St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Claire McCaskill, Low-Profile? Nope.
March 11, 2007
By Ron Harris and Deirdre Shesgreen
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
WASHINGTON -- When Claire McCaskill arrived here with the rest of Congress in January, the freshman senator from Missouri told anyone who would listen that she was going to keep a low profile at first.
"I'm going to be a good backbencher (and) keep my head down," she said.
Those familiar with the Democrat's assertive personality rolled their eyes.
Two months later, McCaskill is in the spotlight as one of the leading voices in the national scandal surrounding the mistreatment of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at Walter Reed Hospital.
She and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., have introduced legislation to fix many of the problems associated with the facility as well as those at other military hospitals and to alleviate other issues confronting wounded veterans.
Meanwhile, the Senate last week passed McCaskill's compromise amendment giving the nation's 43,000 airport screeners the same union rights as members of the Capitol Police here and the nation's border patrol, but with special restrictions that McCaskill inserted into the bill to make it more palatable to critics.
And she was invited to join such political luminaries as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Hillary Clinton to speak before a prominent women's group.
With her newfound stature has come the media spotlight.
It was McCaskill on MSNBC calling for the resignation of Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army's top medical officer, for his role in the Walter Reed scandal.
It was video of McCaskill grilling Kiley during a Senate hearing last week that the NBC's "Today Show" chose to air.
She also has appeared on NBC News and Fox television. She has been quoted in the New York Times and USA Today. On Sunday, she's scheduled to appear on CBS' "Face the Nation."
Quiet, she has not been.
When reminded of her pledge, McCaskill confessed, "I've had a little trouble with that one."
"I have high energy and I'm passionate about things," she said. "It's not hard for me to get wrapped up and really engaged. And when that happens, I see an opportunity to make something happen, and I can't help myself but to try to make it happen."
'Not a maverick'
In a legislative body with egos the size of the Edward Jones Dome, a freshman mouthing off about who needs to be fired and proposing legislation on one of the hottest topics in town can be expected to have rubbed some of her fellow senators the wrong way.
Not so, said those around Capitol Hill.
"I haven't heard that at all," said a staff member for a ranking Republican senator. "She's not a maverick. She's been very collegial, very cooperative. You have to commend her for being out front as quickly as she was on Walter Reed."
The Obama-McCaskill bill has drawn support from Republicans such as Missouri Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond and Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau.
Observers say she hasn't ruffled political feathers because in the weeks since taking office, she has indicated that she will be paying her dues as a rookie.
"Her colleagues say she's focusing on learning how the Senate works and she's showing up at her committee meetings and doing the work," said Norm Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. "What matters here is you are expected to appreciate your colleagues, but most of all to show up and do the work. She's doing all the right stuff."
Steven Smith is a professor of political science at Washington University who has been watching the Senate since he was a doorman as a college student there in 1973. "This appears to be a senator who wants to develop a reputation as a serious legislator, a hard worker, someone who's knowledgeable about the issues, but not someone who is going to compete for the cameras," he said.
An example of why McCaskill's style goes down well with other senators is illustrated in how she and Obama came to co-sponsor the legislation regarding military hospitals.
After reading the stories in the Washington Post about the maltreatment of servicemen at Walter Reed, she wanted to see something done. "But I didn't think I could do this by myself," she said.
So, she ordered her staff that Sunday to see which other senators were working on the issue so she could be supportive, she said.
Her staff discovered that Obama, as a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, was preparing legislation, and they told his staff of their boss's interest. "He asked would I like to be a co-sponsor, and I said yes," McCaskill said.
At their news conference to announce the bill, Obama took all of the questions. Later, away from the cameras, McCaskill told a handful of reporters that she was sending a letter to the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff requesting the reassignment of the Army's surgeon general.
"I didn't want to step on Obama's press conference," she said.
McCaskill knows that her aggressive, often confrontational style might be off-putting. So, she's been careful, she said.
"I've gone to several senior members and I've said to them, 'Please tell me if I'm trying to do too much, if I'm crossing the line in terms of a freshman senator.' If people are resentful, no one has let me feel it yet."
Auditor's cap
When McCaskill arrived in Washington, she decided her best efforts could be directed at doing what she had done for the past eight years as state auditor in Missouri, looking for ways to root out waste and inefficiencies in government.
"The last thing Claire packed when she left Missouri and the first thing she unpacked when she arrived here was her auditor's cap," said Sean Kennedy, her chief of staff.
A member of the Armed Services Committee, she has grilled Defense Department officials -- in public hearings, private meetings, and sharply-worded letters -- about hiding unspent funds so they didn't have to be returned to the U.S. Treasury, and about evading competitive contracting rules.
She's been especially tenacious about a 230,000 square foot Army building outside of Washington, erected using operational money, instead of construction funds.
Armed with a General Accounting Office report, McCaskill took aim at Pentagon officials at a sparsely attended subcommittee hearing Jan. 17.
She began by telling her colleagues she's "so weird that GAO reports are fun for me."
Referring to the Army building, she asked: "Does somebody get fired when that happens? When you actually use money that's operational to construct a building and then try to say that you were just leasing a building?"
Her question prompted a quick tutorial from Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla.: "The senator from Missouri will learn that there's no such thing as firing a federal employee. Just doesn't happen."
But McCaskill pressed ahead. The next day, she was drafting letters to Defense and GAO officials asking how many times there had been prosecutions for violations of federal contracting laws and how many times someone had lost their job or been disciplined for such incidents.
"I'm not going to let go of this until somebody acknowledges that what they did was wrong ... and somebody is held accountable," she said.
McCaskill said she hopes that her questions at least will signal to federal contracting officials that someone is watching them.
"At a very minimum, the people who are in charge of acquisitions in various parts of the federal government are going to know that if an envelope arrives and my name is on the outside, it's probably not good news," she said. "These guys (are going to) start thinking 'You know, if we do this, McCaskill's going to notice it'."
'Slap On a Little Lipstick'
McCaskill's office set-up in the Senate's Hart building has progressed more slowly than her work.
When she arrived in December, she got a temporary basement office. Then in January, McCaskill and her aides were moved to a second temporary space where they are still housed — a cramped and inauspicious office, with an entrance located in an unmarked stairwell on the 8th floor.
But by the end of February, things had started to fall into place. She had hired 17 staffers for her Washington office — the maximum that would fit in her temporary quarters. And she had plans to hire another 3 or 4 when she moved into to her permanent office later this month.
For now, her often overwhelmed-looking crew occupies a set of wooden desks lined up in the L-shaped space. At the far end, McCaskill's own office has just enough room for her desk, a small couch, and a bookcase holding three dense manuals on Senate procedure and a book titled "Slap On a Little Lipstick — You'll Be Fine."
Assembling her life in Washington outside the Senate has been a little easier.
She bought a two-bedroom condo near the Capitol, big enough for her family to visit. She has a table but no chairs yet and a bed but no dresser. Most of her clothes are still in a cardboard box in the closet.
"I get there and it's time to go to bed, and I get up and leave," she said. "I think you could go six years with just a bed."
Adjusting to Claire
Just as McCaskill has had to adjust to Washington, so has Washington, particularly her staff, had to adjust to her.
Kennedy, who worked for 10 years for former Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-St. Louis, recalled how shortly after joining McCaskill's staff he prepared a one-page statement for her before a hearing. He advised her to stick closely to the statement.
"The rest of the staff looked at me for a minute and the just started laughing," he said. "She went to the hearing and left the draft on her desk."
McCaskill, who worked her way through six years of college and law school by waiting tables, is plainspoken and off-the-cuff, something considered a dangerous combination by many in a town where the message is usually carefully controlled.
"It's terrifying from the staff perspective because we don't know what she's going to say," Kennedy said. "But in the end, you realize she's a very smart woman who asks the right question at the right time."
Because of her style and the nature of politics, McCaskill expects to make mistakes.
"I'm not afraid to make them," she said. "You can't be a leader if you're afraid to take risks."
Blunder on pork
McCaskill's first political misstep came on what she had hoped would be a signature issue, ethics reform. Specifically earmarks, the pet projects lawmakers often slip into spending bills to benefit their home-states.
During the Senate ethics debate in mid-January, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., offered a proposal requiring disclosure of the sponsor, the price tag and the purpose of all earmarks. Most Democrats, including McCaskill and six other freshman, voted against the measure, earning the "Porker of the Month" award from a taxpayer watchdog group.
McCaskill said later that Democratic leaders had told them the amendment wasn't as strong as a Democratic version already in the bill; in fact, that bill included loopholes that would have allowed most secret earmarking to continue.
McCaskill and her freshman colleagues were upset and embarrassed. They told party leaders it had to be fixed.
A few days later, the Senate voted again on the issue and the tougher measure passed with McCaskill and others voting yes.
She said she has since decided that her office will not support earmarks unless they meet a set of guidelines that her staff is still developing.
"That does not mean I'm not going to fight for investment of federal dollars in Missouri," she said, adding that infrastructure, research and other projects would likely win her support. "But I'm not going to be participating in a process where certain groups get federal money just because they know the secret knock."
