Tom Daschle is no ordinary appointment. Not just because of his experience, or relationships, or prestige. The connection between Daschle and Obama is deep, and Daschle's influence in Obama's campaign is more significant than most realize. That's because Obama, to a point, was actually running Daschle's campaign. The sophistication and brutal efficiency of the Obama team is, in some ways, a historical accident. In general, politicians who have served at the national level for a mere two years cannot amass the top-level staff talent to run a serious campaign. And that should have been all the truer in a year when a candidate with the last name "Clinton" was running as the prohibitive favorite. If you can't get the Clinton folks on your team, then there are fairly few pools of political operatives with the seasoning to run at the national level. But Obama entered office at a unique moment. Tom Daschle, then the Senate minority leader, had just lost his seat in an upset to John Thune. Dick Gephardt, the House minority leader, had retired after losing in the presidential primary. And the Democrats had been wiped out in the 2004 elections. Obama enters office at the very moment that the staffs of both legislative leaders lose their jobs. Which is how he ends up hiring Pete Rouse. Rouse was Tom Daschle's powerful chief of staff. So influential that he was often called "the 101st Senator," he had served at the pinnacle of the legislative structure, acting as the key staffer to the majority leader of the body. Going from chief of staff to the most powerful senator to chief of staff to the most junior, which is to say least powerful, senator is not a traditional career path. But Obama wasn't a traditional politician. He asked, and Rouse declined. He asked again, and Rouse stood firm. He persisted, and Rouse folded. The Senate's most junior member thus entered office with arguably its most experienced and powerful staffer. Much of what came since has been Rouse's doing. Obama's campaign was built off the plans Rouse wrote for Tom Daschle's Senate run. It even used the same people. His deputy campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, managed Daschle's 2004 campaign. His director for battleground states, Jennifer O'Malley Dillon, and his director of communications, Dan Pfeiffer, were both deputy campaign managers for Daschle in 2004. Obama's foreign-policy director, Denis McDonough, was Daschle's foreign-policy adviser, and his finance director, Julianna Smoot, was head of Daschle's PAC. And in February of 2007 -- which is rather early for this sort of thing -- Tom Daschle, who had served with Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, stepped forward and endorsed Barack Obama, giving Obama crucial establishment credibility, a powerful emissary to elite Washington, and a key adviser. And since then, other Daschle confidantes have entered Obama's inner circle, namely Phil Schiliro, formerly Daschle's policy director and now Obama's legislative liaison. Which is all to say that Daschle is rather better integrated into Obama's political structure then your everyday appointee. And he has the relationships and the information to have made an informed judgment on whether the president-elect was serious enough about health care to merit Daschle's full-time involvement. Which is again why I urge people not to underestimate the importance of this pick, either as a signal of intentions or a signal of strategy. Though this point is argued in greater detail below, the distance between Ira Magaziner and Tom Daschle could not be greater. Magaziner knew nothing of the Congress. Daschle knows nearly everything. If the Clinton plan failed because it was too much the product of a policy process and too little the product of a congressional process, Daschle's involvement is the strongest evidence possible that Obama's plan will not suffer from the same mistakes.
