Frist, Daschle seek to highlight poverty

Former Senate Majority Leaders Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) helped launch an initiative yesterday to raise awareness of global poverty in early-primary states.

The goal of the ONE Campaign’s new effort, ONE Vote ’08, is to mobilize primary voters “to make the fight against global extreme poverty a key foreign policy issue in the 2008 presidential election.”

{mosads}Frist and Daschle will co-chair the new non-partisan campaign, which plans to spend a minimum of $30 million on media and mobilization efforts in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina. According to the ONE Campaign, ONE Vote ’08 already has 72,000 people organized in those states.

“We will spend the next 18 months making sure that candidates hear [the] message — a message of great hope in the power of the United States to beat back global poverty and disease, to restore stability and security, and to be a shining example throughout the world,” said Daschle.

Frist added, “We’ve got to work together to increase awareness of these issues and raise their visibility in the upcoming presidential election.”