Democratic group targets Senate GOP
Daschle aiding project to gather, spread criticism
WASHINGTON -- Hoping to strike back at Republicans who mounted a yearslong effort to oust him from office, former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle is helping raise millions of dollars to form a new political advocacy group aimed at creating a clearinghouse of opposition-research information against all Senate Republicans.
Senate Majority Project is to formally launch today, with Daschle and other Democrats looking to bring in more than $2 million to collect and disseminate political information critical of all GOP senators, not just the handful of vulnerable incumbents whom Democrats have targeted this year. The project is the first concerted attempt by Democrats to create a permanent opposition-research arm focusing on all Republicans.
''It [is] time to stop playing defense all the time and start holding every Republican accountable for what they do in Washington," Daschle wrote in a fund-raising letter to prospective donors last month.
The Democrats' project is being considered a new benchmark in the trend toward ''permanent campaigns," which specialists said is transforming the political culture. Pressuring senators as many as five years before they're up for reelection increases the need for money to fight back; that requires big campaign donors and constant fund-raising even as Congress wrestles with ways to reduce the influence of money in politics, said Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Boston University.
''The campaign is extending endlessly," Zelizer said. ''If you're going to really conduct a serious campaigns for the Senate in offyears, it's going to increase the importance of raising money, and it's going to cost even more to run campaigns."
The project's leaders say their model is the GOP's vast opposition-research campaigns run at the national and state level, which dig up Democrats' votes and positions on controversial issues, then use the information as political weapons well before Election Day.
Those efforts paid off when Daschle -- an influential senator from South Dakota -- was defeated after nearly two decades in office. Republicans spent years hammering him as a politician out of touch with the voters who sent him to Washington, pushing an extreme liberal agenda in Washington.
Meanwhile, there are signs that Daschle's successor as Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, is next on the Republicans' hit list. Last year, the Republican-leaning group Progress for America ran advertisements in Nevada accusing Reid of turning his back on the interests of his constituents; Reid's term expires in 2010.
The steady attacks on Daschle highlighted the need for Democrats to return fire, said Jim Jordan, a veteran party operative who helped form the group. Researching all Republican incumbents, he said, ''is something that's not done anywhere in our party. . . . This was a fairly glaring hole in our party's infrastructure that we thought ought to be plugged."
Republicans, however, say Democrats are trying to hide from voters their lack of a coherent vision.
''Maybe Mr. Daschle should invest in a think tank to help the Democrats figure out an agenda for the first time in several elections," said Dan Ronayne, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Daschle lost in 2004 ''because he had no agenda," Ronayne said.
The Democrats' project has been running a blog-style website -- www.senatemajority.com -- since November and has already begun e-mailing political reporters critical analyses of GOP senators' records.
One recent post blasts Senator Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, for keeping $250,000 from a 2004 fund-raiser cochaired by disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Elected in 2004, Martinez isn't up for reelection for nearly five years.
Today, the project will unveil its first report, which blasts the GOP majority in the Senate -- Bill Frist in particular -- on leadership. ''On everything from inadequately funding homeland security to devastating the economy, the Republican Senate has made the nation insecure and unprepared to deal with a future disaster -- be it economic, natural, or terrorist," the report states.
Daschle has not ruled out a 2008 presidential bid, and Frist, who will retire from the Senate this year, is contemplating a run of his own.
Some high-profile party strategists are in charge of the project. Besides Jordan -- Senator John F. Kerry's first campaign manager for his 2004 presidential bid and a former official in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee -- the team includes Steve Ricchetti and Mike Gehrke, two high-level staff members under President Clinton.
Senate Majority Project is organized as a tax-exempt ''527" organization, meaning it can raise unlimited amounts of money to spend on issue advocacy, as long as it does not specifically promote the election or the defeat of particular candidates.
The group received hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed money last year primarily from Democrat-friendly labor unions and trial lawyers, according to IRS data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The organization expects to spend about $800,000 a year, according to a brochure mailed to prospective donors. The group wants to raise an additional $1.5 million for ads about Republican senators, project leaders say.
Democrats acknowledge that the effort could ratchet up the intensity of campaigns, but ''I would argue we have been neglectful by not concentrating on this for the entire six years in a person's term," Ricchetti said. GOP incumbents, he said, ''shouldn't get a pass for four years, and then be able to remake [themselves] in the last 18 months." 