Daschle's legacy may well be that he used a sophisticated strategy and understated midwestern style to reunify the fractious Senate Democrats during the mid-1990s. He fashioned a more centrist party agenda that produced important legislation, including campaign finance revisions.
Perhaps more significant, he played a big role in saving Clinton's presidency by quietly engineering his acquittal at the impeachment trial in the Senate.
As a relatively junior member when he succeeded Mitchell as Democratic leader in January 1995, the boyish-looking Daschle was easy to underestimate.
Yet Daschle methodically courted the more senior Democrats and persuaded them to close ranks. Then he helped them use the rules to advance Democratic priorities such as the minimum wage, prescription drugs for seniors and HMO regulations, while thwarting the Republicans' marquee initiative -- a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.
Although he and the prickly Lott could not have been more different in style and temperament, they forged a collaborative relationship that proved crucial to the Democrats and Clinton in weathering the historic impeachment trial in early 1999. Daschle had been disgusted by the revelation of Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky and fumed publicly over the president's legalistic "hairsplitting" in defending himself.
"At any moment at that time, a negative signal from Tom Daschle would have brought down the presidency," a veteran Democratic senator close to Daschle said.
But Daschle and Lott believed that conservative House Republicans had gone too far by impeaching the president for essentially lying about his affair in a civil proceeding, and they worked successfully behind the scenes to avert a conviction.
Daschle's great strengths were his patience and consensus-building, and he rarely tried to impose his will. When he replaced Lott as majority leader on June 6, 2001 -- after Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont defected from the GOP and gave the Democrats a one-seat majority -- Daschle promised to honor the "spirit of bipartisanship."
Yet within weeks of becoming majority leader, Daschle began to show a far more aggressive and steely side, and his relations with the Republicans began to sour. With a new Republican president in the White House and the House firmly controlled by conservative Republicans, Daschle became the most prominent Democrat in Washington -- and a lightning rod for Republican attacks.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Daschle briefly became the Democrats' main face of bipartisanship. Bush hugged him when he went to the Capitol to give a speech, and Daschle championed emergency legislation to respond to the national crisis. The next month, when 20 members of his staff were exposed to anthrax in the Hart Senate Office Building, "Tom became a national victim," Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said then.
But as Daschle repeatedly blocked Bush's initiatives on drilling for oil, the economy and tax cuts, GOP hostility increased. In late 2001, South Dakota newspapers carried political ads featuring side-by-side photographs of Saddam Hussein and Daschle that accused the Democrat of helping to keep the Iraqi dictator in power by blocking oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Daschle's stormy tenure lasted only a year and a half, but he helped push through the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, he shaped major farm legislation, he pushed for creation of a Department of Homeland Security, he helped pass election law changes arising from the 2000 presidential election, and he passed a major economic stimulus package, albeit one smaller than sought by Bush.
