Daschle, lobbyist wife vow to keep careers separate

By Jim Drinkard, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Tom Daschle's rise to the helm of the Senate spotlights an awkward fact of life for Washington's power couples: When professional lives intertwine, ethical conflicts can follow.

The South Dakota Democrat's wife, Linda, is a lobbyist who mostly represents airlines, aircraft makers and other aviation-related interests — all of which have a steady stream of issues before the Senate. As majority leader, Tom Daschle has the power to set the Senate's agenda.

Linda Daschle says she will deal with that potential pitfall the way she has since she resumed her lobbying career in 1997: by never lobbying her husband or any member or committee of the Senate. "With dual careers in public policy, you need to be careful and take steps to avoid any appearance problem," she says. "I feel very comfortable with my activities."

Ethics groups say Daschle's new job makes it even more important that he and his wife keep their business separate. "They have to make sure she's not given any special favor because of who she's married to, and that he not get involved in anything she is directly lobbying," says Larry Noble, director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which researches links between political money and public policy. "This is a problem for a lot of couples now in Washington."

For example, when Dick Cheney became vice president, it called attention to the many business connections of his wife, Lynne, who serves on two corporate boards. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the new chairman of the agriculture committee, is married to lobbyist Ruth Harkin.

For such two-career couples, the most common issue raised by ethics watchdogs is the appearance that relatives of powerful policymakers are snagging lucrative clients because of who they know, rather than what they know. In some cases, the arrangement can look like an indirect payoff to the public official.

In Linda Daschle's case, that possibility seems remote because most of her lobbying is in a field where she has long-standing expertise and contacts. For five years — from 1993 to 1997 — she was deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. She served for the last few months as the agency's acting administrator. She was a top manager at the Civil Aeronautics Board from 1980 to 1984 and worked for aviation trade groups during a 20-year Washington career.

Her client list includes airlines American and Northwest, aircraft maker Boeing, and aviation technology companies L-3 Communications, *Loral and United Technologies. She also represents airport executives, airports in Cleveland and Englewood, Colo., and a trade association for concrete paving contractors. Those clients paid Daschle's law and lobbying firm, Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell, about $1.1 million in the year ending last June, the most recent records available.

One client that attracted attention because it was outside Daschle's normal area of expertise was Schering-Plough, the pharmaceutical giant that sought unsuccessfully last year to extend the patent life of its allergy drug, Claritin. Several ethics groups said the lucrative lobbying arrangement smacked of buying special access..

But Marc Miller, a Washington attorney who has studied the potential conflicts that arise for congressional spouses, says it appears that Tom and Linda Daschle's arrangements more than meet normal ethics guidelines.

Miller says disclosure of lobbying relationships is a key to avoiding conflicts. "If in the next reporting period, she starts to show a whole bunch of brand-new clients in areas other than aviation, that would be a red flag," he says.

Linda Daschle, 46, was born in Oklahoma and educated at Kansas State University. She became a weather observer for the FAA while in college. She won the Miss Kansas competition in 1976 before going to Washington to launch her career. She and the senator were married in 1984, the year after he and his first wife, Laurie, were divorced.


{*note: remember Loral, the company that sold the US multi-warhead guidence system to China}