Disclaimer: I live in South Dakota and I'm a fan of our boy.
I have a professional as well as a personal interest in Daschle's career. He donated his career papers - 2,000 linear feet - to South Dakota State University. It's been my job to catalog those materials for availability to researchers.
It's been uplifting to see the strength of the liberal/progressive/populist politics in this very conservative state. Tom made his bones in the George McGovern run for the White House in 1972. How quaint all those hand-written charts and tables look 36 years later.
But it's also been frustrating to read through some of Tom's papers. Health care is not a recent interest for Daschle. He worked on health care during the Carter administration. They called it a "crisis" then. It's not online but a Sylvia Porter column from the time cited "shocking" statistics. And for thirty years it's festered.
Reading through just a small portion of Daschle's papers has shown me a man who truly cares and works hard to forge solutions.
It took me a while to find this article from 1999. Though it deals primarily with Clinton and the impeachment, it provides some good insight into Daschle.
The man Clinton could have been
Here are a couple of excerpts.
It was 1973. Abourezk, a fiery populist, held the seat Daschle now occupies, railing against oil companies, neglect of the Indians in his state and the war in Vietnam. Daschle was his skinny young legislative aide, fresh out of the Air Force.
"I had a bunch of hostile American Legionnaires in my office one day," Abourezk recalled over the telephone from Sioux Falls this week. "They were on my ass about the Vietnam War. The vote bell rang and I said, 'Tom, you speak to these folks and answer their questions until I get back.'"
He chuckles.
"I was so happy the vote bell rang. I came back later and they were almost hugging and kissing. Tom had them eating out of his hand."
Abourezk added, "He's been so good at that over the years. He's always been that way. Tom brings people to accommodation."
In the 1970s, for example, Daschle took on the entire corporate and government health establishment over Agent Orange, the Vietnam defoliant that was making veterans sick. Both the Veterans Administration and Rep. Sonny Montgomery, D-Miss., chairman of the House Veterans Committee, denied any connection between the chemicals and the illness. Daschle came up with a solution that had the National Academy of Sciences study the evidence and the V.A. accept its findings -- whatever they turned out to be. The NAS study, as Daschle anticipated, linked Agent Orange to various cancers and the V.A. was forced to start treating veterans.
"He was the guy who was responsible for the Agent Orange issue finally gaining credibility," said Mike Leavick, then legislative director for the Vietnam Veterans of America Inc. "If it wasn't for him, it never would've happened. He's the guy."
Rereading this, I can see how Daschle and Obama can work together and really get things done.
With his easy smile and low-key manner, Daschle was considered too soft to negotiate with the swaggering Republicans when he ran for the Senate leadership post in 1994.
One of his foremost critics was Sen. Robert Byrd, the silver-maned West Virginian and leader of the Democrats in the 1970s and early '80s. But he came around after he saw Daschle in action.
Read the article.