Kevin A. Roberts
Claire McCaskill’s twitter bio opens, “Former bunch of stuff including Senator from Missouri”—and her critics use that record against her. She lost, some say. How dare she advise a centrist strategy for the presidential election when her own centrist strategy failed. The sharpest retorts came from progressives when she remarked, after the second Democratic presidential debate, that moderate candidates were right to be wary of Green New Deal job guarantees and promises of Medicaid coverage for anyone who crossed the border. “What I think [Rep.] Tim Ryan was trying to express is a bucket of cold water, which is reality about where America is,” she said on MSNBC, warning that moving that far to the left would lose the votes of many Midwesterners. She was promptly called clueless and accused of issuing “a racial dog whistle.” But criticism doesn’t daunt McCaskill; she has weathered public service as prosecutor, state rep, state auditor, and first female U.S. senator elected in Missouri. She cheerfully tackled some of the least sexy projects in government—highly technical and in-the-weeds financial stuff, overspending, cybersecurity, even the ridiculously high cost of hearing aids. Crisscrossing the center line, she wound up too conservative for many liberals and too liberal for many conservatives. A convert to Catholicism, she was denied Communion for her pro-choice stance. A fierce advocate for women’s rights, she caught flak for sounding dubious about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s inexperience. McCaskill shrugged it all off: “My grandmother once told me, “If you aren’t making somebody mad, you aren’t getting anything done.” Now a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC, she is enjoying the freer role of pundit, and she intends to use some of her new free time to help Missouri candidates she thinks can save the state.
You actually campaigned—subtly and successfully—to become your high school’s prom queen, building a constituency with lots of tiny kindnesses. Was the political acumen instinctive? Part of it was, and part was the role model of my mother, who never met a stranger. Even though as a kid I was embarrassed by my mother’s outgoing nature, she showed me that you can find friends in every nook and cranny of the world.
Had you been shy before that? Oh, I don’t think anybody would ever call me shy. I got the nickname Motormouth McCaskill in fifth grade. My parents were so convincing in their belief that I was magnificent that they gave me a great deal of confidence. Not that they didn’t call me down when I did something inappropriate, but they certainly made me believe that I was capable of anything.
What’s the worst thing you did as a kid? I was 10 or 11, and I’d found my dad’s stash of Playboy magazines in a box in the garage. I charged kids in the neighborhood a dime apiece to look at them.
Last Election Day, you told reporters, “I have no flipping idea what’s going to happen tonight.” You tend to speak in your own voice. When, in public life, is that hardest to do? When you know it’s going to hurt people. And when you know that some of your opinions are so different from a large part of your constituency. In the early days of gay rights, it was hard for me. I finally just decided to tear off the Band-Aid and say what I really believed, which is that we should never look at someone differently based on who they love. It was difficult in some of the immigration issues, too: I believe immigrants have been the strength of this country, nothing to fear or be mad at. And it was hard within my own party, when I was more conservative.
Is a centrist position even possible anymore, or are we too polarized? Well, it certainly has atrophied. The muscles have gotten flabby in the middle. People now can choose to be in an echo chamber and never figure out what the other side thinks. Once people get used to doing that, there’s no political win for being able to compromise. The only political win many politicians see is being strong at the extreme.
Politically, were you a victim of Missouri’s shift from blue to red? First of all, I would never characterize myself as a victim. What we had going for us in 2018 was a well of enthusiasm on our side of the equation, as a result of some of the antics of Donald Trump. When [Supreme Court Justice Anthony] Kennedy resigned, I had a sinking sensation that was going to be the mechanism that would ultimately wake up the Trump voters in Missouri, and I was right. It wasn’t my vote on [Brett] Kavanaugh that was problematic as much as it was the spectacle around confirmation. It was not pretty. And I was of Washington; therefore it was easy for my opponent to make me part of the problem. Then Mitch McConnell did something very smart: He convinced Trump to focus on Missouri and Indiana. So you had the optics of the caravan, the optics of the Kavanaugh hearing, and Trump camping out in Missouri. It was those three things that leveled the enthusiasm. The notion that Democrats weren’t showing up for me because I was too liberal was complete bullshit.
Your opponent also hinted that your 38 years of experience were a liability. You know, if you get wheeled into an operating room and they say, “We have really good news: This surgeon has never done this before,” you’re going to say, “Back up the gurney.” Government is the one place where experience is a negative. We did a focus group, and one woman said, “She’s smart, and she works hard, and she does town halls, and she speaks her mind.” I’m thinking, Great! Then, at the end, she said she wasn’t going to vote for me: “She’s been there long enough. She’s had her chance.” That was a punch to the solar plexus.
Back to the blue-red shift—why do you think it happened? When I first came to the legislature, we had lots of Democrats in rural Missouri, but many of them were pro-gun, many were anti-choice, many didn’t support gay rights. A chasm has opened up between the rural and urban areas of our state. There’s a sense in the rural areas that people in the urban areas don’t get it. And there’s a sense in urban areas that rural voters are voting against their own economic interests.
President Trump signed bills on net neutrality and pharmaceutical information that you co-sponsored. Are there other times you’ve agreed with him? Well, I don’t disagree that NAFTA needed to be updated. I’m not sure they got much done there in terms of what was produced. He says he wants to lower prescription drug prices, but they haven’t done anything. I certainly agree that our country is woefully behind on infrastructure investment—it’s really going to diminish our economic power—and he’s talking a good game on that…
What’s your overall take on his presidency? I think what scares me the most is that he’s normalizing aberrant behavior for a president of the United States. Presidents used to get in trouble for lying. This guy lies like other presidents have brushed their teeth. He has a tortured relationship with the truth.
What was it your daughter said that persuaded you to back Barack Obama? You asked earlier when I’ve been afraid to speak my mind. I was afraid then, and she verbalized it. She said, “Mom, as long as I can remember, you’ve told us that the reason you can’t be as available at times is because you’re trying to do the public good. You’ve always made it sound so noble. And the only reason you are not supporting Barack Obama is that you’re afraid it’s going to hurt you politically. It has nothing to do with the good of the country.” She was right. The next day I called him and said, “I’m ready.”
“The only political win many politicians see is being strong at the extreme.”
Any criticism of Obama’s presidency? I used to tease him and say, “You have to eat your spinach. You have to call and schmooze senators.” Back-slapping’s an important part of being successful, and he just didn’t like it. There’s a long list of things he did well, but he kind of sucked at the back-slapping part, and as a result, people saw him as arrogant. If you knew him well, he was anything but.
Of what accomplishments are you proudest? Starting one of the first drug courts in the country, as a prosecutor, back in the early ’90s. I took a lot of heat—but the people who were most opposed to it in the beginning came around. Therapeutic courts work.
You also worked hard on contracting at the Pentagon. That got very little attention, because it was complicated and not sexy, but we really dug into it, and billions of dollars were saved. There are some elected officials who are kind of sleazy and try to take advantage of taxpayer money—there’s a group who always go to the Paris air show, and I mean, give me a break—but the real waste is in contracting. So we labored hard on that, and it wasn’t because there were cameras.
What percentage of legislators roll up their sleeves when the cameras aren’t rolling? They’re usually the ones you don’t see on TV. Chris Coons works hard. Susan Collins. But I don’t know that I’d want to put a percentage on it—people are already down enough on Washington!
You were the first elected female senator from Missouri, one of only 16 women in the Senate that term. You’ve seen at least a few things change? When I started as a prosecutor, it was still legal in Missouri to rape your wife, and victims had no role at sentencing hearings. I’ve worked hard on sexual assault issues—it is a heartbreaking crime and still massively underreported. I do think we’ve begun to turn the corner in terms of women feeling comfortable in coming forward.
You served on the Homeland Security committee. What did you learn? The interesting thing is why I got on that committee. It used to be the Governmental Affairs Committee, before 9/11, and they just globbed homeland security onto it. So it has the most jurisdiction over government of any committee, and it is the home of the Truman Committee, the permanent home of congressional investigations. I came to the Senate as such a fangirl for Harry Truman, and I also realized it wasn’t one of the sexy committees everybody was trying to get onto, so I could probably move up in seniority more quickly. What did I learn? I learned that the Homeland Security [Department] is a mess. It was cobbled together quickly, and it’s a big jumble, responsible for everything from tornado relief to the border to patting you down at the airport. To this day, I don’t believe anybody who runs that agency can tell you how many contractors they have working for them versus employees. The morale’s always low. It’s suffered from a lack of continuity because of the changing priorities of political leadership at the top. It was put together with masking tape and chewing gum, and it’s the agency in most need of constant oversight and vigilance.
What’s a recurring tension in your life? Making sure I managed my family and the responsibilities of being a mother, especially the years that I was a single mom, with the guilt I felt about how driven I was in my career. But I’m grateful for that guilt: It’s kept me focused on staying very close to my children and my entire family and now our large blended family. They will ground me and keep me sane and lift me in ways I don’t realize. So I’d better pay attention.
Any chance you’ll run for office again? No, I’m done. I’m really done. Frankly, I feel guilty that I’m so happy. I honestly didn’t realize how hard I was grinding until it stopped, and the freedom is exhilarating. I hadn’t had the ability to control my schedule since I was in my twenties. I do want to help others, though; I don’t want to turn my back on candidates in Missouri I think are viable, particularly at this moment. Jefferson City is embarrassing. The legislature is Neanderthal.
Do you ever feel like this nation’s experiment in democracy is imploding? Talk to me after 2020. If this country re-elects Donald Trump, it’s going to be very troubling, but I don’t think they will. This isn’t a partisan thing—there’s a reason the Bush family is a little aghast. Ronald Reagan would have been, too. But if we recover from this, I think we’re going to be fine. We have a rule of law in this country that is the envy of the rest of the world, and that has not been compromised.
If you could make one systemic change? Compulsory voting. They have it in Australia. With that, you would make early voting available and open up the process, allow voting at various places. The notion that Missouri required me to have a notary public to vote absentee when I was going to be in Washington—it’s so stupid.
What have 38 years in public life revealed about human nature? That there is too often a tendency to believe the negative, to go to the dark side. Why? I think it’s frustration in people’s own lives. Things aren’t going as well as they could be, and that makes it easy for them to be angry and cynical.
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”? Oh, the constituency for the middle is there; it’s just quiet. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: The less you compromise, the less likely it is that important things get done, and the less that gets done, the more cynical people become and the more likely they are to elect more extreme people. So which came first, the failure to compromise, or the polarization? They feed off each other.
