Chasing a Coveted Democratic Prize Across the Plains
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
OWARD, S.D., Oct. 21 - By the time Senator Tom Daschle's fancy silver bus rolled down Main Street, past the golden corn fields and the grain elevator, to stop at the American Legion hall, nearly everyone here knew who was on board. The most powerful Democrat in the United States Senate had come to the prairie town of Howard, population 1,156, to rustle up votes.
He needs them desperately, every last one.
This is the other big race of 2004. While Americans are focused on the campaign for the presidency, the second most important political contest is playing out in the rural towns and sparsely populated cities of South Dakota, a heavily Republican state where Mr. Daschle, the Democratic leader, is fighting for survival in a race that could well determine the balance of power in the Senate.
While independent analysts expect Republicans to retain control of the Senate, Mr. Daschle's race against a popular former congressman, John Thune, is one of a number of contests that are too close to call. Races in Oklahoma, Florida, Alaska, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina and Louisiana remain tossups, and Democrats insist they can win.
Yet no Senate race has evoked as much passion and symbolism as the one in South Dakota, where Mr. Thune - who two years ago lost to South Dakota's other Democratic senator, Tim Johnson, by the achingly slim margin of 524 votes - has become a cause célèbre for national Republicans, including President Bush. A Republican victory would deliver a huge psychological blow to Democrats, even if their presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, won the White House.
"This is a big one,'' said Charles Black, a Republican strategist with close ties to the White House. "If you said to almost any national Republican leader, of all these U.S. Senate races you can only pick one that the Republicans are going to win, everybody would say Thune.''
It is rare for a Senate leader to be vulnerable at home. But Republicans set their sights on Mr. Daschle years ago, when they labeled the minority leader the "chief obstructionist'' to the Bush agenda. Mr. Thune, a Christian conservative with strong appeal to the party's right wing, is making obstructionism a central theme of his campaign, along with cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage.
So after 26 years in Congress, including 18 in the Senate, Mr. Daschle, 56, is leaving little to chance. He has raised more than $18 million and is flooding television with advertising; Mr. Thune, with more than $13 million, is doing the same. But in a state of just 750,000 people, where voters expect face-to-face contact with politicians, most experts agree that the race will be decided on the ground.
Little towns like Howard are too important to ignore. Hundreds of Daschle campaign workers and volunteers are going door to door, looking for an elusive catch: undecided voters. There are precious few, but when they are discovered, the workers take painstaking notes, so campaign officials, and even the senator himself, can follow up.
Mr. Daschle, meanwhile, is spending the waning days of the campaign traversing the windswept prairie in his silver bus, stopping at roadside coffee shops and community gathering spots, as he did Thursday morning here.
Just two days earlier, Mr. Thune had been there, making an unannounced visit in his own silver bus. High school girls squealed at the sight of him; farmers stopped to shake his hand.
The Daschle event, a pancake breakfast, was a more formal affair. Well over 100 people, silver-haired ladies and beefy men in plaid shirts and dusty work boots, turned out to hear the senator speak. They call him Tom; most had already met him.
He took the microphone and unspooled his standard stump speech, which begins with Benjamin Franklin at the birth of the Republic, moves into the story of how Mr. Daschle's grandfather, a Russian émigré, came to America with $35 in his pocket, and then neatly slides into an image of Mr. Daschle's Capitol office and his desk in the Senate chamber, in the front and center spot reserved for the two leaders, as opposed to way in the back corner, where freshmen sit.
Mr. Thune's name is never mentioned, but Mr. Daschle, reminding voters of the millions of federal dollars he brings to South Dakota, makes the message clear.
"Some would have our South Dakotans believe there is nothing wrong with trading that office and that desk in the front row in the center aisle for another desk in the far corner in the back,'' he told the gathering in Howard. "But I think there's a big difference, a very big difference.''
If anyone can beat Mr. Daschle here, it is Mr. Thune, a telegenic 43-year-old who was personally recruited by Mr. Bush to run against Mr. Johnson in 2002. The president is hugely popular in South Dakota, where there are more registered Republicans than Democrats.
For Mr. Thune, who is holding his own "pancake feeds,'' the race is a referendum on the minority leader, whom he portrays as a creature of Washington, not of South Dakota. "If he is just a conduit for federal money, any senator can do that,'' Mr. Thune said in an interview. "But a senator is about more than that; it is about representing the values and beliefs of the people you represent.''
At a pancake dinner in De Smet, a farming community made famous by the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, people seemed to agree. One woman turned up wearing a tiny gold pin in the shape of baby's feet, the symbol of the anti-abortion movement. Mr. Thune talked about the Democrats' efforts to block judges they describe as outside the mainstream.
"That's code,'' he said, "for these judges are pro-life.''
Conservatives are working hard for Mr. Thune. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and a sometime pheasant-hunting partner of Mr. Thune's, has has accused Mr. Daschle in a recent letter of advancing "the radical homosexual agenda.''
While Mr. Thune's positions on such matters are black and white, Mr. Daschle's are grayer. The senator calls abortion "a tragedy,'' and voted to ban the procedure that critics refer to as partial-birth abortion, but supports the Roe v. Wade decision. He opposes gay marriage but also opposes a constitutional amendment to ban it.
In recent weeks, the race has turned negative, even vitriolic. One independent organization calling itself You're Fired Inc. is running advertising against Mr. Daschle. Mr. Daschle is running advertisements calling Mr. Thune dishonest. And a mysterious group sent a letter to churches that contained bumper stickers saying a vote for Mr. Daschle was a vote for sodomy; the envelope carried the return address of the Daschle campaign headquarters in Sioux Falls. Mr. Thune disavowed the mailer; Mr. Daschle asked for a criminal investigation.
"It has taken on a decidedly testy tone,'' said Bill Richardson, chairman of the department of political science at the University of South Dakota. Perhaps, Professor Richardson said, that is because the stakes are so high for both men.
"It's huge for both of them,'' he said, "because Thune would have lost twice in a row, which in South Dakota does not leave one with much of a future. And for Daschle, where is he going to go if he loses?''
On his campaign bus, the Democratic leader was asked if he had given any thought to that question. He came back with a one-word answer: "No.'' |
