Election Guide News, voter information MARK WAITE / PVT Tom Daschle, former U.S. senator and co-chairman of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, speaks to the faithful at Red Sky barbecue Saturday. Advertisement

Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, of South Dakota, downplayed Republican fears about the unbridled power of a Democratic president and Congress during a stopover in Pahrump Saturday.

Daschle, who is a national co-chairman of the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, sought to energize volunteers canvassing voters on the final weekend of the campaign at Democratic Party headquarters, before speaking over lunch at Red Sky Barbeque.

Daschle seemed to relish his role in the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign, after he was dethroned from his leadership position in the Senate in a close 2004 race to John Thune, R-S.D.

"Hopefully the level of cooperative work that can get done between the legislative branch and executive branch, to a certain extent is favorably effective when the same party controls both, which you realy have in a parliamentary system. The same party runs the government," Daschle said.

"That's in essence what we're doing now, is you have a real possibility of a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress working to enact their agenda. But I think it would be a big mistake if they did it without the participation and cooperation of Republicans. We've got to build bipartisanship regardless of who controls Congress and the White House, and that will be a major job to build the bipartisan spirit and environment."

Fears of a Democratic triumvirate of a President Obama with Speaker of the Houser Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., are unfounded, he said.

Democrats regained control as the majority party in Congress in November 2006, while Obama was leading in the polls to win the presidency Tuesday after eight years of Republican rule under President Bush.

"First of all, really you got a pretty strong Republican presence in the Senate. You need 60 votes to do anything. But secondly, Barack has made a pretty clear promise that he's going to do all that he can to create a bipartisan consensus and bipartisan environment in which to work," Daschle said.

"I find it ironic that the Republicans are now talking about the dangers of a completely Democratic Congress and White House when they've had a Republican Congress and a Republican White House at the same time, and you haven't heard any concerns about that."

During his speech to diners, Daschle told Democratic Party volunteers the way to preserve the republic is to fight for it as a million soldiers have done, or to persuade that last vote. He read off the litany of economic problems facing Americans during this election.

"This is a very difficult time. The number of foreclosures in Nevada is the highest in the country. The unemployment rates are going up all over. People are more and more anxious andlast year there were more bankruptcies because people didn't have health care than for any other reason," Daschle said.

Americans have survived and fluorished because of good leadership, Daschle said, rattling off the names of presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. But he said America won't be a great country unless there's universal access to health care for everyone.

Before he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August, Daschle said he did some research and found out the last time Democrats had their convention in Denver was exactly 100 years ago, in 1908.

Daschle hopes the Democratic nominee this year doesn't suffer the same fate as their flagbearer in 1908, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, who lost his third and last three presidential race that year. One hundred years ago, Bryan, known as "the Great Commoner," whose platform included breaking up the big, corporate trusts, lost to President William Howard Taft.