George McGovern
A Political Life, A Political Legacy
edited by Robert P. Watson
South Dakota State Historical Society, 209 pp., $19.95
Like No Other Time
The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever
by Tom Daschle
Crown, 292 pp., $25
GEORGE MCGOVERN spent twenty years gathering and leading Democrats out of the wilderness in South Dakota. Starting in 1953, traveling the farm roads town to town, McGovern--a former preacher, World War II Air Force veteran, and college history professor turned party executive secretary--built a Democratic organization from next to nothing. By 1972, the year he won his party's nomination for president, liberal Democrats in South Dakota held the governorship, both Senate seats, and one of the state's two seats in Congress. Between 1970 and 1978, voter registration climbed for Democrats by 50 percent (while Republicans went up by 5 percent), and Democrats briefly became the state's majority party.
But by 1980, after two terms in the U.S. House and three terms in the U.S. Senate, time was up for McGovern. The voters of South Dakota had elected Republicans to three of the state's five major offices and were prepared to banish him, too. Campaign buttons bore the slogan, "George McGovern does not speak for me." The majority felt he had lost touch with South Dakota--"gone Washington" was how folks put it--and told him so, electing instead a Republican congressman named Jim Abdnor.
Tom Daschle admired McGovern, worked on his presidential campaign, and once in office determined he would not make the same career-ending mistakes. He went to Washington to work for wild Jim Abourezk, another liberal Democratic senator South Dakotans elected in 1972. Abourezk chose not to seek reelection in 1978 rather than face a hot young Republican star in Larry Pressler. With the eastern district's House seat open, Daschle launched his own public career, defeating a Democratic former representative, Frank Denholm, in the June primary and in November squeezing by Republican Leo Thorsness, who had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam and had challenged McGovern in 1974.
Daschle didn't have another close race until this year. He rolled past a series of overmatched opponents for three more terms in the House, then challenged Abdnor for the Senate seat in 1986. McGovern had the unpopularity in farm country of President Eisenhower's agriculture secretary Ezra Taft Benson to use in his campaign, and so, too, Daschle was fortunate during the twelve years of Reagan and the first Bush presidency to have a Republican administration that he could blast on South Dakota's behalf. The economic and credit crisis choking rural America in the mid-1980s came at a perfect time for Daschle, who made farm policy the central issue of his 1986 Senate campaign.
In that campaign Daschle favored government price supports, while Abdnor wanted a market-export policy. Abdnor handed his opponent a gift when a Daschle staffer filming an Abdnor public event caught the senator on camera saying that farmers would have to accept "low prices" for a while in order to export more and create international demand. While producers who understood the issue split on the two approaches, Daschle ran the "low prices" statement in ads aimed at less-knowledgeable South Dakota voters empathetic to the plight of farmers.
Combined with his get-out-the-vote effort that Republicans purposely declined to match because GOP leaders subscribed to the belief that each candidate should identify and turn out his own voters, Daschle turned a dead heat into a four-point win. Unlike McGovern, who made foreign affairs his second legislative priority after agriculture, Daschle smartly focused on entitlement recipients, from veterans and farmers to senior citizens and students and tribal people, giving him a centrist base of pocketbook appeal that blurred party lines.
Fortune continued to fall Daschle's way. For his victory, the Senate Democratic leadership delivered on his pre-candidacy bargaining point that he receive a politically lucrative Finance Committee seat if elected. He helped deliver the votes to select George Mitchell as Senate Democratic leader, and Mitchell rewarded Daschle by making him his heir apparent. And when Mitchell's leadership post came open, Daschle beat Senator Christopher Dodd by one vote: the proxy given to Daschle by Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, only a few weeks before the Colorado senator changed parties and joined the Republicans.
The good times rolled on for Daschle. Back home he easily won re-election in his next two races, even getting the endorsement of Republican governor Bill Janklow in 1998. (Janklow had challenged Abdnor in the 1986 primary and to this day believes he could have beaten Daschle.) With Bill Clinton in the White House for eight years, Daschle was able to use for South Dakota's advantage all the power perks of being a Democratic leader but didn't have to step to center stage daily as the Democratic party's national voice.
Every summer, Daschle came home to South Dakota during the congressional recess, spending a month driving town to town, typically alone, with no public schedule, stopping when he wanted and talking to any voter he happened to run across. He did it purposely--a deliberate attempt not to be accused of losing touch as McGovern had. But just as McGovern saw what seemed a permanent base unravel, events swiftly turned against Daschle. With George W. Bush's election to the presidency, Daschle became the everyday opponent. South Dakotans liked it when their Democratic senators rattled the White House fence on behalf of South Dakota. But doing it for the national Democratic party was something else. Daschle's tactical mastery in the Senate was effective in slowing down Bush's agenda, and Daschle achieved the ultimate coup by bringing Senator Jim Jeffords across the aisle from the Republican caucus and making the Democrats the Senate majority. He was riding high until the crash on Election Day 2002 left Daschle stunned and disheveled, his majority gone, looking the morning after like a Las Vegas gambler who had bet it all on the sure thing and lost.
While House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt ultimately chose to step aside and run for the presidency, Daschle was reselected as minority leader in the Senate by unanimous acclamation on the motion of Senator Robert Byrd. Undeterred by the voters' message in 2002 and by the lessons of McGovern's failed run for the White House, Daschle moved forward with writing his book-- Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever--and making plans for a presidential candidacy. He and his wife Linda purchased a large house with heated in-ground pool in Washington, D.C., valued at $1.4 million, but looking even more expensive and mansionesque by South Dakota standards.
And one other unfortunate thing happened to Daschle in those 2002 elections: He successfully helped his fellow South Dakota Democratic senator, Tim Johnson, turn back a three-term Republican House member, John Thune, by just 524 votes. Thune came closer than expected because he was a charismatic candidate with fundamental values, and he understood the significant differences that the Democrats' voter identification and get-out-the-vote efforts had made in Daschle's win over Thune's mentor Abdnor in 1986 and Johnson's victory over Pressler in 1996. Outside writers and political insiders clucked over the organization problems that Thune's "Victory" campaign ran into on Election Day in getting out the vote against Johnson. What they didn't recognize was that Thune's ground war, flawed as it was in its first run, came within an eyelash of succeeding and captured thousands of votes that had eluded Pressler and Abdnor.
Curiously--and ironically for Tom Daschle, who had worked hard to save his Democratic colleague--Thune's loss to Johnson gave Republicans the one thing they previously didn't have: a top candidate to run against Daschle two years later. At the urging of his longtime driver Ryan Nelson, Thune hired Dick Wadhams as his new campaign manager. Their message was simple: Daschle was so busy with the trappings of power that he was out of touch with South Dakota's needs and values. Republicans nationally saw the opportunity to get rid of Bush's nemesis, and they poured money and legal firepower into the state. By late afternoon on Election Day, the flatness in Daschle's voice during a radio interview, as he tried to stir more Indian reservation residents to the polling places, signaled his realization that Thune probably had beaten him. He always knew how to count votes. South Dakotans had, in effect, traded Johnson for Daschle, keeping a low-key, play-it-safe appropriator and firing one of the most powerful elected Democrats--and leading Bush obstructionist --in the nation.
South Dakota's electorate changed in significant ways during the span of Daschle's career. Democratic voter registration essentially remained flat, while Republican and independent numbers climbed steadily, especially in the fast-growing Black Hills region of western South Dakota and the economic powerhouse of Sioux Falls and its neighboring counties at the eastern edge. In 1978, registration was 193,345 Democrats, 191,766 Republicans, and 35,707 independents. By 2004, the state had flipped back to its traditional GOP dominance, with 238,580 Republicans, 191,523 Democrats, and 70,966 independents. Even so, Daschle still did better than a Democrat might be expected to do under those circumstances, getting 193,279 votes to Thune's 197,813.
Daschle turned to Indian Country as his final refuge, where Democrats typically win by huge margins. But reservation participation tends to be very low. On Election Day, Thune won the turnout battle in the growing Republican counties: He captured four of the five highest-turnout counties across the state; Daschle the five lowest, all in Indian Country. Two years earlier, many South Dakotans had gone to bed with Thune leading and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation votes yet to be counted. They woke up to a Johnson victory. This time, the Shannon County vote wasn't enough for Daschle. While those ballots were still running through the optical scanners at the old stone courthouse in Hot Springs, the word whispered through the crowd of rival Democratic and Republican lawyers and pollwatchers: Daschle had called Thune to concede. Daschle scheduled a morning address for seven hours later at a Sioux Falls hotel. The speech so far remains his last public statement.
DASCHLE'S DEFEAT might be seen as the end of McGovern liberalism in South Dakota. But his legacy of a Democratic organization remains very much alive, with Johnson in office and a new bright young Democrat in the state's lone House seat, Stephanie Herseth. She understood very well what was happening the past three years. She stressed the phrase "blue dog Democrat" and the word "independent" in her debates and campaign ads. She spoke in support of President Bush on terrorism and Iraq and gay marriage.
After winning the special June election to fill the House vacancy created by Janklow's conviction in a motorcyclist's traffic death, Herseth cast a vote that won her the NRA's endorsement. Another vote in favor of the Republicans' package of business tax cuts got her the backing of Grover Norquist. Lost in all of that was her support for abortion rights and her endorsement by the pro-choice organization EMILY's List.
The vacuum of Daschle's postelection silence leads back to his presidentially ambitious memoir, Like No Other Time. Rereading it in hindsight, we can see that both the lessons he missed in 2002 and the seeds of his 2004 defeat are now obvious. Just days after the election last week came the release of George McGovern: A Political Life, A Political Legacy, a collection of essays written by various academics, many of them clearly admirers of McGovern, including the book's editor, Robert P. Watson, an associate professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University.
Essentially a collection of professorial papers, the book provides scholarly insight into McGovern's philosophy and political achievements. But missing is an examination of McGovern's last term in the Senate and the state's final repudiation of his brand of liberalism in the loss to Abdnor. Daschle wrote the book's foreword and concluded with these words: "Admirers of George McGovern will have their admiration for the man reinforced. And I suspect that even many who disagree with his politics are likely to discover a surprising new respect for the man." Those thoughts might just as well express Daschle's own hopes for how history will treat him. As with the McGovern book, the treatment will depend on who writes the history.
THE OLD PONTIAC Daschle drove all those summers was retired a few years ago and rests on display at the Pioneer Auto Museum in the small town of Murdo, along Interstate 90. It is John Thune's hometown. His parents still live there, at the corner of two dirt streets, and people vote in the old auditorium where he played high-school basketball. The museum's owner, Dave Geisler, pledged some of the seed money that helped Thune get started in 1995. On Election Day this year, not a Daschle sign could be seen in town. South Dakota has always been about very small places. And a forty-two-year string of senators--George McGovern, Jim Abdnor, Tom Daschle, and John Thune--all know that fact well. When they forget it, the voters always remind them.
Bob Mercer is a newspaperman covering state government and politics in Pierre, South Dakota.