PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER was a Republican, Senator Lyndon Johnson a Democrat. But in his memoir “Waging Peace,” Eisenhower remembered Johnson, the Senate majority leader during his presidency in the 1950s, as a friend and frequent ally. “We had our differences, especially in domestic and economic policy,” Eisenhower wrote. “Yet, when put in perspective, he was far more helpful than obstructive.” When President Bush writes his memoirs, he’s unlikely to recall his Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, in the same way. The LBJ model of a majority leader–Johnson held the post from 1955 to 1960–has become prominent again with the publication of Robert Caro’s “Master of the Senate,” the third volume of his biography of Johnson. Caro declares Johnson the greatest Senate majority leader ever, a verdict few historians would quibble with. And so the question is, How does Daschle, like Johnson a Democrat confronting a Republican president, measure up against LBJ? The answer is not well on two hallmarks of Johnson’s tenure: the ability to work with a president of the other party and a willingness to take on a major constituency group of his own party. But that’s not the end of the story. Times have changed dramatically on Capitol Hill since LBJ’s era. And Daschle follows a different model from Johnson’s–more patient, more liberal, more partisan, and less conciliatory. Majority leader since June 2001, Daschle may prove to be more effective than either the White House or congressional Republicans admit. Johnson’s favorite tactic was to side with Eisenhower, notably on foreign policy, and drive a wedge through Senate Republicans, picking off the liberals and moderates. Daschle rarely joins with Bush, instead rigidly sticking to Democratic positions and waiting for the president to acquiesce. This worked successfully on the farm bill, airline security legislation, and an economic stimulus package–and is likely to succeed again with accounting reform and with passage of an energy bill stripped of Bush’s cherished provision to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. But the absence of an LBJ-like relationship with the White House and Daschle’s unwillingness to break with Democratic interest groups limit what he can achieve. Chances are Johnson, were he Senate leader today, would forge agreements with the White House on a prescription drug benefit, a patients’ bill of rights, and terrorism reinsurance. These are high priority issues on which Daschle seems unwilling to compromise. At least on a drug benefit, the Johnson tactic of reaching agreement with the president and dividing GOP members of Congress could work. True, it would boost Bush. But it would also allow Democrats to claim credit for a popular measure in time for the midterm congressional elections in November. Oddly enough, Daschle is a great fan of Caro’s biography of LBJ. He’s read all three volumes, listened to “Master of the Senate” on tape, and spent an evening with Caro talking about Johnson and his time. He regards Caro’s work as second only to William Manchester’s “The Last Lion” (on Winston Churchill), Daschle’s favorite biography. According to Daschle, three huge changes from LBJ’s time have reduced the sway of a majority leader. Johnson excelled in building personal relationships with senators. But that’s far harder today, Daschle insists, because senators “aren’t around” on evenings and weekends when personal ties could be nurtured. Then there’s the press. “Instantaneous media attention compounds and makes more complex the challenge” of running the Senate, he says. Finally there’s the role of fund-raising. “You can read all 1,200 pages, and I don’t think you can find the word fund-raising in that book.” Johnson took care of raising money with a few phone calls, but Daschle devotes many hours each week to this distracting task. While Daschle isn’t as powerful a majority leader as Johnson, he has considerable clout nonetheless–and a great deal more than his Republican predecessor, Trent Lott. “The Democratic leader has both carrots and sticks,” Lott says. “The Republican has few carrots and no sticks.” Republican committee assignments are governed by strict seniority. But Daschle decides all of them himself, has many patronage staff appointments, and determines the budget of party groups such as the Democratic Policy Committee. Rather than concentrate on senators one-on-one as LBJ did, Daschle stresses the caucus of all 50 Senate Democrats. “In all the time LBJ was leader, they only had one annual conference,” Daschle says. “His strategy was to never meet as a group” because it might lead to an uprising. “I take the opposite point of view. I think there’s a group chemistry that’s produced. . . . We now meet three times a week. I think inclusion is the only way to keep my people together.” Whatever the cause, Daschle has maintained amazing unity among Democrats, who have just a one-vote edge over Republicans. To get his way, Daschle has run roughshod over Democratic committee chairmen. He refused to let the chairman of the Finance Ccommittee, Max Baucus, handle the economic stimulus package or the prescription drug benefit. He grabbed the energy bill from Jeff Bingaman’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to prevent it from approving oil production in the Alaskan wilderness. He wrote the farm bill, trumping Iowa’s Tom Harkin, chairman of the Agriculture Committee. And he nullified a bipartisan compromise on terrorism reinsurance, reached by Paul Sarbanes, Banking Committee chairman. Republicans say Daschle defers only to three Senate chairmen: Robert Byrd of the Appropriations Committee, Edward Kennedy of Labor, and Patrick Leahy of Judiciary. Daschle matches one asset Johnson had as majority leader: an adoring press corps. When the Senate is in session, he presides over a daily “dugout” with reporters. It is good-natured on both sides. Daschle is easygoing, the press corps chummy–in contrast to the hostile attitude of reporters at the White House briefing and the understandable defensiveness of press secretary Ari Fleischer. This pays off for Daschle. His failures get scant attention. The inability of Senate Democrats to produce a budget this year is rarely cited in the media. In May 2001, Daschle promised that approval of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada would not pass so long as Democrats control the Senate. Last month Daschle wiggled out of his promise. He declined to keep Yucca off the Senate floor. Once it passed, few stories mentioned Daschle’s vow and failure to deliver. Storing the nation’s nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain was the White House position, but there’s no evidence Daschle allowed the vote to be helpful to Bush. Daschle’s relationship with Bush isn’t like that–and isn’t like LBJ’s with Ike either. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, Daschle, Lott, House Speaker Denny Hastert, and Minority Leader Dick Gephardt began gathering weekly for breakfast at the White House. For weeks, as anti-terrorist legislation was drafted and enacted, Daschle and Bush worked in a warm, bipartisan fashion that was captured in Bush’s firm hug of Daschle after his speech to Congress last September 20. But the relationship cooled. In November, Bush asked a GOP member of Congress what the real story is with Daschle. Bush indicated he was willing to seek bipartisan agreements with Daschle on legislation unrelated to September 11. He was told Daschle was a deeply partisan liberal who wouldn’t be much help. And Daschle hasn’t been. But Daschle says a huge roadblock is Bush’s unwillingness to break with his conservative base in Congress, which is no doubt true. For Johnson and Eisenhower, things were easier. The Senate in the 1950s had many conservative Democrats eager to back Eisenhower, and the president had a bloc of liberal and moderate Republicans to appeal to. Now, there are few liberal or moderate Republicans, fewer still conservative Democrats. “At least once a month, and frequently more often, Johnson and [House Speaker Sam] Rayburn would drive to the White House at the cocktail hour, enter unseen through the back door, and settle down for a highball or two with the President in the second-floor presidential study,” write Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in “Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power,” a highly regarded biography of LBJ. No such sessions have occurred with Bush and Daschle. “They don’t have anything close to that” sort of relationship, a White House aide says. The Ike-LBJ tie “was based on trust.” They could “do business,” the aide says, and Bush and Daschle can’t. For his part, Daschle says secret meetings are “all but impossible” nowadays. In “Master of the Senate,” the climax of Johnson’s career as leader was his bold and risky engineering of passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. To pull this off, Johnson broke with the Senate’s most cohesive group, conservative Southern Democrats, the group that had promoted his rise to majority leader. He had ulterior motives–politicians always do–but the result was to end the Senate logjam and pass the first of the great civil rights acts. The closest Daschle has come to breaking with a Democratic interest group is trade promotion authority, and even there it’s only a partial break. This authority–like the “fast track” authority that led to the free-trade treaties of the 1970s and ’80s–would allow the president to get trade agreements through Congress without amendment, and organized labor is strongly opposed. To soften the blow, Daschle added lavish wage insurance and trade adjustment assistance for workers to the bill. More important, he allowed an exception to be tacked on that may prompt a presidential veto, killing a bill that Johnson would surely have made acceptable to the president. On other issues, Daschle is a prisoner of interest groups. Because of opposition by trial lawyers, Daschle has blocked a patients’ bill of rights and terrorism reinsurance. To satisfy environmentalists, he made defeat of oil drilling in the Arctic mandatory. To please labor and liberals, he insists on the most costly prescription drug benefit. Because of feminists, he’s allowed conservative judicial nominations by Bush to be blocked. A final point. Both Johnson and Daschle recognized the popularity of the presidents they dealt with. For Johnson, this led to a special promise when he was elevated to majority leader. “There will be no personal attacks upon the integrity of the president or upon his intentions,” he said. There weren’t any. Daschle has made no such promise and Bush lacks Eisenhower’s stature. He has raised doubts, at least obliquely, about Bush’s ethics at Harken Energy before entering politics and his forthrightness in disclosing pre-September 11 clues about possible terrorist attacks. Times change, and so do majority leaders. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
