On Monday night, the day before Tom Daschle withdrew as President Obama’s HHS nominee, this 1986 campaign ad was posted on YouTube:
The GOP immediately exploited the ad by distributing it in anti-Daschle email on Tuesday morning.
As I posted on Twitter several hours before Daschle resigned, I’ve never seen a clearer case of a politician’s own campaign ad turn into a negative ad against himself without a single edit.
Andrea Mitchell reported on MSNBC yesterday that shortly after Daschle withdrew, Daschle told her he decided to withdraw after he read the editorial in Tuesday’s New York Times, which forcefully argued he should withdraw. The editorial apparently persuaded him he was too damaged to help the president enact health care reform.
I think Daschle told Michell the truth, but not the whole truth. Sure, the NY Times editorial was very persuasive and harmful to Daschle. But after it was published, many in the senate and the administration remained confident he could be confirmed. So if that’s true, what else triggered his decision?
The answer is fear of being mocked on late night TV and becoming more famous as the butt of a joke than he ever was a Senate Majority Leader.
This campaign ad perfectly illustrates the real issue with Daschle’s tax problem: he lost his common touch and had become the clueless, elite Washington insider he had campaigned against. How perfect is it that his tax issue arose from failing to report income from being provided a limo and driver, and in his old campaign ad he bragged about driving his old Pontiac over the fancy limos of Washington fat cats? It puts Daschle in the same company as anti-homosexual social conservatives who turn out to be in the closet, like former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL), fundamentalist church leader Ted Haggard and former Senator Larry Craig (R-ID).
Politicians don’t mind being attacked on policy grounds. In fact, they live for that kind of substantive, partisan conflict – it makes them feel like Davids fighting Goliath. But politicians can’t stand being mocked and ridiculed as fools, hypocrites and charlatans. For a politician who spent decades establishing his reputation for integrity, wisdom and probity, mocking is particularly intolerable.
Once that old 1986 TV ad hit YouTube, Daschle knew his good name would become a short-hand expression for Beltway sell-out unless he withdrew, quickly.
<
3 responses so far ↓
PunditMom // February 5, 2009 at 1:30 am
Wow. I had never seen that before. It really makes you wonder what happened to him … maybe the millions he made in the last few years? Bet he wishes he had that old jaloppy now.
girldujour // February 5, 2009 at 4:39 am
Nice to see you back on your game. You’ve been missed.
——–
Thanks. I’ve been spending most of my post-election time on Twitter (@roadkillrefugee). I’ll keep coming back here for rantings longer than 140 characters, and to post videos.
Missives From Suburbia // February 7, 2009 at 2:50 am
I have to keep going back to all of this being an optical illusion. Daschle is still the guy he was a month ago and still the right guy for the job. But the optics are getting in the way of substance again. If only these guys understood the basics of public relations, they wouldn’t keep coming off looking like such douchebags. For that, they deserve to lose these positions. For not vetting them properly, Obama deserves the egg on his face. (Why aren’t they being vetted, btw? Any insight on that RKR? Or are they and Obama’s staff is just assuming they’ll hold their own during the hearings like Geitner?)
—————-
I think they thought that people of good faith would recognize Daschle was being abundantly cautious in self-reporting the use of the car and treating it as if he had full use of it, when I understand he didn’t. In other words, no good deed goes unpunished. It quickly became a part of a narrative, with Killifer and Geithner, that Obama’s appointees were a bunch of tax cheats, which was very unfair (Killifer had a $1,000 tax lien over a disputed payment from a worker). Nobody cared about the details of each individual case with Geithner, Daschle and Killifer, and the GOP did a better job feeding nasty talking points to the cable nets on the whole thing.
There’s always a tension in any White House between defending the guy you know and trust personally versus objectively recognizing how he or she is damaging you politically. You don’t want to needlessly toss someone under the bus, but you also can’t look tone deaf to your constituents.
-RK Ref