September, 2001: The Yankee Trader

By Greg Rushford
Published in The Rushford Report

Ah, ambition.

Democrat Tom Daschle of South Dakota, only four months into his new job as majority leader of the United States Senate, already has his eye on another job. Daschle thinks he should be America’s next president.

To establish his foreign policy credentials, last month the senator gave a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center. It was generally well received, particularly the part where Daschle portrayed the new George W. Bush administration as basically unilateralist. The United States has “a better chance to advance our national interests if we are in the game, rather than on the sidelines,” the senator declared.

What are Sen. Daschle’s foreign policy credentials and priorities?

Is he in the game?

And should he be perhaps a mite careful before calling anyone else a unilateralist?

Take the last question first.

Daschle has voted for legislation to slap quotas on foreign steel, which contradicts U.S. signed obligations as a member of the World Trade Organization. He has written U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick urging continued protection against imports of lamb from Australia, despite a dispute resolution panel’s determination that existing U.S. protection against lamb imports under Section 201 of U.S. trade law has been WTO illegal. He has taken a stance against complying with a determination by a Nafta dispute-resolution panel that the American refusal to permit Mexican trucks access to U.S. markets violates U.S. signed obligations. Daschle has been dragging his feet in moving fast-track trade negotiating authority for the president, which is essential if the United States wants to get back in the game for a new round of WTO trade negotiations.

So, who’s the unilateralist, George W. Bush or Tom Daschle?

Regarding his foreign policy credentials, Daschle’s are slim. The senator will turn 54 this December without having ever displayed much interest in the subject. Daschle has been in public life for 27 years, and calls his agenda “South Dakota First.” Foreign policy and defense are not even listed among Daschle’s priorities on his website.

Daschle’s three most recent press releases touted his role in obtaining a $700,000 grant to South Dakota State University, a $25 million grant for broadband deployment in rural communities, and $716,000 for AmeriCorps. His top priorities are domestic education, health care, “protecting agriculture,” and keeping the Black Hills “healthy,” whatever that means.

We all know what “protecting agriculture” means. Daschle wants to protect U.S. agriculture markets from import competition from the likes of Australia and Canada. Daschle wants an “income safety net” for farmers. He wants to keep giving domestic farmers massive federal subsidies, which are justified as countering even worse behavior by the Europeans. Problem is, subsidies never work.

Subsidies rip off taxpayers, while ultimately harming even the intended farm beneficiaries by encouraging overproduction, which always leads to falling prices. At least Daschle is far from being the only lawmaker to travel down this garden path, despite knowing better.

Actually, I’m not sure Daschle really does know better. Shortly after his election to the Senate in 1986 he championed a truly strange economic idea: If a country like China would buy more U.S. farm products in a given year, it could get a bigger textile quota the next. The senator was already approaching middle age when he thought that the U.S. Congress could ignore variables like the weather and simply legislate agricultural and clothing markets. (The idea didn’t get very far.)

Now that Daschle has signaled in his Woodrow Wilson speech that he wants to get into the game, what are his ideas?

One of them is to try to embarrass an American president on foreign soil. As President Bush was flying to Europe summit in July, Daschle said that he thought “we are isolating ourselves, and in so isolating ourselves, I think we’re minimalizing ourselves.” He added, “I don’t think that we are taken as seriously today as we were a few years ago.”

I remember a time in Washington when senators went out of their way to remind the world that politics stops at the water’s edge.

In his Woodrow Wilson speech, Daschle said that his first foreign policy priority is that “we need to maintain the military strength and superiority we now enjoy.” His second priority: “[W]e need to multiply our own strength by maintaining strong, solid relations with our allies.” (Except, presumably, when those allies are successful in establishing in legal proceedings that America has been violating its WTO obligations.)

Then Daschle took his listeners on a tour of the world, saying that we should do more to help the Russians and Chinese modernize, and so forth. Fine, although it was mostly boilerplate.

The senator’s sixth — and last — priority was that the United States must “maintain leadership in the global economy, expand trade, and deal with the growing economic disparities that arise from it.”

The last clause reflects Daschle’s thinking on the benefits of trade. I’ve never seen him utter the words “free trade” without qualification. He loves exports, but imports worry him. He buys into the AFL-CIO line that what the United States needs to bring to the table in international trade negotiations is “core labor standards.” The Clinton administration took the same line to Seattle in 1999, and look how isolated the United States became.

Does Daschle have any really strong core convictions on foreign policy? No. Has the South Dakota senator latched on to the kind of driving foreign policy issues that could persuade an electorate that Sen. Tom Daschle would be a better leader than George W. Bush? Not even close.

Daschle — like Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and many others who have imagined themselves qualified to be in the Oval Office — isn’t going to become president.

But once you catch a good dose of Potomac Fever, it’s really hard to shake it.

TOP