Anthrax spawns a political hero

A Capitol Hill police officer stands guard inside the empty Rotunda of the Capitol building Friday. Whereas hundreds of tourists would normally visit, Friday it was closed for the second consecutive day. All House and Senate office buildings were closed after 30 workers were exposed to the anthrax bacteria. PHOTO: REUTERS

Receiving an envelope full of anthrax is not normally construed as a piece of good fortune, but politics is a strange business, and these are strange times. The dominant figure of week six of the crisis has not been the president or one of his cohorts, still less a general or a heroic bomber pilot, but a senator who happened to respond to adversity with grace, style and a modicum of courage. This has been Tom Daschle's moment in the spotlight, perhaps not his last.

In the great scheme of things, anthrax may turn out to be a diversion: still only one person has died, a handful are infected, and over the past 48 hours, opinion seems to be swinging away from blaming Iraq and back toward the notion of a lone maniac with a grudge, a chemistry set and a diabolical sense of timing.

Yet the psychological effect has been devastating, at the very moment when the war began to seem sanitized and far away. By midweek the sense of fearfulness was, if anything, greater and more generalized than it was a month ago.

"What we have to do is not run away from these problems. ... We will not let this stop the work of the Senate." US Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, announcing that America's upper house would stay in session PHOTO: REUTERS

For the first time since Sept. 11, one sensed the administration beginning to lose its grip on the message. The effect of the bombing was less dramatic, its execution more accident-prone and its purpose harder to explain. President Bush kept telling people to go about their business and put that into practice by heading off to China as scheduled.

But, away from home, forced to confront other leaders on equal terms on subjects -- such as Taiwan and Tibet -- that the Americans would prefer to fudge, he seemed to shrink back to his old size. Next week he will doubtless jut out his jaw and take charge again but the week served as a reminder that the president's new status as a political colossus is still fragile.

It has, in any case, been hard to take the president's requests for normality seriously when his own vice-president, Dick Cheney, was not even allowed out in public for fear of terrorists. If the secret service cannot even protect Bush and Cheney, what hope do the rest of us have? Cheney's "secure location" has been about as near to a national joke as the country has got lately.

Standing firm

What has become clear from the start of this crisis is that Americans respond best to those leaders who stand firm and exude defiance. It worked spectacularly for Rudy Giulani right from the start, and for the president, once he gathered himself. Not everyone has learned the lessons. The daftest-looking people in America this weekend are the leaders of the House of Representatives, whose first response to the very thought of anthrax, even hundreds of yards away in the Senate, was to scuttle out of town. "WIMPS!" said the headline in the New York Post, one of the country's few terse newspapers, which ironically evacuated its own building yesterday in the latest anthrax scare.

The Senate, meanwhile, carried on. This did not mean much, with the offices closed, and it packed up early Friday anyway.

But the impression was vastly different. Republicans still control the House; Democrats run the Senate. However, the House decision was bipartisan and Richard Gephardt, the Democrat leader, was implicated as much as anyone.

In a sense, this is how the two bodies are meant to respond. Some constitutionalists took pleasure that the House, which is meant to be the flighty branch of the legislature, reacted instinctively, whereas the Senate did its job as the upper chamber by being cool, calm and deliberative.

Coming to the fore

But it was Daschle, as the Senate's majority leader, who set the tone, as the recipient of the poisoned letter and the man with most reason to run away. "What we have to do is not run away from these problems," he said. ?"We will not let this stop the work of the Senate."

And he was extravagantly praised yesterday in the rightwing Washington Times, which slapped down both the House leadership and Trent Lott, the Senate minority leader. "We are, we're told over and over, at war," said the Times. "If our enemies see our leaders running away at the first sound of the guns, it's all over but the formalities."

Since it seems futile to speculate what horror may be lurking round the corner, all this produced more traditional speculation.

Democrats are desperate to find a champion whose name is not Al Gore, and here was one staring them right in the face. Daschle manages to project himself as another of the Senate's open, honest farm boys, though he has actually worked in Washington since 1973. Constituents and colleagues like and admire him. He is increasingly authoritative in public. There are traditional prejudices in favor of tall presidential candidates from big states with the right religious affiliation. He is only 5ft 6in tall, comes from South Dakota and is a Catholic. None of this might matter if he really wants to be president deeply enough.

He does, however, have a few more enemies than he did 48 hours ago: all those House members who think Daschle ratted on them by theatrically staying put. War or no war, Washington is still Washington.