It’s a clear, sunny day as the little twin engine Beechcraft Baron flies straight into an unrelenting wind, bouncing and jostling its passengers for more than an hour.
As she skims the morning’s newspaper, Jean Carnahan is serenely unaffected by the heavy turbulence and the noisy drone of the plane’s machinery.
Setting aside the paper, Carnahan leans her head back and closes her eyes.
It was just a year and a half ago when her husband, then-Gov. Mel Carnahan, son, Randy Carnahan, and campaign aide, Chris Sifford, were killed in a small- plane crash while trying to reach a Senate campaign event in New Madrid, down in the state’s boot heel.
And it was just 22 days after the crash that Missourians made history by electing a dead man to the United States Senate, in the process ousting an incumbent, Republican John Ashcroft, whose consolation prize was selection by President Bush to run the Justice Department.
The acting governor, Democrat Roger Wilson, appointed Jean Carnahan to take over her husband’s job in the seat once held by former President Harry Truman.
Now, this 68-year-old grandmother of two, who had never before held elective office, is asking the voters to elect her in her own right based on her very brief record in office.
The outcome of the 2000 Senate race outraged many in the GOP, setting up the new senator for intense scrutiny and a guaranteed battle to serve out the remaining four years of the six-year term.
Her likely opponent is Republican Jim Talent, a former congressional wunderkind who began his career in politics at 28, when he was elected to the Missouri House. Although he is the party favorite, the conservative Talent, now 45, faces four other Republicans in a primary on Aug. 6.
For whoever wins, the challenge will likely be figuring out how to run against a woman who has suffered — and suffered so publicly and unremittingly. Less than a year after losing her husband and son, Carnahan was inside her family’s farmhouse in Rolla when lightning struck, burning it down.
Republicans say that Carnahan doesn’t have sufficient experience. And they say she is wrong on issues ranging from the economy to election reform to the nomination of Ashcroft for attorney general, which she voted against.
With the Democrats holding a paper-thin, one-vote margin in the Senate, every one of this year’s 34 senatorial races is crucial. But while most of those elections revolve around current political and public policy disputes, this one is inescapably about the past, and about deep wounds that have yet to heal.
They talk about `Governor Mel’
Wherever she goes, people talk to Carnahan about her late husband, a man who coupled centrist policies with a winning down-home manner.
They invoke his name here in Chillicothee, where the senator is touring a spanking new Gear for Sport plant that employs about 100 people to emblazon artwork on Champion T-shirts.
In Macon, as she visits the local ethanol plant, the farmer-owners tell her that her husband — a man whom they still call “Governor Mel” — helped them get their start. And in Moberly, where she tours the community college, the head of the nursing program tells Carnahan that it was her husband who came up with the seed money so the college could provide nursing instruction.
But Carnahan does not dwell on her husband’s accomplishments. Instead, she’s intent on introducing herself and touting her own achievements in office.
Before her husband’s death, Carnahan was a strong presence in Missouri, as she lobbied for better schools and sought to boost childhood immunizations. Within her family, she was known as the better speaker compared with her husband. In the Gear for Sport conference room, where about 50 locals have jammed in, she talks about the importance of work, noting that her father was a plumber, her mother a hairdresser and her uncle a carpenter.
“I was the first in my family to graduate from high school and college, but I had to work and pay my way,” she says of growing up in Washington, D.C.
Carnahan tells them that it’s important to see things firsthand, like their new plant. And quickly she segues to her recent trip to Afghanistan where, with other members of the Armed Services Committee, she inspected the USS Theodore Roosevelt and met with sailors from Missouri.
“I’m looking for ways we can be helpful in Washington for you,” she says.
“Grief takes many forms,” says Carnahan, asked when she had time to mourn. “It’s not always a straight line, but a zig-zag back and forth.”
For Carnahan, who refers to that night simply as “the crash,” grief was channeled into the job that was supposed to belong to her husband and became hers instead.
“Mel would have wanted this,” she says of her decision to take his place in the Senate. “We worked too hard, for so long, for the things we believe in. I couldn’t walk away from that.”
Riding from Macon to Moberly in a navy blue mini-van, trying to quickly down a roast beef sandwich and curly fries, Carnahan says she had no idea what to expect when she first got to the Senate.
“I just realized I had to work at it harder than everybody else,” she says.
Carnahan immediately won over her Democratic colleagues during a closed-door session in which each freshman senator addressed the entire caucus.
“Unlike everyone else in this room, I’ve never had my name on a ballot,” Carnahan told them. “You came here because of a victory, I came here because of a loss.”
In the Senate, Carnahan is not the loudest or the brashest or the most likely to be found standing before a microphone. In her sensible pantsuits and delicate scarves, she has a quiet, serious presence as she moves intently through the crowds and into the chamber to vote.
While most first-term senators have little impact on the legislative process, Carnahan has shrewdly picked her issues, taking a high profile on aid to the unemployed and an economic stimulus package. With the blessing of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, she was front and center in the debate over helping workers hurt in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
She scored an important early victory when she persuaded senators on the Commerce Committee not to stand in the way of the TWA-American Airlines merger.
“I had to say, this is not a merger, this is a rescue mission,” she recalls, noting that 12,000 TWA jobs were at stake in Missouri.
Wherever she goes, Carnahan is introduced as a centrist trying to find answers to problems.
“The American people don’t just want us up there doing the political thing,” she says. “They want us finding solutions.”
Called a liberal
And yet, Republicans say Carnahan is perfectly willing to cast partisan votes herself. They castigate her as a liberal.
In particular, they cite her decision to vote against Ashcroft’s nomination for attorney general, despite the fact that he graciously accepted defeat in the bitter Senate race and refused to challenge the results, despite questions of vote fraud in the city and county of St. Louis.
“There is nothing to indicate that Mrs. Carnahan is a consensus builder who works well with Republicans, who is bipartisan in her approach, and reaches across the aisle to get things done,” said John Hancock, executive director of the Missouri Republican Party.
“Her record is one of obstruction and blockage that the Senate Democrats in general and Mrs. Carnahan in particular are employing against the president’s agenda,” he said.
In fact, Carnahan has substantial criticisms of the president when it comes to the domestic agenda. She is advocating more money for education and a prescription drug benefit, which has yet to come to the fore in Washington.
“We have to fund the war, but we can’t walk away from our domestic responsibilities,” she says.
Of President Bush, Carnahan says, “He has been distracted. There’s just a whole lot of people out there hurting.”
But she bristles when asked about Republican criticism that she lacks the experience to be a United States senator.
“There are different kinds of experience,” she says, citing hers raising a family and caring for her ill, diabetic father during the last eight years of his life.
Before taking office, Carnahan wrote three books — one on the families who lived in the governor’s mansion, another on entertaining in the mansion, and a collection of her speeches.
As for experience, she pointedly notes that “I’m the only one serving in the United States Senate in this race.”
And, in a dig at Talent, she says it’s important to have life experiences in order to represent people, “not just be a professional politician.”
A hostile Ashcroft
At the Bass Pro Shops in Springfield, with 300,000 square feet of hiking, camping, fishing and hunting equipment, the boyish-looking Talent is courting women voters.
Nearly 500 women have come to a luncheon held just behind the motor boats display in order to hear from Talent and Janet Ashcroft, a lawyer and the wife of the attorney general.
“This is a race where the person with youth and energy is also the one with the experience,” says Talent’s wife, Brenda, as she whips up the crowd after a prayer and the pledge of allegiance.
President Bush has stumped for Talent, who has imported high-profile women from the Bush administration to bolster his standing with female voters as he takes on the woman senator. Mary Matalin, Vice President Dick Cheney’s senior adviser, has been here. So has Karen Hughes, one of the president’s most trusted aides.
But unlike Matalin and Hughes, Janet Ashcroft bears scars of her husband’s defeat.
At a small news conference around a corner from the Bass Pro Shops’ two-story waterfall, Janet Ashcroft is asked to explain the differences between Talent and Carnahan, a seemingly innocuous question that winds up touching a nerve.
“The choice is between someone who will support President Bush and his initiatives, particularly his top priority, which is the war against terrorism — which has to be our most important consideration in this particular election cycle,” she says.
She continues, saying the choice involves someone who supports a need for a responsive military, someone who supports Bush’s homeland defense initiatives and faith-based plans. But she never says that the other candidate does not support these things.
Asked if she means to imply that Carnahan has not been supportive of Bush’s efforts to fight terrorism and secure the homeland, Janet Ashcroft leans forward.
“I am not saying anything about anyone but Jim Talent,” she responds heatedly.
Just as Talent begins to speak, Janet Ashcroft cuts him off.
“Now, if I compliment this lady’s dress, am I insulting your dress?” she says, her voice becoming shrill. “I’m asking you a question. Have I insulted your attire?”
When the reporter suggests that she had been asked about the differences between the two candidates in the Senate race, Janet Ashcroft repeats her praise for Talent.
“Jim Talent is the person with the expertise, with the experience and the understanding and team spirit to get the job done,” she says.
While the last Missouri Senate race was considered one of the nastiest in the nation, this one so far is tentative and polite.
“I don’t think there’s anything Jim Talent and the Republicans can do to my mother that approaches what she’s been through in the last year and a half,” said Carnahan’s daughter, Robin, an attorney who specializes in international trade.
If anyone does attack Carnahan, it’s more likely to be an outside group than Talent. He has little stomach for the inherent rough-and-tumble of politics.
Personal attacks were notably absent from his unsuccessful run for governor in 2000. He’s so polite that he even gives a quiet apology following Janet Ashcroft’s tart remarks. He says: “I have never been comfortable with negative and smash-mouth politics.” During his eight years in the House, Talent served on the Armed Services Committee and as chairman of the Small Business Committee. He worked closely with House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and helped craft the Contract with America that helped vault Republicans into the majority.
“I’m the one with experience to get things done.”
The outcome is likely to be close. Missouri is a state almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, with independents frequently determining the final result.
There’s a little bit of everything here. In Springfield there are devout Christian conservatives worried about moral decay. In St. Louis and Kansas City, thriving black populations make up Democratic strongholds. Farming dominates the rural landscape. And in the big-city suburbs there are voters of every ideological stripe, income level and age bracket.
As Missouri goes . . .
This mix, which is reflective of the nation as a whole, has helped Missouri correctly pick the winning presidential candidate in every race during the past century except for William Jennings Bryan in 1900 and Adlai Stevenson in 1956.
Carnahan shrugs off worries and what-ifs about the coming election.
“Missourians are really pretty independent,” she says. “They go the way they’re going to go and they don’t necessarily take direction from people in higher office.”
“I just know what I have to do,” says Carnahan. “I don’t look back, I just look at the next thing at hand.”
That, she says, is how she has survived the last year and a half, and that’s how she’s running for re-election.
