Daschle, Tom (1947– )

US Democrat politician, Senate majority leader 2001–03. He became senator for South Dakota in 1987 and was previously in the House of Representatives 1979–87. In 1988, the then Senate Democrat leader George Mitchell named Daschle the first-ever co-chair of the influential Democratic Policy Committee. He was Senate minority leader 1995–2001 and 2003–05 and Senate majority leader 2001–03. Viewed by President George W Bush and his supporters as the ‘chief obstructionist’ of his administration's agenda, he was successfully targeted and narrowly defeated in the November 2004 Senate elections.

Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, into a German-US working-class Roman Catholic family, he studied political science at South Dakota State University. He served for three years as an intelligence officer in US Air Force Strategic Air Command and for five years as an aide to South Dakota senator James Abourezk, before being elected to the US House of Representatives in 1978 and winning the 1986 elections in South Dakota to the US Senate.