Hard Target.

Focuses on United States Republican Party efforts to discredit Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Rarely do you find a document so cynical, shameless, and outright duplicitous as one that has recently circulated among U.S. conservatives planning the personal destruction of Daschle. Soliciting donations of nearly $1 million for television and billboard advertisements, the memo previews a campaign featuring two folksy characters who will muse about their simple lives--and Republican tax policy--in an archetypal small-town barbershop. Never mind the rank dishonesty of the ad. To this end, a front group has been "designed precisely to meet these criteria": The Rushmore Policy Council, an outfit so small it has no website or local telephone listing. The group exists, in other words, to put a phony local veneer on the GOP's efforts to ruin its number-one enemy. By fighting all-out against Daschle now, Republicans hope to limit his effectiveness in Washington, D.C.--"to help neutralize Daschle's attacks" on President George W. Bush, as the Rushmore Policy Council puts it--and maybe even be rid of him once and for all. Attacks like these have already had some effect on how Daschle operates. Since his ill-timed comments about Bush's diplomacy, he has been conspicuously bland on the crucial subject of Iraq. Republicans hope that well-publicized questions about his Catholicism might force Daschle to show caution on social issues. Perhaps more importantly, the GOP aims to create enough problems for Daschle back in South Dakota that he'll be forced to spend hours each week working at his own reelection that he could otherwise spend trying to keep his caucus unified against Bush. And yet, even as Republicans pummel him, Daschle has so far held his ground where it matters: on the issues.