Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
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CARROLL — While supporting presidential candidate Barack Obama, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle came to the defense of the Clinton campaign on one question asked by the Iowa Independent here in Carroll.
Daschle said he thought former President Clinton’s statement that he opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning – a remark with suspect veracity that has raised festering concerns about Clintonian manipulation of language and revision of history – was actually probably more a slip of the tongue.
“There isn’t anybody in public life who hasn’t had an experience like that where you wish you could have taken the words back and probably rephrased them, put them in a different context,” Daschle said. “I’m sure President Clinton feels that way about those words. Maybe he didn’t mean it that way, and I don’t know what his motivation was in saying what he did, but we’ve all been there, and it’s never a pleasant experience.”
In the Iowa Independent interview, Daschle declined to talk about how he would be doing the majority leader’s job differently from U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
“I think Sen. Reid is doing a very good job,” Daschle said. “The problem he has is he just doesn’t have the votes because Iraq is so controversial and because it’s so divisive.”
Reid and Democrats need 60 votes in the Senate to get significant change on matters such as Iraq, Daschle said.
“He’s stuck,” Daschle said. “He knows what his mandate is. He knows what the American people want. But he also knows that he has a president and a Republican caucus that’s very, very intransigent. So this election is going to be very important in sending a message to Congress.”
Daschle referenced Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Abraham Lincoln in making the case for Obama to more than a dozen Carroll County Democratic Party activists.
“I think Barack is a unifier,” Daschle said.
Daschle, a former South Dakota senator who served as a leader in the Senate before losing to Republican John Thune, said Obama’s ability to inspire is Kennedy-esque. What’s more, he thinks Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois seeking the Democratic nomination, would use the power of the presidency much as LBJ did to assist the poor and vulnerable.
And when questioned about Obama’s experience – he was just elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 – Daschle told the Carroll activists at the Moose Lodge that Lincoln’s Washington experience was similarly limited at the time of his election. Lincoln served only a few years in Congress and had far less influence while on the Hill than Obama does today. Both Obama and Lincoln also served in the Illinois Legislature.
“I always think of (Vice President Dick) Cheney and (former Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld when I think of experience,” Daschle said.
Daschle strongly pushed the case that Obama has crossover appeal with Republicans, something he hears frequently in “red state” South Dakota, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since LBJ in the 1964 landslide.
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