Guess they’d rather hug Bush

Apparently Mr. Kerry isn’t a popular guy to be hanging around if you’re a Democrat in some states:

Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle hugged President Bush from one end of South Dakota to the other this summer. In his own campaign commercials.

The brief embrace might seem an odd claim on re-election for the man Republicans depict as obstructionist-in-chief for the president’s congressional agenda. But Daschle is one of several candidates with a common political problem as Democrats nurse fragile hopes of gaining Senate control this fall.

From the South to South Dakota and Alaska, they are running in areas where Bush is popular and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry not so much.

“The congressman is running his own race out here. … He’s not bringing any national people in,” said Kristofer Eisenla, spokesman for Democratic Rep. Brad Carson in Oklahoma, where Bush won 60 percent of the vote in 2000.

“The presidential race is largely separate” from Inez Tenenbaum’s campaign in South Carolina, said Adam Kovacevich, a spokesman for the Democratic candidate in another state Kerry has written off.

What to do, what to do?