SOUTH DAKOTA STRAIGHT TALK

Working together for the common good

When the highway funding reauthorization recently passed Congress you will remember that Senators Thune and Johnson toured South Dakota telling everyone who would listen how well they delivered for South Dakota. It seems they discovered that working together is popular and sharing the credit a good thing. As I expressed then working together is good, although I was skeptical this is easy to do when the issue is spending money on popular projects. Spending money on popular projects is a non-partisan endeavor. Setting my skepticism on how easy it is to be nicey-nicey aside, I applaud the Senators and welcome this approach and newfound attitude.

Today our Senators have ratcheted up the good feeling a notch or two and written a joint letter expressing how this newfound virtue is a wonderful phenomenon. Their communiqué details a wide-ranging shopping list of the projects they are working on.

What is particularly interesting is the following excerpt from their letter: “ We both strongly believe that the time for emphasizing partisan differences and partisan attacks is long over and that South Dakotans are eager for both of us work as closely together as possible -- which we are committed to doing.”

Many of those active in politics have taken the approach for sometime that partisan difference is important but that elected officials working together once elected is also important. Governor Mike Rounds ran his campaign on that theme. When used in his campaign this theme was hardly noticed without comment good or bad. Unfortunately some elected officials, particularly in the State Legislature didn’t get the message. Sometimes it does not appear that everyone is even on the same team.

What does scream out for notice though are those who often criticized Bill Janklow for working with Tom Daschle. On two occasions the Governor thanked the Senator for the work he did on behalf of South Dakota. Those times if my memory serves me were: during a State of the State address where the Governor thanked Senator Daschle for working on the Native American jurisdictional issue and subsequent State and Federal land exchange along the Missouri River and during a press conference concerning the devastating Spencer tornado.

Some extreme partisan Republicans were outraged that anyone would even utter Daschle’s name in a spirit in anything other than hate and outrage. They criticized Bill Janklow at every turn for his so called love of Tom Daschle. (Included in the howlers’ diatribes against Bill Janklow was the repeated message of Daschle’s good deeds. Ironically the complainers actually repeated the good news about Daschle far more that Janklow ever said anything about Tom Daschle.)

Of course there were many other issues the two worked together on but neither worried one way or the other about who got the credit. A large federal grant for the Boot Camp at Custer comes to mind where South Dakota received somewhat over one million dollars out of about nine million that was available under the program nationally. Janklow was always more about getting things done than getting credit.

Now that Senator Thune has joined forces with Tim Johnson to work together for the common good, are the extremists going to be as outraged against John Thune for working positively with Tim Johnson or hypocritically silent and show themselves to be nothing more than simply hateful people?