UNDER THE RADAR:

I'm Linda, Fly Me: The real reason Tom Daschle didn't run for president (Doug Ireland, JANUARY 17 - 23, 2003, LA Weekly)

The national press corps didn't bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats' Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated that he couldn't survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda Daschle has been one of the airline industry's top lobbyists for two
decades - when she wasn't busy running the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which explains why, just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks, her husband rushed through the Democratic Senate, which he controlled, the $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, a notorious taxpayer rip-off. [...]

A particularly odiferous episode involved charges that the senator and his wife had tried to sabotage safety inspections of an air-charter firm owned by Murl Bellew, a Daschle family friend who taught Tom how to fly. The scandal erupted and triggered an official investigation when a Bellew small plane chartered by the Indian Health Service crashed in North Dakota, killing the pilot and three doctors en route to an Indian-reservation clinic. Forest Service inspectors had been arguing that Bellew's firm should be banned from getting government contracts because the operation had been unsafe for years. Senator Daschle obligingly pushed legislation taking the Forest Service out of the
business of inspecting small-plane carriers, and senior FAA bureaucrats said Linda had also tried to submarine a proposal to train Forest Service inspectors to conduct FAA investigations. An FAA inspector reported a cover-up: Documents showing the Daschles' assiduous efforts to minimize inspections of Bellew's planes were shredded by FAA officials under Linda's thumb. While an I.G. report failed to find Linda guilty of any lawbreaking, there's an old saying in Washington: The scandal isn't what's illegal, the real scandal is what's legal.

It's a sign of how lazy, blinkered and source-coddling the Beltway's national press corps is when one considers that none of all this made the dissections of the senator's presidential withdrawal - even though a tough piece by the Washington Monthly's Stephanie Mencimer in the January 2002 issue laying out much of it was still on newsstands. As she observed, "It doesn't take Lee Atwater to see how Mrs. Daschle's professional life might play out in a nasty re-election or presidential campaign: "Sen. Daschle's wife lobbyist for nation's most dangerous airline," or "majority leader's wife lobbied to make airlines less safe?"

Linda Daschle has tried to pooh-pooh her obvious conflicts of interest as an influence peddler, telling The New York Times last August that the staff members she lobbies "are pretty junior and may or may not know who I am"--a mind-boggling, risible assertion. But her senator/leader husband has always refused to make public his and his wife's tax returns, despite repeated press requests. As a presidential candidate, Tom Daschle could not have avoided giving the press a look at those returns - which would have spelled out just how much cash Linda brings in from her clients.

And that, children, was the ticking time bomb that would inevitably have exploded if the senator had sought the White House - and is the bottom-line reason he chose not to run."

Hopefully John Thune is taking notes. Posted by Stephen Judd at January 17, 2003 10:46 AM