Inside the walls of South Dakota
Jon Lauck is the author of the new book on the historic 2004 Senate race in which the indomitable John Thune unseated then-incumbent Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. In the book Lauck brings his professional training to bear. He is a lawyer and historian who currently serves as senior adviser to Senator Thune. The book is Daschle vs. Thune: Anatomy of a High Plains Senate Race. Tomorrow Lauck will appear for a book signing at Barnes & Noble in Sioux Falls (3700 West 41st Street) at 2:00 p.m. Please get out and buy a copy if you are in the neighborhood.
Readers with a long memory may recall that the Sioux Falls Argus Leader was a key player in the Senate race. As a liberal paper that dominates the state's news coverage, it was perhaps Daschle's most significant (and most irritating) supporter. The Internet played a role in allowing Thune supporters to circumvent the Argus Leader, and it was a role that the Argus Leader deeply resented.
The Argus Leader even expressed its resentment toward those of us with the temerity (as the paper saw things) to criticize it on the Internet from "outside the walls of South Dakota." In April 2004 Argus Leader editor Randall Beck fulminated:
"[T]here’s a small group of people — and you know, some of them don’t live in South Dakota, not everybody out there knows that. You know there’s a couple of yahoos in Minneapolis and there’s a guy out in Denver, there’s people from outside the walls of South Dakota who are perpetuating this hate campaign."We responded in "Funny, we don't look yahooish." In retrospect, it seems a symbolic moment and Jon tells us it earned a place in the book. In his Weekly Standard review of the book (subscribers only), Joseph Bottum partially dissents from Lauck's account of the role of the Internet on the ultimate outcome of the campaign, but he usefully recalls:
Jon Lauck was a blogger--perhaps the state's key blogger--during the 2004 campaign, and so in Daschle vs. Thune he emphasizes the blogging explanation [of Daschle's defeat]: The web provided, for the first time, a statewide source of news and commentary besides the local television stations, which did little serious reporting, and the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, which was widely perceived to be in Daschle's corner, both on its editorial pages and in its news coverage....The Argus Leader continues to play its role as the gatekeeper on the state's political news. It is a not so funny fact that the Argus Leader has refused to review Lauck's book. The powers-that-be at the paper say it's against their policy to review books in which they are discussed. South Dakota Politics has collected some of the photographic commentary on the Argus Leader's blackout on the book from around the Internet, including the photograph above. I wonder how many other books the Argus Leader has declined to review under this policy. (The Rapid City Weekly News covered a recent book signing here.)With a near monopoly as the state's only paper of record, the Argus Leader was unused to criticism. Much of that criticism was well deserved, and when the attacks from local blogs were picked up by national bloggers (and then began appearing in such national publications as the Wall Street Journal and National Review), the paper reacted badly, snarling, as Lauck remarks, that blogs are "places where the views of the 'pinheaded' on the 'political fringes' with 'nutty opinions' can 'spew forth.'" Indeed, the Argus Leader's editor added, "If Hitler were alive today, he'd have his own blog." It all made for great Internet theater, and though they mostly spoke to readers who were already Thune supporters, the blogs certainly cost Tom Daschle some votes.
The book has garnered praise from prominent authorities. Michael Barone comments that "Jon Lauck’s account of one of the hardest-fought elections in the 2004 campaign should be must reading for Democrats as well as Republicans." In his Weekly Standard review, Bottum observed that "Lauck has written what should be required reading for anyone interested in how to win--and how to lose--a modern senatorial campaign." The ubiquitous Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics lauds the book as “a good tale about the contest that was arguably second only to the Bush-Kerry presidential battle in 2004" and calls it "a great read[.]"
