Daschle and Destiny: does the majority leader dare disturb the universe? (Below The Beltway).

IN LATE DECEMBER, AS REPUBLICANS and Democrats clashed by night over rival economic-stimulus plans, the nation's newspapers began to take note of a top-down GOP campaign to "demonize" Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. "Republicans leave little doubt about their strategy, or its antecedents," wrote Todd Purdum in The New York Times. The game plan, Purdum explained, is to define Daschle as the chief thwarter of the president's high-minded goals for the nation--a "partisan" (as the New York Post and Wall Street Journal put it), an ...