A Referendum On Tactics

Perhaps the most substantive political race in the country is playing out in South Dakota. Tom Daschle, the nation's most powerful Democrat, is likely to lose his seat because his constituents are repulsed by the way he exercised that power.

If the prospect of unseating a party leader for the first time since 1952 weren't enough, there's another reason why this race is second in importance to only the presidency. Mr. Daschle has served as chief architect of liberals' two-year strategy to obstruct George W. Bush's agenda, from national security and tort reform to energy production, tax cuts and federal judges. A Daschle defeat would be a repudiation of that filibuster game plan, and do more to break the Senate logjam than any other Republican gains. "It'd be like picking up three extra seats," Virginia Senator George Allen, chairman of the Republican campaign committee, said recently.

If that happens, Mr. Daschle will have only his own record to blame. "Tom," as even critics in this state of just 470,000 registered voters chummily call him, has built his career on the message that he's South Dakotan first, Democrat second. Tapping into the prairie populism of the state's eastern side, he's cast himself as a fervent advocate of rural communities, a protector against corporate interests and representative of the state's conservative values. Just as important, he's built a reputation for delivering home pots of federal cash. All this has enabled the Democrat to win in a state where President Bush captured 60% of the vote in 2000. "He delivers," says Linda Kasten, a 51-year-old government employee who tells me she's voting a Bush-Daschle ticket because the senator secured $700,000 in federal money for a senior center in her small town of Parker.