Claire McCaskill’s balancing act: How to be a moderate in immoderate times
She’s here to win over Trump supporters
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Ben Terris.
Out in rural Missouri, Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) travels from town hall to town hall. But she isn’t here to go head-to-head with Trump supporters. She’s here to win them over.
“My job is not to fight the president,” she has been saying at town halls all over the state this summer. “My job is to fight for Missourians.”
A born-and-bred Missouri woman
She grew up in these parts, and knows how much that matters. As her mother lay dying in a hospital during the 2012 election cycle, she would constantly needle her daughter: “Are you spending enough time in rural Missouri?”
How to be moderate during immoderate times
After Trump’s election, populists in McCaskill’s party tried to grab the wheel and pull hard to the left. It was Bernie Sanders’s party now, they said, and good riddance to the insiders and horse-traders. Prominent Democrats started cursing in speeches, trying to harness the fires of liberal outrage that the president has been all too glad to splash with gasoline.
And yet here was McCaskill, the most endangered Democrat in the Senate, for whom “resistance” politics are a liability. A Democrat in Trump Country, the Missourian represents the oft-forgotten flank of the party’s two-year battle to reclaim Congress.
To hold the line, she is running as an experienced politician who, she’ll have you know, has been ranked as the least ideologically pure.
This approach makes her seem like a relic of a long-gone Washington, where flexibility and the art of reaching across the aisle were desirable traits in an elected official. Nowadays, seeking the middle can make a politician appear unwilling to take tough stands.
On this day, for example, hours after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called for Confederate statues to be removed from the Capitol, McCaskill wouldn’t say whether she agreed.
“I think Nancy Pelosi should decide who the statues are for California,” she said when asked by a reporter. “That’s a decision each state has to make.”
So what about monuments in Missouri?
“I think it should be up to each local community,” she said.
Is there a moral argument to keep them up or take them down?
“I understand why they cause pain,” she said. “I also understand why we always have to be reminded of the ugliness of our history, because it keeps us from repeating it.”
And if that sounds like a politician playing both sides — well, if McCaskill has any chance of pulling out a win in 2018, in a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump, she’ll need to rely on her razor-sharp political instincts about the place, and get a lot of help.
From both sides.
How she got here
McCaskill was never supposed to survive this long. Back in 2012, she faced a tough reelection challenge from John Brunner, a Republican hand-sanitizer magnate positioning himself as an outsider. Instead of firing full blast on him, she engaged in a bit of political jujitsu with a move she liked to call “Operation Dog Whistle”: She bought TV ads attacking Brunner’s GOP opponent, Todd Akin, as “too conservative for Missouri.” In a Republican primary contest, that amounted to an in-kind contribution.
McCaskill had reckoned Akin would be the easiest Republican to defeat, due to his hard-right stances and his propensity to say outlandish things.
She was right.
Shortly after Akin won his primary, he choked on his own foot, with an interview in which he maintained women who suffer a “legitimate rape” aren’t likely to get pregnant. It was, McCaskill says, “the most exciting” day of her political career.
Surely there’s a part of McCaskill — who’s spent a good chunk of her career beclowning boorish men — that wishes she could use the president as a similar foil.
While a member of the Missouri House of Representatives, the Senate majority leader called her a “whore.”
She used the opportunity to condemn “gutter speech,” earning a standing ovation from the House and — perhaps more important — some statewide name recognition.
In 2012, McCaskill was quietly thrilled when the loudmouthed Rush Limbaugh called her a “commie babe liberal.”
The attack made her look moderate by comparison and generated a flood of campaign contributions.
Of course, in today’s political circus, where the star of the scandalous “Access Hollywood” tapes is now the president, McCaskill isn’t so sure that “legitimate rape” would even qualify as a legitimate controversy. “It certainly wouldn’t be as noteworthy,” she said.
And despite her attack-dog reputation, McCaskill has long seen value in picking her battles. Early in her career, “I made a decision to laugh on the outside at all the sexual harassment,” she wrote in “Plenty Ladylike,” her 2015 memoir, “while on the inside I used those moments to amp up my determination and focus to succeed.”
Today, McCaskill may be making a similar calculation.
The best way to fight Trump is to win. And the best way to win, she seems to have decided, is to not fight Trump.
Winning over Trump supporters
At her appearances around the state, McCaskill seems more interested in talking about the price of hearing aids, bipartisan efforts to fix health care, or a bill she’s working on to provide aid to World War II veterans exposed to mustard gas, than she is in litigating the culture wars or talking about the president. It shouldn’t be surprising: Missouri has had trouble choosing sides ever since its residents fought for both the North and the South in the Civil War; today, it’s the swingiest of swing states, and the land of both Ferguson and Rush Limbaugh. McCaskill knows the importance of finding balance on terrain that’s liable to shift, and shift again.
Recently, McCaskill co-hosted a Kansas City roundtable about the risk of agro-terror with Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas. The two discussed their work to protect the nation’s food supply from biological attacks, and Roberts praised McCaskill as the person to call when you need to get things done.
As the event came to a close, a gaggle of news media members moved in, peppering the senators with questions about Trump’s latest controversies, among other things. Fortunately for Roberts, a member of the opposing party had armed him the perfect dodge.
“Well, you know, there was somebody, I think it was Senator McCaskill from Missouri who said it was not her job to really criticize the president,” he intoned. “It’s not mine, either.”
Standing by his side, McCaskill offered an exasperated smirk.
“It’s not exactly what I said,” she emphasized, then clarified: Her job was to fight for Missourians, but she reserved the right to criticize the president whenever she saw fit. She also reserved the right not to.
And so, she didn’t.
