Daschle ‘doesn’t expect to be’ Obama’s VP

Former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said Tuesday that he doesn’t expect to be asked to be Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) running mate and has no idea whom Obama will pick.

“I really don’t expect to be asked and I haven’t weighed in on it,” Daschle told The Hill, adding that he’s “tried to keep at an honest length” from Obama’s closely held deliberations about a vice presidential candidate.

{mosads}While the former Senate majority leader declined to speculate on who he thinks would be the best person to join Obama on the ticket, he disputed the notion that Obama should pick an older person because of his own youth and relative inexperience in public office.

“The two biggest things he has to decide are, one, who would make a good president if needed, and second, among those qualified, who does he have the best chemistry with that would allow a good team effort and who would he feel most comfortable delegating responsibility to? Those are far and away the most important factors.”

Daschle emphatically disagreed with the suggestion that Arizona Sen. John McCain, the soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee, would have an advantage as president over Obama in dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because of his military record.

“This debate [over Iraq] has been largely one of experience versus judgment,” he said. “The war has been a debacle in many, many respects, and Barack Obama has shown good judgment from the beginning. I believe that’s better than any length of experience. Anybody who’s attempted to objectively analyze the Iraq situation of the last five years has to conclude that experience has not been any great asset for [Vice President] Cheney, [Former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld or anybody else.”

Daschle, who is one of the national co-chairmen of the Obama campaign, was sharply critical of McCain’s negative campaign ads. “McCain started out with a pledge to run a positive campaign and keep to the issues,” he said. “But we’ve seen one negative attack after another and I’m disappointed. It’s one of the bigger disappointments of the campaign, with all the big issues confronting the country, that so much of the McCain campaign has been spent on attack ads.”

Interviewed in his office at the law firm Alston & Bird, where he is a special policy adviser and a partner of former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Daschle said voters are “looking for a new direction. They’re concerned about issues across the board — like energy, the economy, healthcare, foreign policy — and Barack personifies that new direction.”

Daschle cited recent polls showing that 80 percent of Americans “believe America is on the wrong track. It’s rare to get such overwhelming concern about the direction the country is taking. Most of what McCain advocates is similar or identical to what Bush has advocated for the last eight years, and that makes it pretty hard for McCain to be an agent of change.”

Daschle, who was one of the chief targets of the 2001 anthrax attacks in which 20 of his staffers were directly exposed to anthrax spores in letters sent to his Hart Senate Office Building office, is less critical of the FBI’s investigation than on Aug. 4, when he told CNN he was “very skeptical” of the investigation.

Referring to the FBI’s case against Bruce Ivins, an anthrax researcher at Fort Detrick, Md., who committee suicide as he was about to be arrested, Daschle said, “I give [FBI Director] Bob Mueller a great deal of credit for his leadership in the investigation, but I think it will be some time yet before we can say definitely that they found the right person.”

Daschle said he has been briefed on the case, “and based on that I think [the FBI has] reason to be confident about their ability to conduct [its] investigation successfully.”

As for his role in the Obama campaign, Daschle said it has changed over time, but that it involves four different functions, including acting as a surrogate candidate, briefing the news media, fundraising and acting as a liaison to Congress and elected officials.

He said the latter “basically want to know what’s going on in the campaign — ‘What can you tell us about the campaign’s thinking, what’s the message?’ ”