Pubdate: Sat, 17 Jul 2004
Source: Kansas City Star (MO)
Copyright: 2004 The Kansas City Star
Contact:  http://www.kcstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/221
Author: Kit Wagar

MCCASKILL RUNS ON AMBITION, FRUSTRATION

After 22 years as a tough-on-crime legislator, a lock-'em-up prosecutor and
a state auditor who redefined the job, Claire McCaskill finds herself
campaigning for governor as an outsider. Her bid to knock off Gov. Bob
Holden in the Aug. 3 primary has Democrats doing a lot of soul searching.
They must choose between a steady but low-key governor who has fought for
Democratic interests and a forceful, charismatic state official who said she
offered the best chance to beat the Republicans in November. For McCaskill,
the campaign is about avoiding the stalemate of the last two years, when
name-calling became the principal form of negotiation between the governor
and Republican legislative leaders. "One of the biggest problems we have in
Jefferson City now is that everybody is more focused on winning than on
getting the problems solved," McCaskill said. "The Republicans have been so
focused on winning the governor's office that they have been irresponsible.
"I think the governor has been so anxious at times to appear strong that he
has wanted to use the Republican legislature as a foil in order to prop up
his image as being strong and decisive.

Unfortunately, in that stew, we haven't made any progress," she said. Fueled
by a mix of ambition and frustration with the status quo, McCaskill said
bluntly that she could do a better job than anyone else in the race.
Standing on principle is good, she said of Holden, but a governor must be
able to get things done - no matter who controls the legislature. Her
detractors, however, said McCaskill had a tendency to exaggerate her
accomplishments and her ability to solve problems.

Holden goes out of his way to avoid criticizing McCaskill directly.

His supporters complain that McCaskill is an opportunist willing to split
the Democratic Party in a quest to satisfy her ambition. "Claire doesn't
work with her own party," said Rep. Mike Sager, a Raytown Democrat. "How is
she going to work with Republicans?" McCaskill said working with any
legislature was an issue of leadership. The governor, she said, must choose
to push for priorities, such as better highways, and must know where state
government falls short. At campaign stops, she often compares her experience
as a prosecutor and state auditor with the background of likely Republican
nominee Secretary of State Matt Blunt. She ridicules Blunt's pledge to
commission a top-to-bottom review of state government the day he becomes
governor. "I can walk in on day one and start implementing dozens of audits
to save taxpayers money," McCaskill said. "I won't need studies or task
forces or commissions to tell me what to do." Audits ignored Perhaps
McCaskill's biggest frustration is that so many of her audits recommending
ways to improve efficiency, save money or better-serve the public have been
ignored.

A simple requirement that school districts make bond firms offer competitive
bids could save schools millions of dollars, she said. "We have forced some
change," McCaskill said. "But my sense of urgency for this race is the body
of audit work that is out there and should be implemented. As governor, you
can do things.

You don't have to hope that someone else does." Those audit findings are a
road map for McCaskill's campaign.

She has focused on the need to protect funding for public schools and to
direct more money into classrooms by offering incentives to reduce waste and
administrative costs.

She pledged to boost funding for higher education each year. Her campaign
reflects a history of promoting new approaches to public policy at the state
and local level. McCaskill, who turns 51 this month, was an assistant
prosecutor in Jackson County who distinguished herself as the county's first
full-time prosecutor of arson-for-profit schemes.

Her approach was typically straightforward. "The more cases you file and the
more you pursue, it's amazing how many more you can get convictions on," she
said in 1981. She served three terms in the Missouri House, where she
championed laws to protect victims of domestic violence, to lengthen prison
sentences for violent criminals and to help the city deal with derelict
housing. McCaskill served two years on the Jackson County Legislature, where
she was especially critical of the county's drug enforcement efforts and
financial problems in the prosecutor's office.

When she called for an audit of the prosecutor's use of anti-drug tax money,
then-Prosecutor Albert Riederer criticized the audit.

He said McCaskill "will sacrifice anybody or anything for (her) political
interests." The audit, however, found that a third of the computers
purchased were not being used to fight drug offenses. In 1992 she ran for
Jackson County prosecutor and won, replacing Riederer as the county's top
legal officer. In that role, she benefited from a national crackdown on
crime, and crime rates dropped throughout her tenure.

She acquired a reputation for a no-nonsense approach, and the office began
to reflect her personality. McCaskill focused on repeat offenders and
boasted that her office sent nearly 1,000 people to prison in a year. She
began charging people accused of beating their spouses under state law,
which carried stiffer penalties than city ordinances. She also started a
drug court that emphasized putting first-time offenders in treatment rather
than in prison and won national recognition for her efforts. McCaskill cited
the drug court as an example of her ability to identify a problem, then work
with multiple agencies to come up with a solution. "Police would catch these
minor drug offenders, they would spend 10 minutes in jail, and then they
would be out stealing again and living on welfare," McCaskill said. "We set
up drug court so they would get off drugs, get a job and, if they completed
the program, they got a clean start.

If I just wanted to lock everybody up, I wouldn't have put together a
program like that." In 1998, McCaskill ran for state auditor, promising to
expand beyond financial audits into audits of agencies' performance. "A
financial audit is to figure out whether the money's in the right drawer,"
McCaskill said at the time. Performance audits "figure out whether or not
the money's going down a rat hole." She has followed through, issuing 670
audits on topics ranging from abuses at dog-breeding operations to
questionable use of adoption tax credits.

She documented mismanagement in the St. Louis School District and conducted
a groundbreaking audit of the state Sunshine Law. The audit found that
nearly half of the local governments studied routinely violate the law that
gives the public access to government records. Critics accuse McCaskill of
sometimes exaggerating her audit results.

When she called the state's drug subsidy program for senior citizens a
"Band-Aid applied to a cancer," Lt. Gov. Joe Maxwell was outraged.

Maxwell, who supports Holden, said her criticisms "not only embellish the
audit, they are downright false." An outspoken politician Even her critics,
however, find little fault with her approach to public policy. She combines
a liberal stance on social issues with a long record of being tough on crime
and a fierce critic of government waste. Rep. Marsha Campbell, a Kansas City
Democrat who supports McCaskill's campaign, said McCaskill's great strength
was her desire to know all the facts before making a decision. "She doesn't
like yes-men," Campbell said. "She likes people who rock 'n' roll, who
scream and yell. She listens and really wants to know the upside and the
downside.

And she makes decisions issue by issue.

If I made my case and I lost, she still wanted to hear my side on the next
issue." Over the years, the toughest criticism has focused on McCaskill's
personal life and her political ambitions.

While exploring a campaign for prosecutor in early 1988, McCaskill missed 40
percent of the votes in the Missouri House. In 1994, McCaskill's then
husband, David Exposito, was caught smoking a joint at a riverboat casino
and was busted for possessing a small amount of marijuana. McCaskill, who
was in California at a prosecutors' convention at the time, never ducked a
question. "It's going to take about a month before I can resist the urge to
kill him," she said. The following year, they were divorced. That blunt
approach to problems, whether personal, political or involving public
policy, has become her trademark. David Webber, a political scientist at the
University of Missouri-Columbia, said McCaskill needed to showcase that
ability to deal with problems when she meets Holden in two debates scheduled
Monday in Kansas City and Tuesday in St. Louis. McCaskill, he said, has to
perform a difficult balancing act. She has to show that she is a stronger
leader than Holden without coming across as an overly ambitious politician
just slinging mud, Webber said. McCaskill said she wanted people to judge
her on her record. "I want people to decide, if they were hiring a governor,
who they would want in that office," McCaskill said. "If they look at my
resume and look at my job performance, I think they'll elect me."

Profiles of Republican and Libertarian candidates for governor will run next
week. Claire McCaskill and Gov. Bob Holden will debate from 7-8 p.m. Monday
at City Stage in Union Station. To read Holden's profile, go to
www.kansascity.com.

Claire McCaskill

Age: 50
Residence: Ladue
Education: Bachelor's degree in political science, May 1976; law degree,
December 1977, University of Missouri-Columbia.
Public service: Missouri House, 1983-1988; Jackson County legislator,
1991-1992; Jackson County prosecutor, 1993 to 1998; Missouri state auditor,
1999-present
Endorsements: Labor groups, including Teamsters and Laborers International;
Jackson County Committee for County Progress; Kansas City Women's Political
Caucus.
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