There is an elderly woman with a long-winded anecdote about the old days on the prairies; a farmer with a desperate appeal for drought assistance and lower petrol prices; and a set of African refugees who want a group photograph of themselves.
Tom Daschle, the most powerful Democrat in Washington, has time for them all.
The party’s Senate leader stays long after a community dinner in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was due to finish, until the last question is answered, and the last anxious words are heard. The tables have all been dismantled and the chairs neatly stacked.
For the first time since he entered the Senate in 1986, Daschle is fighting for his political survival. But there is much more than his career in play. Control of the Senate is also at stake, and all that that means — a legislative veto, the right to ratify foreign treaties and the power to shape the United States Supreme Court.
The Republicans have a two-vote majority in the Senate. The Democrats have an outside chance of overturning that margin, but virtually no chance if their Senate leader loses this excruciatingly tight race to a popular and photogenic Republican, John Thune.
”This is a very pivotal election,” Daschle said in an interview after the last potential voter had drifted out into the cool prairie night. ”We can’t win back the Senate without winning this race, and the president himself has said this is the second-most important race in the country. It’s become the most expensive race per capita in American political history.”
If President George W Bush is re-elected, Daschle will continue to be the Democrats’ last line of defence against the president’s second-term agenda. If John Kerry wins the presidency, on the other hand, the senator from South Dakota will be his right-hand man in Congress.
Either way, it will make an enormous difference if Daschle is leader of the minority, as is the case now, or of the majority. As majority leader, he will have a decisive say in the Senate’s order of business, and his office will become a power centre to rival the White House. ”[The Senate] confirms all ambassadors and ratifies all treaties, so it has a huge importance,” he said. ”The next president and the next Senate are likely to confirm two or three new Supreme Court justices. There is little doubt that the direction the Supreme Court takes over the next 20 or 30 years will be determined at this election.”
In the US’s ongoing culture wars, control of the Supreme Court is even more important than residency of the White House. The court alone will determine whether the US is a country where abortion is legal, whether restrictions on stem cell research are legalised, whether there are gay marriages, and whether the death penalty is maintained, restricted or banned.
Both parties have poured millions into sparsely populated South Dakota, where there are barely 400 000 voters and where the politics are decidedly retail. The big issues are drought, guns, the future of the corn-based fuel ethanol, and the plight of both Native American reservations and of a pesky rodent, the prairie dog.
The airwaves are choked with campaign advertisements, but in a race that will probably be decided by a few hundred votes either way both Daschle and Thune know the only real way to clinch a floating vote is to meet every possible voter in person.
Hence Daschle’s long night at the Sioux Falls community centre, and Thune’s insistence on as many debates as possible. His campaign asked for 25. The Daschle camp agreed to six.
The encounters are a far cry from the much-hyped presidential debates. At a recent Daschle-Thune debate in the small university town of Vermillion, there were two journalists in attendance and Thune did all the post-debate spin himself.
Thune has a lot going for him electorally, as well as the $2-million or more the national Republican party has devoted to winning Daschle’s scalp. The former congressman has a vote-winning combination of distinguished grey hair and strong-jawed film star looks. He is also a nimble and aggressive debater, arguably stronger than the softly-spoken senator.
Again and again at the Vermillion debate, Thune accused his opponent of being ”the chief obstructionist” in Washington, blocking legislation for the sake of political advantage. In a mostly conservative state, where 58% of voters are registered Republicans, Thune is playing to a home audience.
Daschle’s Senate tenure, by contrast, has always been something of an anomaly. He has held on to his seat by cultivating his constituents, making sure he visited every county in the state each term in a 1971 Pontiac, until the old car fell apart.
He has also campaigned to the right of the Democratic mainstream. This time, for example, one of his advertisements shows him hugging Bush a few days after the September 11 attacks. It is not an image that goes down well with hardcore supporters, but it helps counter allegations that he is no more than a partisan obstructionist.
The senator has also burned some of his bridges with environmentalists by turning against the cuddly prairie dog, blamed by ranchers for eating their pastures. Daschle now backs poisoning them in large numbers.
Most of all, Daschle is campaigning on the clout of his office as a Senate leader. It means, he repeatedly points out, this is a moment in history when one of the most important desks in the country is controlled by South Dakota.
The Daschle camp is hoping that this pragmatic appeal will be enough to win over at least one in five of the state’s registered Republicans, just enough to outweigh Thune’s party advantage, and that the margin of victory will be secured by mobilising the state’s 40 000 long-suffering Sioux Indians, who are just waking up to their own political leverage. If the election is as tight as it promises to be, they could well determine who controls the US Senate. — Â