Leadership Quote by Tom Daschle

Daschle’s line is built to sound like a civic no-brainer while quietly staking out a partisan battlefield. “We must” does the heavy lifting: it frames election reform not as a preference but as a moral obligation, a move that pressures skeptics into seeming complacent about injustice. Then comes the deliberately roomy pairing of “problems and inequities,” a phrase engineered to collect grievances across the spectrum without naming a single villain. That vagueness is the point. In election politics, specificity is an invitation to be litigated; abstraction is a coalition.

The verb choice matters, too. “Conduct and decide elections” spans the whole pipeline: access (registration, ID rules, polling locations, wait times) and outcomes (counting, recounts, adjudication). It’s a rhetorical umbrella that signals seriousness about both the front-end experience of voting and the back-end legitimacy of results. You can hear the post-2000 subtext: after a razor-thin presidential race decided by courts, not voters, Democrats in particular leaned into a language of procedural fairness that doubles as a legitimacy argument. If the system can be shown to be inequitable, then outcomes become politically contestable without sounding like sour grapes.

Daschle, a Senate leader during an era of tight margins, is also speaking to institutional power. “Correct” implies technocratic repair work, not revolution, which reassures moderates while still opening the door to structural changes: federal standards, voting technology upgrades, expanded access, or tighter oversight. The line’s genius is its ambiguity: it invites listeners to supply their own “inequities,” then enrolls them in a shared imperative to fix them.