Daschle's Dirty Revisionism
By Tom Bevan
The RCP Blog
Ron Brownstein serves as a witting accomplice to Tom Daschle's underhanded attempt to rewrite the history of the Iraq war debate:
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Tom Daschle, the former Democratic senator from South Dakota, remembers the exchange vividly.
The time was September 2002. The place was the White House, at a meeting in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pressed congressional leaders for a quick vote on a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.
But Daschle, who as Senate majority leader controlled the chamber's schedule, recalled recently that he asked Bush to delay the vote until after the impending midterm election.
"I asked directly if we could delay this so we could depoliticize it. I said: 'Mr. President, I know this is urgent, but why the rush? Why do we have to do this now?' He looked at Cheney and he looked at me, and there was a half-smile on his face. And he said: 'We just have to do this now.' "
Daschle's account, which White House officials said they could not confirm or deny, highlights a crucial factor that has drawn little attention amid rising controversy over the congressional vote that authorized the war in Iraq. The recent partisan dispute has focused almost entirely on the intelligence information legislators had as they cast their votes. But the debate may have been shaped as much by when Congress voted as by what it knew.
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Brownstein is smart enough to know that Daschle sold him a bill of goods with this story, but he couldn't resist: the anecdote was just too juicy, too suggestive, and too perfect to support Brownstein's predetermined angle that the Bush administration politicized the Iraq vote by ramming it through Congress before the election.
The record shows that by the time Daschle met with Bush and Cheney on September 18, 2002 he had already concluded - after a heated, public debate among members of his party - that the best way to handle the Iraq vote was to move it through Congress quickly and get back to "kitchen table" election issues. In fact, a quick check of Google shows that the night before Daschle's September 18 meeting CNN ran the following story:
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Congress will vote on a resolution about war with Iraq "well before the election, " despite the nation's last-minute pledge to allow the return of United Nations weapons inspectors, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle predicted Tuesday.
"I think there will be a vote well before the election, and I think it's important that we work together to achieve it," said Daschle, who had been pressed by some Democrats to hold off action on the resolution until after November's mid-term election.
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Daschle could have easily postponed a vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq until after the election if he had wanted to - though to do so would have been political suicide. Remember, this was the week after the first anniversary of September 11 and just days after Bush laid out a powerful case against Saddam Hussein before the United Nations. Daschle was under tremendous political pressure - not directly from Bush but from members of his own party - to deal with Iraq before the midterm and he made the right political decision by holding the vote in early October. Now that the political climate has changed, it's shameful that Daschle is trying to rehabilitate himself politically by peddling a revisionist story using Ron Brownstein as an uncritical media mouthpiece.
realclearpolitics.com
latimes.com
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