"…not persuaded by pretty talk."

October 6th, 2006

As I’m off this afternoon to attend a local Democratic meet-up [and barbecue,]
I thought you might like to peek in on Pea Patch politics. I’ll let you know how the locals see it tomorrow — I’m thinking the Foley Follies will help the cause a good deal.

Jude

If GOP is in trouble, Missouri will reflect it
Senate race likely to mirror national view of Iraq war
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Sunday, September 24, 2006
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/24/MNGSSLBPJ11.DTL&hw=red states turning blue&sn=004&sc=350

Licking, Mo. — Deep in south-central Missouri, where wooded cattle farms mingle with Wal-Marts, Jesus billboards dot the highways, radio runs from Rush Limbaugh to Dr. Laura and carrying a concealed weapon is legal, a rebellion is brewing — against Republicans.

“I’ve been basically a Republican, but I don’t plan to vote for any Republicans this year because I’m so disillusioned with the Bush administration,” said Dan Hatch, a biology teacher and landowner who lives with his wife, Cookie, near this tiny speck of a town on Highway 63. “It was the rush into the war above all else.”

Even Hatch’s mother-in-law, Ruth Moloney, a widowed cattle farmer and loyal Republican whose husband fought in World War II, wonders about President Bush.

“Well, I wish he hadn’t got us into this war,” she said. “I’m really sorry that he did that, because I don’t know if it was necessary as far as terrorism goes. I think that man was awful hard on his people — Saddam — he was about like Hitler. But the way it’s turning out is awful.”

The best test of whether such sentiments will translate into Republicans losing their House or Senate majority in November is right here, in a toss-up Senate race that pits two smart, seasoned politicians — incumbent Republican Sen. Jim Talent and Claire McCaskill, Democratic state auditor and a former prosecutor — in a contest considered a barometer of whether Republicans can survive Iraq.

“This race is the purest test in the country of any tidal wave against Republicans in general, and President Bush in particular,” said Dave Robertson, a political scientist at the University of Missouri in St. Louis.

“As Missouri goes, so goes the nation,” agreed veteran political scientist and pollster Kenneth Warren of St. Louis University. “There’s no question the rural base has been eroded” for Republicans. “The fact of the matter is in Missouri, the Iraq war is not popular.”

Missouri is America’s mood mirror, a perfect reflection of North and South, West and East, black and white, cow towns and college towns, union halls and country clubs. It votes as happily for Democrats as Republicans — but nearly always for the winner.

Missouri has voted for every winning presidential candidate — including Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan — since 1900, with just one exception (it voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1956), and has done it by margins nearly matching the national vote. Bush’s vote here in 2004 was 0.1 percentage point off his national total.

Both Senate candidates reside in the wealthy St. Louis suburbs but are trying to erode each other’s strongest areas — McCaskill in the cities and Talent in the rural counties. Both are tacking hard to the middle.

A conservative in Washington, Talent presents himself as a moderate in Missouri. He seldom mentions that he’s a Republican, but is quick to note his collaboration with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, on a bill to curb methamphetamines. He is running polished new commercials aimed at African Americans that tout his efforts against sickle cell anemia.

Bush has made at least four private fundraising trips to the state for Talent, but Talent avoids Bush in public. Talent trumpets the war on terror, but not the war in Iraq.

He lines up squarely with Bush for what he calls “terrorist surveillance,” or domestic wiretapping, as well as Bush’s approach to interrogation methods and military trials.

“We’re fighting a transnational army of people who are out to get us, and we have to get intelligence in order to defeat them,” Talent said last week at a forum with McCaskill. “We need to be concerned first and foremost about the freedom and security of our own people rather than engaging in technicalities with regard to terrorists.”

As for Iraq, Talent said, “I’m supporting winning in Iraq.” He said setting a timetable to withdraw, as McCaskill would, “is another name for quitting.”

Truman Democrat
McCaskill, for her part, is campaigning in rural towns denouncing amnesty for illegal immigrants, supporting fences on the Mexican border and calling herself a Harry Truman Democrat standing with the troops but against Bush’s bungling in Iraq. She is as big a hawk as Bush on Iran, supports tax cuts for the middle class and denounces GOP spending.

“Fiscal responsibility has been on vacation in Washington for the past five years,” she said at the forum. “Earmarks are a new art form, and the idea that Republicans will balance the budget is a work of fiction.”

A quaint old feed mill just down the road from Licking in the small town of Houston sports a fresh barn-red coat of paint, paid for by the McCaskill campaign. Known as the old McCaskill Mill, it was once run by her family. She lived in Houston briefly as a child and used the mill as a backdrop for her campaign kickoff a year ago.

McCaskill admits that she lost her race for governor two years ago against Matt Blunt (son of Republican House Majority Whip Roy Blunt), by ignoring rural Missouri, counting instead on the bright blue blotches of Democrats bisecting the state, anchored by Kansas City in the west and St. Louis in the east, along with liberal Columbia, where smoking pot gets a $25 fine.

“I made a mistake,” she said of her 2004 race. “I think I’ve set a new record for anyone running for the United States Senate of admitting mistakes. But I think it’s a healthy thing to admit mistakes. I made a mistake in ‘04 and didn’t go out and listen to rural Missouri. I didn’t show them who I was and my values.”

Of Missouri’s 114 counties, 109 are rural, and they deliver nearly half of Missouri’s vote. McCaskill won eight of them in 2004. To win, she needs to chip two percentage points from the GOP’s 60 percent share in rural counties, while holding her urban base, Warren said.

The mill turns
But the latest redecoration of the old McCaskill Mill by its owner — the new red paint now showcases three big blue Talent signs — shows how tough a task she faces.

“She’s trying to make herself look like she’s from rural Missouri,” said Kevin McGowen, the 38-year-old chairman of the Texas County GOP in Houston. “She doesn’t have our values in mind.

She’s a big-city person with big-city values,” McGowen said. “Most people around here are smart enough to know when they’re about to get fooled.”

Asked about this, McCaskill replied, “I was raised in rural Missouri. My family taught me strong values, and frankly I think what happens in these political campaigns, unfortunately, is you get turned into a cartoon character.” With time, she said people will learn that “my values are about looking after them and their families, taking care of our neighbors. I think those are the kind of values that Missourians really like.”

McCaskill has been quiet about her abortion rights stance. Other hot-button social issues such as same-sex marriage also are absent from her campaign Web site. Asked whether her positions would alienate rural voters, she said, “I have principled stands on issues, and sometimes that will cost me votes. I don’t have to have every vote. But I do have to be principled.”

Both candidates are polished and quick on their feet. Neither exudes charisma on television. (They are scheduled to appear Oct. 8 on “Meet the Press.”) Both have won and lost statewide races.

Virtuous appearances
Talent has a money advantage and has been flooding the airwaves, but Warren said the race will come down to who will appear more virtuous. Here he gives Talent the edge.

Talent presents himself as more moderate and sensitive than his voting record demonstrates, Warren said.

But Talent also looks like the sophisticated suburbanite and University of Chicago law school graduate that he is. Unlike the folksy politicians who typically carry Missouri, he shows up at county fairs in loafers.

“He’s a real city slicker,” said Warren, who has known both candidates for years. To rural Missourians, he said, Talent “may say things they want to hear, but he doesn’t look like them, he doesn’t act like them, he doesn’t talk like them.”

Talent also is a freshman incumbent in an off-year election under an unpopular president who barely won his last race.

Political professionals in both parties say the race in Missouri, as elsewhere, will hinge on turnout. As across the country, Democrats are energized and many Republicans are soured. But Republicans contend their vaunted turnout machine still gives them the edge.

Tom Kuypers, a former Army lieutenant colonel and outgoing GOP chairman of St. Charles County, a prosperous northwestern suburb of St. Louis, rattles off battlefield statistics to demonstrate the efficiency of the Republican grassroots battle plan engineered by White House political czar Karl Rove.

Kuypers said he outmuscled the unions on the ground in 2004, fielding 700 door-to-door volunteers on election day against 200 from the AFL-CIO.

But Kuypers said he “was in kind of a downer mood” two months ago. Talent was trailing McCaskill in the polls, and Bush’s popularity was hitting new lows. But he said since Bush “has taken the bully pulpit, it’s made a big difference.”

Straight talk over coffee
Missouri’s political divisions were evident one morning at Nita’s Cafe in Houston, where Frank White, a print shop owner and local pastor, sat having breakfast with his wife, Pat.

Asked why he opposed McCaskill, White said, “Pro-abortion, against gun rights, stem-cell research, cloning. I can’t accept that. If you got a lot of time, you don’t have enough paper to write it down.”

A Vietnam War veteran, White is fatalistic about the war in Iraq. “The way they’re going about it bothers me,” he said. “If they keep it up the way they are, it’s going to be another Vietnam.” But that doesn’t mean he’ll vote for a Democrat. “Who we got to vote for other than Bush?” he said.

At a nearby table, retired steelworker Don Lavely declared he would never support Talent. “The Republican has never done nothing except hurt the working man, and Bush has done nothing for this country except mess it up.

“You sat down at a table with an angry American,” Lavely said. “Maybe these country folks can understand this: You get a killer dog out in the middle of a flock of sheep, they’ll stand there and let that dog kill every one of them and just wait their turn. Well that’s what Americans do. Stand there waiting for their turn to go broke.”

It is the war, however, that makes this fight such a heavy slog for Republicans.

Kuypers conceded, “Nobody is enthusiastic about the war.

“I’m not going to say we’re upbeat, for heaven’s sakes,” he said. “It’s committed. We support our troops, we believe what the president is doing is right, we see that you have to follow this thing through like Harry Truman.” Not seeing it through, he said, “would be criminal.”

Missouri at a glance
Missouri lies in the heart of the Midwest, surrounded by eight states and bordering the Mississippi River. Lewis and Clark began and ended their expedition here. Divided by the Mason-Dixon line, Missouri was a slave state but fought for the Union in the Civil War. Birthplace of former “the-buck-stops-here” President Harry Truman, it calls itself the “Show Me State,” meaning Missourians are not persuaded by pretty talk.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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