Tom Daschle

Thomas Andrew Daschle (born December 9, 1947) is an American politician and lobbyist who represented South Dakota in the United States Senate from 1987 to 2005.

A member of the Democratic Party, he led the Senate Democratic Caucus during the final ten years of his tenure, during which time he served as Senate Minority Leader and Majority Leader.

He attended Central High School in Aberdeen before becoming the first person in his family to graduate from college when he earned a B.A. from the Department of Political Science at South Dakota State University in 1969.

While attending South Dakota State University, Daschle became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega.

From 1969 to 1972, Daschle served in the United States Air Force as an intelligence officer with the Strategic Air Command.

In the mid-1970s Daschle was an aide to Senator James Abourezk.

After leaving the United States Air Force, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1978 and served four terms.

In 1978 Daschle was elected to the United States House of Representatives at the age of 31, winning the race by a margin of 139 votes, following a recount, out of more than 129,000 votes cast.

Daschle served four terms in the House of Representatives and quickly became a part of the Democratic leadership.

Although Daschle was not seeking the Vice-Presidency, he received 10 (0.30%) delegate votes for Vice President of the United States at the 1980 Democratic National Convention.

Several others also received protest votes, but incumbent Vice President Walter Mondale was nevertheless renominated easily.

In 1986, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming Minority Leader in 1995 and Majority Leader in 2001, becoming the highest-ranking elected official in South Dakota history.

In 1986, Daschle was elected to the U.S. Senate in a close victory over incumbent Republican James Abdnor.

In his first year, he was appointed to the Finance Committee.

In 1994, he was chosen by his colleagues to succeed the retiring Senator George Mitchell as Democratic minority leader.

In the history of the Senate, only Lyndon B. Johnson had served fewer years before being elected to lead his party.

In addition to the minority leader's post, Daschle served as a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.

South Dakotans reelected Daschle to the Senate by overwhelming margins in 1998.

At various points in his career, he served on the Veterans Affairs, Indian Affairs, Finance, and Ethics Committees.

In 1999 and 2003, Daschle voted in favor of the ban on partial-birth abortion, and supported legislation making it a crime to harm an unborn child when someone attacks a pregnant woman.

When the 107th Congress commenced on January 3, 2001, the Senate was evenly divided—that is, there were 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans.

Outgoing Vice President Al Gore acted in his constitutional capacity as ex officio President of the Senate, and used his tie-breaking vote to give the Democrats the majority in that chamber.

For the next two weeks, Daschle served as Senate Majority Leader.

Upon the commencement of the Bush administration on January 20, 2001, Dick Cheney became president of the senate, thereby returning Democrats to the minority in that body; Daschle reverted to the position of Senate Minority Leader.

However, on June 6, 2001, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont announced that he was leaving the Senate Republican caucus to become an independent and to caucus with Democrats; this once again returned control of the body to the Democrats and Daschle again became majority leader.

Daschle recounted his senate experiences from 2001 to 2003 in his first book, Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever, published in 2003.

With Charles Robbins, he has also written the book The U.S. Senate, part of the Fundamentals of American Government series.

In October 2001, while he was the Senate Majority Leader, Daschle's office received a letter containing anthrax, becoming a target of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Some of his staffers were confirmed to have been exposed, as well as several of Senator Russ Feingold's staffers and Capitol police officers.

His suite at the Hart Senate Office Building was the focus of an intensive cleanup led by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Daschle has a mixed voting record on abortion-related issues, which led the pro-choice organization NARAL to give him a 50% vote rating.

Democratic losses in the November 2002 elections returned the party to the minority in the senate in January 2003, and Daschle once more reverted to being minority leader.

In 2004, he was defeated for reelection in a close race.

Later, he took a position as a policy advisor with a lobbying firm, became a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and co-authored a book advocating universal health care.

Daschle was an early supporter of Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, and was nominated by President-elect Obama for the position of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services after the 2008 election.

However, Daschle withdrew his name on February 3, 2009, amid a growing controversy over his failure to properly report and pay income taxes.

He is currently working for The Daschle Group, a Public Policy Advisory of Baker Donelson, a large law firm and lobbying group.

Daschle was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, the son of Elizabeth B. (née Meier) and Sebastian C. Daschle, both of German descent.

His paternal grandparents were Volga Germans.

He grew up in a working-class Roman Catholic family, the eldest of four brothers.