Inside Politics

Frist vs. Daschle

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, will travel to South Dakota next month to campaign against his Democratic counterpart, Minority Leader Tom Daschle, Roll Call reports.

Mr. Daschle is up against his toughest opponent since joining the Senate in 1986 — former Rep. John Thune. Mr. Thune won statewide election in South Dakota as the state’s only representative in the House for three terms before retiring to run for the Senate four years ago. In that race against the state’s junior senator, Tim Johnson, he lost by 518 votes amid accusations of election fraud on the state’s Indian reservations.

A spokesman for Mr. Daschle said he welcomes Mr. Frist and plans to lobby him on matters of local interest, such as country-of-origin labeling for meat.

Senate historian Richard Baker told Roll Call that he could not recall a time in the modern era of campaigns when one floor leader campaigned against the other in his home state. But that is mostly because Mr. Daschle is the first floor leader since the 1960s to face a tough re-election fight, he added.

Gorelick’s history

Former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick is a member of the September 11 commission, but she should be sitting on the witness stand, Ethan Wallison writes in National Review Online.

Today, former Attorney General Janet Reno, “under whom Gorelick served for three years beginning in 1994, testifies in open session,” said Mr. Wallison, who covers the White House for Roll Call.

“The questioning can reasonably be expected to focus on steps taken (or not taken) at the Justice Department in the wake of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City — the worst incidents of terrorism inside the United States before the September 11 hijackings.

“Shouldn’t Gorelick provide the commission — and the public — with answers on these topics as well? There is something absurd about the notion that, rather than testifying, Gorelick will instead be asking Reno for information. Are there any questions she can ask to which she does not already have the answer? Gorelick’s role with the commission deprives the inquiry of a potentially valuable source of agreement or disagreement with the attorney general’s testimony.

“Consider one theme that has emerged from the hearings to date: the hapless condition of the FBI’s antiterror efforts before the 9/11 attacks. If the attacks in New York and Oklahoma City amounted to failures for the FBI, what steps did Gorelick and other top officials at Justice, of which the agency is a part, take to defend against the next instance?”

Serving waffles

“Some jokers who don’t like the Democratic presidential candidate are trying to make his campaign Web site, johnkerry.com, the first answer to a search of the word ‘waffles’ on Google, the No. 1 Internet search engine,” USA Today reports.

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