The producers who brought you Doggygate and the brouhaha over Al Gore's alleged claim that he invented the Internet are at work on a brand new project: the destruction of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Comments from a recent discussion thread on the right wing website FreeRepublic.com demonstrate the budding smear efforts: "Please help me flesh out various scandals that Daschle is involved in," writes one contributor. "There is something about his wife's employment I think that might be a conflict of interest. Maybe not," suggests another. (Daschle's wife, Linda, is a transportation lobbyist for the firm Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell.)

The website Spinsanity.com, which tracks and critiques political rhetoric, has been monitoring Daschle-bashing, recently noting a Washington Times article that mentions a "coordinated" attack on the senator by right-wingers. Thanks in part to Spinsanity, it's possible to trace many of the key motifs and rhetorical techniques in this spin war -- a project that reveals striking continuities across a range of different conservative media outlets.

Here is a short list of some burgeoning Daschle-bashing techniques:

"Puff Daschle"

This is Rush Limbaugh's moniker for the South Dakota senator; Limbaugh, wit that he is, also came up with "'Little Dick' Gephardt." From a spin perspective, Limbaugh's coinage is brilliant, equating Daschle with "Puff Daddy," the singer recently acquitted on weapons charges relating to a 1999 nightclub shooting. Not surprisingly considering its ad hominem nature, this nickname doesn't appear to have made its way into the mainstream media. But below the surface, on right wing websites like FreeRepublic and Newsmax.com, "Puff Daschle" has become a standard way of referring to the Senate majority leader -- not unlike "Slick Willy" as a nickname for Bill Clinton, or the venomous "Hillabitch" for Hillary Clinton.

Mt. Rushmore: Tom Daschle's Buddhist Temple

But the right doesn't just have nicknames for Daschle; it has scandal narratives-in-progress, stories that can be made out to seem shady when told the right way -- thus giving the impression that the Senate majority leader has an inclination for dirty dealings. So far, the most prominent of these involves a 1997 trip to the top of Mt. Rushmore for roughly 100 Daschle friends, supporters and campaign contributors. Regular tourists aren't allowed to make the climb, but the park's superintendent escorted Daschle's gang -- suggesting a special favor for donors.

In 1997 The Washington Post ran a story on the affair, and the paper's editorial page rebuked Daschle, though it also observed that "As such things go, the Daschle event may not have been any worse than the many similar festivities put on by his colleagues to raise money from people who want their ear." And then, at least for the moment, that was it for Rushmore-Gate. But on NBC's Meet the Press last May, shortly after Jim Jeffords' defection from the Republican Party, Tim Russert asked Daschle about the trip. He responded, "Well, I haven't done it since. And I'm disappointed that it was interpreted [as a reward for donors]. But to avoid interpretation, you're right. I've made mistakes. I admit them. I'll go on and try not to make them again."

This admission wasn't enough for the National Review Online, however. On June 1st, the site posted an anonymous note titled "Daschle's Rushmore Problem," which began: "Did Tom Daschle lie to Tim Russert on Meet the Press last Sunday? It certainly looks that way." The short article seized on Daschle's comment to Russert that "You can go to the top of Mt. Rushmore regularly. People do that almost every week. I'm sure they're doing it today." According to both The Washington Post and the National Review Online, this is not actually the case. Whether Daschle was lying to Russert about it is another matter, and the National Review Online's commentary doesn't come within miles of proving it.

Tom Daschle Wants to Poison Your Children

As early as last April, when Tom Daschle was the most visible elected Democrat but not yet Senate majority leader, Rush Limbaugh and the National Review's Rich Lowry also hit on another attack strategy. Last October, they noted, Daschle joined 18 other Democratic senators in voting to delay the Environmental Protection Agency's implementation of Clinton's proposed rules lowering arsenic levels in drinking water. But when the Bush administration suggested doing basically the same thing, Daschle upbraided the president.

It's certainly fair game to point out this contradiction. But the way Rich Lowry highlighted Daschle's re-positioning on arsenic was designed for maximum smear-effect: His National Review Online article was titled "Daschle's Love Affair With Arsenic," and subtitled "Does Tom Daschle enjoy poisoning the nation's children?"

Daschle fired off a letter to the National Review Online criticizing Lowry's rhetoric; in response, Lowry quibbled, but finally conceded the point: "I'm willing to admit that my accusation in last week's piece that Daschle wants to poison the nation's children was not serious, just a way to make a point." But what Lowry didn't admit was that the framing of his article helped create an easily recyclable Daschle trope: one that equates Daschle and poisoning children. (If Lowry knows what's best for his party, he might want to abandon this line of attack; it's President Bush who is associated with arsenic poisoning in the public's mind, and no amount of spin will undo that.) After his false apology Lowry immediately went on, introducing another key tactic in the spin war against Tom Daschle: "Daschle will never admit the same about his anti-Bush charges because . . . well, because partisan demagoguery is what he does for a living."

Tom Daschle, Ferocious Partisan

Lowry's labeling Daschle a "partisan" was a sign of things to come. After Jim Jeffords defected from the Republican Party and Daschle replaced Trent Lott as majority leader at the end of May, conservatives furiously seized on this word as an adjective to describe Daschle. Commenting in the National Review Online, John Fund, a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, observed:

There is much irony in Sen. Daschle ascending to the post of majority leader. He was elected to the Senate in 1986, and quickly became a protégé of George Mitchell, the most partisan majority leader of the last century. Mitchell delighted in throwing sand into the gears of George Bush's administration . . . Now his equally partisan protégé, Tom Daschle, will have the opportunity to bedevil a new president named Bush. Let's hope the younger, tougher, more conservative George W. has better luck maneuvering around a fiercely partisan Democratic Senate than his father did.

Fund appears to have liked his new epithet for Daschle quite a bit. Subsequently, a May 31st Wall Street Journal editorial termed the South Dakota senator, "the hyper-partisan Mr. Daschle." Strikingly, this was just words away from a May 24th op-ed by New York Times righty William Safire, which referred to "the ultra-partisan Tom Daschle." In newspaper reports around the same time, meanwhile, Daschle was dubbed a "partisan" by, among others, Republican Senators Pete Domenici and Rick Santorum and GOP operatives John Weaver and Ed Gillespie. Finally, a May 31st Republican National Committee press release made the whole strategy the official party line. Ironically, it was Jim Gilmore, the Republican Party's chairman (the most partisan post of all) who said, "I hope Senator Daschle leaves partisanship at the door as he assumes his new role as Majority Leader."

There's much thought behind this phrasing. Calling Tom Daschle "partisan" (or "ultra-partisan" or "hyper-partisan") is a clever strategy, for it is at once extremely negative and virtually irrefutable. (It is one of the media's conceits that partisanship is inherently evil, and bipartisanship -- regardless of the issue -- inherently good.) The charge is also utterly comic: The parties are virtually always at odds, each "partisanly" opposed to the other's positions. By definition, party leaders are partisans. But if Republicans are able to implement their strategy effectively, they can spin their position as the baseline and the Democrats' alternate position as the partisan one.

And it's not just the word "partisan." As Daschle-bashing grows and evolves, conservatives continually co-opt new negative adjectives to describe the Senate majority leader, according to Daschle staffers who have been monitoring attacks on their boss. "There's 'inflexible' and 'autocratic' now, and of course the always popular 'obstructionist'," says Daschle spokesperson Anita Dunn.

Tom Daschle, Illegitimate Usurper

Also around the time of the Senate switch, many conservatives began to label Tom Daschle's assumption of the position of Senate majority leader "illegitimate," arguing that the American public voted last November for a Republican-controlled Senate, making Jeffords' defection and Daschle's ascent a "coup." This Swiss-cheese logic can be easily debunked; for an extensive critique see a previous Rightwatch. What's more interesting about the argument, however, is its political lineage. Spinsanity traces the "illegitimacy" attack from its apparent origins with Rush Limbaugh to The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes, who repeated it on Fox News on May 24th. From there, the claim entered the political ether, repeated by Tucker Carlson on CNN's "Crossfire," as well as by The Wall Street Journal editorial page -- not to mention in a now-notorious memo issued by the outgoing Senate majority leader Trent Lott.

These five examples don't exhaust the only strategies out there for attacking Tom Daschle. They are only some of the most prominent so far, and it's hard to tell which, if any, will ultimately stick. But what's most striking about these approaches is how deliberate some of them seem.

Last year, in a revealing column, National Review founder William F. Buckley referred to an "off-the-record meeting of 20 right-wing editors, writers and diverse others . . . to inquire how enthusiastically should American conservatives labor for the election of George W. Bush." Are conservative pundits currently strategizing about ways of smearing Tom Daschle? Who knows. What's clear, though, is that quite a lot of them are working hard to jack up his negative ratings -- and that their constituents, who listen to Rush Limbaugh and post on FreeRepublic.com, are hungry for more.