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a White House meeting this week, George W. Bush asked Senate Majority
Leader Tom Daschle to help speed up the Senate's slow-motion confirmations
of Bush's judicial nominees. It was the perfect opportunity for
Daschle to offer a few reassuring words. "Mr. President, we've
been terribly busy working on terrorism measures," the majority
leader might have said, "but we want to assure you we will
do all we can to help." Perhaps Daschle might even have made
a token effort to confirm a few nominees — a district judge
or two — so he could appear to make good on his word.
Instead, Daschle
told the president to get lost. We Democrats don't need judges —
you do, Daschle said. We don't need appropriations bills —
you do. So forget about it. It was an almost breathtakingly dismissive
response, especially at a time when leaders of both parties claim
to be working in a newly bipartisan spirit.
What accounts
for Daschle's brazenness? Republicans have always known the majority
leader to be a hardball partisan fighter beneath his mild-mannered
exterior. But there was something new in his response at the White
House Tuesday. When he told the president to forget about judges,
Daschle was announcing his new status as a Big Bad Dude in post-September
11 Washington.
Of the four
leaders of Congress, Daschle's profile has risen the most in the
weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In contrast, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, while widely visible,
has not achieved the status of a national leader. "[Hastert's]
strength is being a consensus builder, and his constituency is the
House of Representatives," says one congressional aide. "He
has not shown a tremendous inclination to go out and speak, and
when he does, he doesn't always look so good." Nor have congressional
minority leaders Trent Lott and Richard Gephardt achieved new levels
of authority during the crisis.
But Daschle
has. Not only was he a more visible and effective leader in the
days after September 11, but now, with his office having been the
target of bio-terrorists, Daschle is more than just a Democratic
leader. He's a tough, courageous veteran of the war on terrorism
— a made man in Washington. "The anthrax attack on Daschle
means that he can look Bush in the eye," says one Republican.
"It's taken away that look of softness around Democrats and
Daschle."
Daschle's new
status is undergirded by a new national prominence and popularity.
One example was the recent nationally televised "Concert for
New York City." Overlooked in all the discussion of the crowd
booing Hillary Rodham Clinton was the fact that Daschle also appeared
on the program, and was wildly popular. The Majority Leader from
South Dakota received a very, very friendly reception in New York
— a vivid indicator of his new standing.
So that might
well be the reason Daschle felt he could tell George W. Bush to
forget about getting any judges confirmed. And it appears that at
least so far, Bush has chosen not to fight back. It's a telling
illustration of the ways in which political Washington has changed
since September 11. Consider this: In the spring, when George W.
Bush's job-approval rating hovered in the low 50 percent range,
he passed the largest tax cut in a generation and made significant
progress on fulfilling several other campaign promises. Now, when
Bush's job-approval rating is hovering in the low 90 percent range
and he is widely respected as a wartime president, he finds himself
dissed by the Senate's newly pumped-up majority leader.
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