Leadership Quote by Tom Daschle

A classic Daschle move: sound like you are saying almost nothing while quietly signaling you are tracking every ripple. "Two people" is deliberate flattening. He strips away party labels, ideologies, and ambitions and reduces the players to what matters in South Dakota politics: name recognition and standing in the community. "Well known" and "respected" are not compliments so much as credentials, a reminder that in a small-state ecosystem, reputation is its own currency and scandal travels faster than policy.

The real action is in the tense and the dodge. "We'll see" performs neutrality, but it is also a way of claiming authority without owning a prediction. Daschle positions himself as an insider-observer, the adult in the room, implying access to information while refusing to become the story. It's a politician's version of plausible deniability: he can later say he never endorsed, never condemned, never forecasted.

"How it all shakes out" adds a folksy shrug that masks a harder truth: outcomes are not just discovered, they're engineered. It hints at backroom endorsements, donor conversations, party pressure, and the quiet calculus of who can survive a primary, who can win a general, who can avoid embarrassing the state. The phrasing is intentionally frictionless, built to calm a nervous base and keep lines open to both camps. Respectability, uncertainty, inevitability: three soft words doing the work of a power broker.