Carol Platt Liebau: Talent-McCaskill

Monday, August 21, 2006

Talent-McCaskill

As this piece in US News & World Report points out, Missouri State Auditor Claire McCaskill is working hard to give Senator Jim Talent a tough race for reelection.

She's pretty much a typical liberal, although she's trying hard to conceal that fact, given that it doesn't play all that well in the Show-Me State. In this interview with lefty website My DD.com, she sounds like a lefty from start to finish, and even hails the existence of the lefty netroots as a great thing for America.

Amazingly, the press has allowed her to get away with portraying herself as "just one of the folks" despite the fact that she's from a family which, unlike Talent's, could afford to have her spend $1.6 million of family money on her unsuccessful 2004 race for governor. (It's hard to believe we wouldn't have heard more about it if she were a Republican, isn't it?)

It will be interesting to see if Missouri -- which is often a bellwether state -- really believes that Claire McCaskill has what it takes to serve as Missouri's first female senator elected in her own right. It's not yet clear to me that she has what it takes to create a real comfort level with her candidacy in rural Missouri, especially given her social views and her cut-and-run approach to Iraq.

But as the US News piece notes, she's working hard to link Senator Talent to George W. Bush. Well, turn and turn about's fair play -- and if Senator Talent is George Bush's twin, she's Ned Lamont's . . . in more ways than one.

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