Truman Days 2008 - Day 2

Oh, but it is good to be a Democrat! Oh, my, yes. Last night was the banquet, and the evening started off with a wine-and-cheese reception hosted by Mike Sanders, who was our host and master of ceremonies for the weekends festivities, and he is well suited for it. He is charming and witty and thinks on his feet. He gives a good speech and engages the public and one of these days we are going to share him with the state, cause he is just that good. We owe our out-state brethren the opportunity to be represented by this guy.

We heard speeches by State Auditor Susan Montee, Senator Claire McCaskill, Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Jay Nixon, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, and Jesse Jackson Jr.

Every speaker was excellent and I heard some words I wanted to hear from Claire. As you know if you read me, I have been mad as hell at her since August, and every bit of my anger is over telecom immunity. In the view of this civil libertarian and long-standing card-carrying member of the ACLU, that is a betrayal I can not reconcile.

In her speech she acknowledged that the Democratic Party is messy and prone to squabbling amongst ourselves, and that there are times we don't like one another. What I read between the lines of her speech was "I know I am polling at 30% disapproval among Missouri Democrats and I've pissed a lot of you off. "

Yes, she certainly has. But the thing is, I will let her out of the box if she starts acting like Harry Truman, who defined the oeuvre of the hell-raisin' Missouri Democrat when he occupied that seat. If she stops acting like a blue-dog and tells Jay Rockefeller to go fuck himself, her constituents are overwhelmingly against telecom immunity, and he should accompany her on a trip back home and meet some of us if he thinks that she won't pay a terrible price for taking his position, that would go a long, long way. Other than that one issue, she has been just fine. Here's hoping I didn't hear her speech through a rose-colored filter, hearing what I wanted to hear.

My congressman, Emanuel Cleaver II.


Claire and Kay Barnes. I will likely start spending more time in the northern tier so I can vote in the Sixth in November. EC is safe. He has no primary challenger and we don't have any republicans in the 5th. We are still a Democratic town, but they tell me the "machine" was busted up decades ago - however, I have seen no evidence of this.


DNC Member and KC Councilwoman Melba Curls, engaged in conversation with Kay Barnes.


Kay and Mike Sanders catch up at the reception before the banquet.


Claire McCaskill and "Ruckette" Mary O'Halloran - who is as much fun in person as she is when she is on the verge of jumping out of her chair and throttling Woody Kozad his chair on the set.


Claire, EC and Kay. I want this picture to be the norm once Kay is elected. That will flip Missouri back to blue, you know. Right now our congressional delegation is as evenly split as it can possibly be using whole numbers. Our Senate delegation is one of each and the house is five/four with the advantage to the republicans. That will reverse in less than 180 days, when Kay is elected! (At the Blue Girl blog, there will be an Act Blue link for Kay in the sidebar for the duration of the campaign - Graves has a lot of out-of-state and PAC money. Every penny counts.)

Overall, the weekend was a success, and a blast and I am already looking forward to next year! I will attend this function every year for the rest of my life, because I am a true, Truman Democrat, and I have the good fortune to have generations of history and a sense of place that is rooted in the soil of the northern tier counties of this state.

We are going forward and we are going to win in November. We are going to take back the Governor's mansion, and we are going to take back at least one chamber of the statehouse. We are going to elect Kay Barnes and we are going to retain the Secretary of State's office, and we have a deep bench for Attorney Generals race (Jeff Harris, Margaret Donnelly, and Chris Koster) and meanwhile I can't even tell you who is running in the republican primary for that office.

And I can't close this post without thanking Senators Koster and Victor Callahan. They used parliamentary procedure and ran out the clock on the session, and in so doing, they strangled Rosemary's Baby - the proof-of-citizenship-to-vote amendment to the state Constitution - in it's crib.

A lot of Democrats have given Koster a hard time since he switched parties last year, and I started cringing soon after - don't we want the Missouri republicans with some common sense and decency to have that "come to Harry" moment? I sure as hell do!

Chris gets full marks from me for his clever application of the rules on Thursday and Friday. I won't have any problem marking my ballot for him when his name appears. I told him last night when we were talking before the banquet that the way I understood it, he was the last person to realize he was a Democrat, and he laughed and said he has heard that and it's quite possibly true.

Let's get busy, Missouri, and start growing the grassroots (this is where DFA comes in...) and let's elect Democrats all the way down the ticket in November.

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A year out, and the MO 06 is already heating up

The 2008 elections might still be 53 weeks hence, but it is already getting brutal in the Missouri 6^th.

For the first time since Sam Graves slid into the seat in 2000, he is facing a real challenger in the person of popular former Kansas City mayor Kay Barnes, and it is already getting nasty.

This race is quite possibly going to be the nastiest fought battle for a seat in the entire 111^th congress. Graves is, without a doubt the meanest sonofabitch in the Missouri delegation, if not the entire congress. He routinely uses that white-trash, trailer-park minion of Rove, Jeff Roe to wield a hatchet – but Kay is highly skilled with a scalpel. May she show Roe his black little political heart before it stops beating. I think he – and Graves – may have made a tactical error in conflating winning elections against sacrificial lambs with successful electoral strategy. Graves has been a nasty, negative campaigner from day one, starting with the Republican primary in 2000.

[keep reading]

In 1999, the National Republican Congressional Committee recruited Teresa Loar, a moderate Republican to challenge popular conservative Democrat Steve Danner, the son of long-term and much-loved Congressman Pat Danner. Then late in the election cycle, Danner stepped aside, guaranteeing that a first termer would be elected in November 2000.

Congressional attack dog DeLay saw a chance to put a junkyard cur in that seat, and there was no room for an ethical moderate Republican who would work for the constituents instead of the Party Agenda. DeLay wanted an acolyte, he wanted a swaggering jingoistic goon, and he was gonna have one, no matter what. Roy Blunt and Tom DeLay called Loar personally, telling her, in essence, “Step aside, little lady.”

When she didn’t, Roe unsheathed the long knives. They went through her trash, they followed her, they staked out her home and office, they stalked her like paparazzi, getting in her face and snapping pictures nonstop.

Sam Graves is busily trying to paint Kay Barnes with the Nancy Pelosi brush, making sweeping statements like “She’s going to be very frustrated because the 6^th is not like San Francisco.”

And that is the kind of garbage that makes this daughter of the 6^th just want to slap the jackass silly. I went to high school in the 6^th, I am the same age as Graves, and I know a dozen jerks just like him. No kidding the 6^th isn't like San Francisco! You don't say! Why, I would have been totally confused without Sammy setting me straight. (Get it? That was a poke at San Francisco and the Camp cover. Geez, Sam, try to keep up. These are the jokes, Son...)

We tire of your antics. The 6^th has a history of flipping regularly, the people are not as homogeneous as Graves would like to think. A whole bunch of us have been to college - hell, some of us have even been to europe! For the most part, we aren't scared of brown people, don't think terrorists are gonna blow up the courthouse in Trenton, And are more concerned about CAFO's than gay marriage. Shoot, a whole bunch of us realize that our marriages aren't in jeopardy if the gay people we know are given equal standing in their relationships.

Graves is banking everything on xenophobia and immigration. And yeah, we are concerned about the problem of undocumented labor, and the drain on our schools and healthcare systems - but we are also smart enough to cypher two and two and come up with four. We know that deporting ten million people en masse would wreak economic havoc. We also realize that if they would get the CAFOs under control, a lot of our problem with immigration would be solved as a byproduct.)

Graves has been the most loyal of Bushies, and it’s going to bite him in the ass. He can’t run away from his support of Bush on virtually every issue. His unflagging support of a war that the district wants over yesterday would probably be enough to sink his chances in 2008.

But then, he followed aWol off the SCHIP cliff. Bush isn't running next year, but Graves is. And that is gonna hang him. The people of the 6^th are fed up with the dirty politics, the lies, and the loyalty to Bush. They went for McCaskill last November, and they passed Amendment 2 with a comfortable margin. So keep misreading and underestimating us. And by all means, continue the way you have.

I already have my little black dress picked out for January 20, 2009!

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It's Official! Barnes is in!

At 12:30 central Kay Barnes will announce her candidacy for the MO-06 congressional seat, currently occupied by Sam Graves. She is making the announcement at a press conference in front of her 94-year-old mother’s house in St. Joseph surrounded by four generations of family.

Come January 2009 – Kansas City will be boasting not one, but two former Mayors in the House of Representatives. This will tip the 5-4 balance of the Missouri delegation to favor the Democrats. (I'm dancin' in my jammies here!)

Sam Graves managed to secure the seat in 2000 after a close race with Steve Danner, and hasn’t really faced an opponent capable of mounting a campaign against him since. His opponent in the 06 mid-terms, Sara Jo Shettles, gained the endorsement of the KC Star, but still managed to garner only about 40% of the vote after a vicious and slanderous barrage of smear from Graves and the trailer-trash version of Karl Rove, the loathsome toad Jeff Roe. (Here is the gist of the story…over 20 years ago Ms. Shettles sold advertising for the pop-science magazine Omni. Omni was a Bob Guiccione publication, so Ms. Shettles was a pornographer. Ro(v)e called her answering machine and did a burlesque routine. Classy guy.)

Sara Jo Shettles is, I’m sure, a very nice lady and would have done a fine job in the House. But she didn’t have a couple of the requisite ingredients to push back against the Graves-Ro(v)e slime machine. She didn’t have the money, and she didn’t have the name recognition. Barnes has both, in spades. I almost forgot…the endorsement of Walter Cronkite is a given…He is her first cousin.

It doesn’t hurt Barnes any that the Graves brand name is being tarnished by the US Attorney scandal – Sam Graves is the brother of Todd Graves, one of the ousted US Attorneys – and the only one who had another side-scandal working that involved the long-standing Missouri tradition of patronage for political donors in the form of MO Department of Revenue fee offices. Every license plate in Missouri is issued by a political crony, and it’s that way no matter which party controls the Governor’s office.

Jeff Ro(v)e predictably dismissed the challenge, of course. I think he said something about values or some such. It was pretty much whipping a dead horse. Oh yeah, I remember now…Sam Graves represents the values of the 26 counties of the 6th district, Barnes represents the values of the 26 blocks of downtown KC. She will have a very difficult time convincing people in St. Joseph and the Northland that downtown Kansas City should get a second member of Congress. (I wonder if Ro(v)e noticed that Missouri's senior Senator, Kit Bond, has not ruled out endorsing Barnes over Graves? I sure did! Graves has problems in his party. I don't know what he has done, but he has pissed off a lot of the states Republican powerful.)

Well, I have something Ro(v)e might not. I have relatives and deep roots in the tall corn of the MO 06. I’ve actually bought the tags for my car in a fabric store on the town square of a rural county in the 06. My relatives and their neighbors are not happy. The Republican franchise is tainted up there right now. Iraq and Medicaid cuts have poured vinegar in the Republican's milk and they can't take the rural areas for granted any longer.

Given the choice between someone who spent the last eight years in Washington doing a mediocre job, and someone who spent the last 8 years leading the biggest city in the district to revitalization and prosperity – I have every reason to believe they will select the girl from St. Joe done good.

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If You Liked Her as the Mayor, You'll LOVE Her in Congress!

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Meet my Beloved Mayor. Her name is Kay Barnes. She will be exiting city hall gracefully after two wildly successful terms in office on May 1, leaving on a high note with a popularity rating that has been phenomenally high all eight years she has been in office. Her success in office is evidenced by the cranes punctuating the skyline, and the revitalized downtown.

She is going to take Sam Graves seat away from him in November 2008, and then KC will have two former mayors in the Congress.

I simply find it a wholly intolerable situation that Sam Graves (R MO 06) has a seat in congress in the first place. The word 'apostasy' seems an understatement when applied to that situation. The man is an embarrassment to Missourians and an offense to decent, thinking people everywhere. He is not our finest offering; that is certain. Since election night 2000, I have been plotting his political demise from the district to the south.

I live and vote in the Missouri 05/State Senate 10. My zip code is the bluest Missouri has to offer. My zip code is literally – and figuratively – as far left as the state goes. I want this blue tint to spread, because we have it pretty damned good, and I think all my fellow residents should be so fortunate. Being a liberal, I want to share, not just hoard the good stuff for myself. In this case the good stuff is responsive and responsible Democrats elected to office. Part of that good stuff I want to share is Kay Barnes.

I always have an eye cast toward future elections. When Kay Barnes sold her Ward Parkway mansion and moved north of the river a couple of years ago, I took note. She moved from the Missouri 05 to the Missouri 06. The 05 is solidly Democratic and currently represented by Rev. Emmanuel Cleaver II – Mayor Barnes predecessor at City Hall. A congressional bid in the 05 after her wildly successful time in the mayors office would have most likely involved a primary challenge to a sitting Democrat. Why would she do that when she could gain a seat for the Democrats and unseat an embarrassing stereotype in the process?

Graves has not had any serious competition since taking his seat. Sarah Jo Shettles earned the endorsement of the KC Star in the 06 midterms, but she garnered less than 40% of the vote.

Kay Barnes would not be such an easy opponent. And with vast personal wealth, she would be able to push back in the media against the Graves slime machine. Prime Graves: His opponent in November, Ms. Shettles, once sold advertising for Omni magazine. Because Bob Guiccioni owned Omni, he charged that she had worked for the porn industry. He is a typical right-wing bully, and his low-rent tactics would wither in the face of a pro like Barnes.

The Missouri 06 is largely rural, covering area from KC North all the way to the Iowa line, and reaching east to within a hundred miles of Illinois. Vast – but empty. The population growth that is happening in the MO-06 is all happening in Kay Barnes neighborhood – or Kansas City North.

She will go into the race with higher name recognition than anyone he has yet faced, perhaps with name recognition higher than Mr. Graves himself. Additionally, there has been very little negative reporting about Kay Barnes in the entire eight years she has been Mayor.

This is the race that will turn Missouri purple, after too-long in the red. It will shift Missouri’s nine-member House delegation to 5 Democrats and 4 Republicans. Our Senate delegation is split, and will be for the foreseeable future (McCaskill, Democrat, just elected in Class I and Kit Bond, Republican, Class III).

The Washington Post agrees with me:

The district's electoral history suggests the potential for real competitiveness. Although President Bush won the 6th relatively easily in 2000 and 2004, Sen. Claire McCaskill showed that the district's voters are willing to vote for the right Democrat. After losing the district by more than 20 points in her 2004 gubernatorial race, McCaskill narrowly carried it in 2006 over incumbent Sen. Jim Talent (R).

The Virginia Tech massacre turned the spotlight last week to gun control, a political hot potato that has been dormant in recent years on the national stage. But cross a presidential campaign with the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, and you're going to get a gun debate -- another volatile wedge issue to define the crowded 2008 field.

Mayor Barnes will have credibility on the gun issue – KC has a lot of gun crime, and she and her Mayor Pro Tem Alvin Brooks have been effective on the issue on the local level. Her experience as a mayor of a large, urban area with a gun problem will be an asset, and the events of the last week have primed the long-overdue debate.

One thing is for sure – a farmer in Mercer County that hunts deer, quail and pheasant – and who sends the kids off to one of the state schools at Columbia or Springfield or Maryville or Warrensburg – is not identifying with the image of the V-Tech shooter staring into the camera, brandishing his guns and babbling incoherently. They more likely identify with the parents of the victims. Kay Barnes has dealt with the issue in real-time. Sam Graves has, for the last six years, offered mealy-mouthed platitudes and pablum.

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