus Leader piece on Linda Daschle was mostly puffery and didn't report the critical details. For the whole story, one has to turn to other pieces, several of which were being written at the time Daschle was preparing the launch his Presidential bid. All the pieces argue that if Daschle had run, he would have been skewered by critics for his wife's lobbying. Many believe that's the reason Daschle didn't run for President. Anyway, it's important to note that all this criticism came from the left. SDP noted this morning, for example, that the brutal LA Weekly story was written by Doug Ireland, a reporter for The Nation, which doesn't get any more left-wing. It's entitled "I’m Linda, Fly Me: The real reason Tom Daschle didn’t run for president." Doug Ireland's biography says "before he reached the age of 30 Doug had worked on the staff of four presidential campaigns for liberal Democrats." Look, this guy is anything but a conservative--read the bio, you'll see. Anyway, because the Argus Leader and others haven't fully examined Mrs. Daschle's situation, when it now comes up in mail pieces or in Daschle attack ads voters don't have all the details they need to judge the situation. Here's some more from the LA Weekly piece:
The national press corps didn’t bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats’ Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated that he couldn’t survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda Daschle has been one of the airline industry’s top lobbyists for two decades — when she wasn’t busy running the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which explains why, just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks, her husband rushed through the Democratic Senate, which he controlled, the $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, a notorious taxpayer rip-off.Right after then-Congressman Tom Daschle dumped his first wife for a younger, prettier one, the former Miss Kansas Linda Daschle went to work as chief lobbyist for the Air Transport Association, the airline industry’s main lobby; she then became the senior vice president of the American Association of Airport Executives; and these days hangs her hat at the pricey top Washington law/lobby shop Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell, headed by former GOP Senate leader and ex–Reagan chief of staff Howard Baker — where she peddles influence on behalf of a long list of lucrative aviation clients. The clients for whom Linda lobbied brought more than $5.86 million into Baker, Donelson in one three-year period, including Northwest Airlines ($870,000 from 1997 through 2001) and American Airlines ($1.26 million in fees). Northwest was already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy even before 9/11. American, which has had six fatal crashes since 1994 (not counting 9/11) and has been repeatedly fined by the FAA for a skein of safety violations, had the reputation as the most unsafe major U.S. carrier.
Yet these two clients of Linda Daschle’s got nearly $1 billion from the airline bailout her husband pushed into law — thanks to which Northwest (which was the second largest contributor to Senator Daschle’s 1998 campaign, and which scooped up $404 million in government cash) actually posted a $19 million profit in the third quarter after the twin-towers attacks. And, as the lone senator to vote against the bailout, Illinois GOPer Peter Fitzgerald, decried, “The only people who got bailed out were the shareholders. The 1 million airline employees were left twisting in the wind.” So much for the populist noises that occasionally come from Senator Daschle’s mouth. The Daschles also made sure that the bailout exempted American (which has consistently lobbied against tougher airline safety standards) and other carriers with lousy safety records from any real liability to lawsuits from the families of 9/11 victims. Moreover, the General Accounting Office found that the airline industry’s representations to Congress to secure the bailout overstated its anticipated losses from 9/11 by as much as $5 billion.
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Linda Daschle has tried to pooh-pooh her obvious conflicts of interest as an influence peddler, telling The New York Times last August that the staff members she lobbies “are pretty junior and may or may not know who I am” — a mind-boggling, risible assertion. But her senator/leader husband has always refused to make public his and his wife’s tax returns, despite repeated press requests. As a presidential candidate, Tom Daschle could not have avoided giving the press a look at those returns — which would have spelled out just how much cash Linda brings in from her clients.
And that, children, was the ticking time bomb that would inevitably have exploded if the senator had sought the White House — and is the bottom-line reason he chose not to run.
Read the whole thing. And then read this Washington Monthly piece, which we'll review later. And you'll see, once again, how badly the Argus Leader has failed to inform voters.
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