This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 2, 2012 - When U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill was growing up, her parents required that their children “watch the evening news before we sat down for dinners.“
“We’d talk about it at the dinner table,’’ McCaskill explained, while emphasizing wryly that “this was back in the day when you got straightforward news from Huntley/Brinkley or (Walter) Cronkite."
After lamenting the partisan news now on much of cable, McCaskill added that the point of her parents' mandate was that “I was exposed to the notion that caring about the world around you, and something more than just your family and your friends, is an important part of being an American."
The future prosecutor/auditor/politician also learned something else about herself, she observed with a chuckle: “My parents always said I was happiest when I was arguing.”
At 59, McCaskill has spent a lot of her adult life arguing: in court, in the state Capitol and in Congress. And not all of her targets were Republicans. Some have been fellow Democrats.
“I don’t please everybody,” is often one of her favorite lines. So is, "I'm not afraid of compromise."
McCaskill’s toddler years were spent in rural Missouri, but she grew up primarily in mid-Missouri, where her father served as state insurance commissioner under then-Gov. Warren Hearnes, a powerful Democrat. Her mother, Betty Ann McCaskill – a frequent feature in her daughter’s TV ads – was the first woman elected to the City Council in Columbia, Mo.
McCaskill attended college and law school at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and admits that even then her dream was to become Missouri’s first woman governor. At first, that appeared to be her chosen path.
By 1982, McCaskill was living in Kansas City and had won election to the Missouri House. She got married two years later, and soon was a mother of three as well as a legislator. (She was the first woman in the Missouri General Assembly to give birth while holding office.)
McCaskill left the General Assembly at the end of 1988 and considered various political options before she successfully ran for Jackson County prosecutor in 1992. While attracting headlines for various criminal cases, she also found her public and private life becoming news in 1994 news when her then-husband, David Exposito, was arrested for possession of marijuana. A year later, the couple was divorced. (He was murdered in 2005.)
McCaskill won re-election as prosecutor, and soon after set her sights on a return to Jefferson City. She opted to run for state auditor in 1998, despite some party concerns because she was a lawyer, not an accountant.
McCaskill became enmeshed in a nasty primary fight with St. Louis Alderman Steve Conway (an accountant), who sued her at one point over some of McCaskill’s accusations. McCaskill won anyway.
McCaskill then went on to defeat Republican Chuck Pierce, who also brought up the issue that she wasn't an accountant. That election year, 1998, saw then-Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, a Republican, defeat his Democratic rival, Jay Nixon, then the state's attorney general.
As state auditor, McCaskill became known for her “performance audits’’ in which her staff’s probes went beyond the standard how-the-money-was-spent audits for which the office had traditionally been known. She also married successful businessman and developer Joseph Shepard in 2002.
In 2004, McCaskill did indeed run for governor – challenging the fellow Democrat who held the job, Bob Holden, in a contest that had been discouraged by many Democratic insiders.
McCaskill accused Holden of being too politically weak to survive the expected onslaught from Republicans who already had taken control of the state House and Senate and regularly battled with Holden.
McCaskill defeated Holden in the August 2004 primary and swiftly reorganized the state party – including installing a new chairman – as she took on the GOP nominee, then-Secretary of State Matt Blunt.
Blunt won, thanks in part to a successful last-minute ad blitz that attacked Shepard’s business dealings. McCaskill also publicly blamed the unexpected last-minute withdrawal of the national Democratic Party’s field staff in the state, after then-presidential nominee John Kerry determined he couldn’t carry Missouri. Kerry lost the state by about 225,000 votes to then-President George W. Bush; McCaskill lost to Blunt by 81,000 votes.
During her campaigns, and while holding statewide office, McCaskill -- a Catholic -- confronted some differences with church leaders because of her general support for reproductive rights.
At the encouragement of party leaders, McCaskill agreed to run for the U.S. Senate in 2006 against Republican incumbent Jim Talent. The two waged a vigorous contest, which centered in part on the unpopular war in Iraq and who would be best at overseeing military spending.
But the battle also got enmeshed in social issues, since the 2006 ballot also featured Amendment 2, a proposal to protect in Missouri all stem-cell research allowed under federal law. Talent sided with religious conservatives against the measure. McCaskill backed it and brought in actor Michael J. Fox – a stem-cell research advocate who suffers from Parkinson’s disease – as well as entertainer Willie Nelson.
McCaskill defeated Talent by about 49,000 votes.
In the Senate, she has focused much of her time on military contracting and veterans issues, often citing her father’s tenure in World War II. As she called for in her 2006 campaign, she has headed a panel overseeing military contracts -- especially those in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and says that finding fiscal abuse has been "like shooting fish in a barrel."
She also took a political risk in 2008 by becoming an early supporter of fellow-Sen. Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency. During that first campaign, she often was among his most visible surrogates.
That role has made her a magnet for praise and pummeling, from Democrats and Republicans, especially as the president's political stock has gone up or down. McCaskill has sought during the past three years to emphasize her policy differences with the president, while also acknowledging that she does support his re-election.
She also has highlighted her right-in-the-middle No. 50 rating from the nonpartisan National Journal, which annually ranks members of Congress, based on their votes, from the most liberal to the most conservative.
McCaskill also may have taken some lessons from her political past, while also being upfront about how her political life hasn’t exactly gone by plan.
In a commencement speech at Mizzou a few years ago, McCaskill publicly acknowledged her unfulfilled goal to be Missouri’s first woman governor.
But she added that, regardless of what happens in the future, she’s pleased to be in Missouri’s history books as the state’s first woman to win election to the U.S. Senate in her own right. There's no argument.
