Comment: Dakota demon.(Republicans obediently attack Senator Tom Daschle)(The Talk of the Town)

It would be nice if President Bush had meant what he said the other day when he told a cheering audience in California, "Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes!" That is, it would be nice if he had meant that he does not regard the unlikely prospect of an increase in the taxes paid by the rich as an appropriate cause for which to lay down his life. Alas, there is every indication that, far from meaning what he said, he merely meant what he meant.

The "they" Bush was vowing to stop by making the ultimate sacrifice is actually a "he": Tom Daschle, the Senate Majority Leader. Or, rather, a straw man by that name. In a speech the day before, Daschle had hypothesized a connection between the abrupt disappearance of projected federal budget surpluses and the dramatic reductions in taxes on high incomes and big estates which, under the Bush plan enacted seven months ago, are scheduled to kick in over the course of the next decade. The logic of Daschle's argument is that these reductions ought themselves to be reduced, but there is a pretty obvious difference between raising taxes and moderating the amount by which they are to be cut. Actually, Daschle is calling for tax cuts, too, only the cuts he wants would favor business investment and people of low to moderate means, who need the money and would be likely to spend it.

According to both the Washington Post and the Washington Times, the current phase of the campaign to turn Daschle into Satan was ordered by the President himself, shortly after Thanksgiving. That campaign had been going on intermittently since last May, when Vermont's Jim Jeffords quit the Republican Party to become an Independent, thereby giving the Democrats a hairbreadth 50-49-1 margin in the Senate. There was a lull after September 11th, when the Senate, under Daschle's leadership, briskly passed bills granting the government expanded antiterrorism powers and resources. But when the Democrats declined to go along with an Administration proposal to give new tax breaks to rich individuals and corporations in the guise of stimulating the faltering economy, the demonize-Daschle campaign was revived, this time in coordinated earnest. In December, Frank Luntz, the pollster who helped guide Newt Gingrich to glory in 1994, circulated a memo explaining, in urgent italics, that

it is time for someone, everyone, to start using the phrase "Daschle Democrats" and the word "obstructionist" in the same sentence. It's time for Congressional Republicans to personalize the individual that is standing directly in the way of economic security, energy security, and even national security. Remember what the Democrats did to Gingrich? We need to do exactly the same thing to Daschle.

Sure enough, Vice-President Cheney and leading Republicans dutifully went on television to utter sentences containing the recommended word combinations. The conservative press wheeled in tight formation. ("DASCHLE'S OBSTRUCTIONISM" a Washington Times ...