Friday evening, I attended a campaign event for Sarah Steelman at a home in St. Charles. Attendance was sparse–12 or 13 of us plus Steelman herself and three or four of her people. Thursday afternoon, I had gotten an automated phone call from her (odd, since I’m not a Republican and don’t live in St. Charles County), but I called and let the young man I talked to know that I wanted to attend.

Always one for transparency, I told him I was a Democratic blogger. He was less than pleased, but he didn’t forbid me to come. I’m sure he worried that I would harangue his candidate and spoil the event. Not me. I was as quiet as a dormouse. I wanted to hear what Republicans say when they don’t know there’s a Democrat in the room.

Can’t really say there were any surprises, though. Steelman presented herself as a populist. Indeed, she came dressed like one in high heeled sandals, a bright summer skirt, and tank top. She struck me as sweet natured and, at the same time, unafraid to assert herself. The bus also proclaimed her populist message: “Putting Missourians FIRST!” And the folks who were there considered her a populist. One gentleman said that where he works, he has discovered that people generally don’t know who Hulshof is. When he tells them that Hulshof is a D.C. insider, that pretty much settles it for them. If they’re Republicans, they decide to go for Steelman, said the man.

Here’s what the populist Republican talked about:

• Steelman stressed her leadership in cutting off taxpayer investments in companies that do business with governments that sponsor state terrorism. She says she took a lot of flack for the program but that now other states are following our lead.
• She says we must take away the financial incentive that draws illegal immigrants here by imposing stiff and meaningful fines. (I can’t disagree on this. I remember Claire pointing out in ’06 that the immigrants streaming across the border aren’t coming here for a vacation.)

  This was the hot button issue. Gay marriage is so two-years-ago. And about abortion and stem cell research–she’s agin ’em, of course–there was not a whisper. No, it was all about immigration. One man wanted to know how we can keep illegals from getting treated in our hospitals. And he also wanted the law changed so that children born here to illegal immigrants would not be granted citizenship. To her credit, Steelman pointed out that such a change would require a constitutional amendment. (I had to wonder if the rhetoric she hears ever alarms her.)

  Our host for the evening pointed out that Steelman had acted on the ideas she espoused by stopping tax incentives for companies that were building apartments in St. Charles County using illegal immigrant labor

• Steelman wants a non-political panel to study the tax issue. She mentioned that getting rid of our individual income tax would be an idea for the panel to study.
• She’d like to get the feds out of education and out of dealing with health care. (That latter idea, now there’s a populist winner. Let’s keep slogging ever downward into the health care quicksand.)
• She spoke about the need to stop the mandate for including ethanol in our gas. (I wrote, agreeing with her about that, two weeks ago.) She mentioned that neither Hulshof nor Nixon agreed with her on this issue but presented it as letting the market work. She asserted that without government subsidies, gas with ethanol in it would cost more.
• Although she nodded toward alternative energy, Steelman’s ideas about handling our energy crisis (more domestic drilling and more nuclear plants) were boilerplate Republican.

Steelman is trailing Hulshof by something in the neighborhood of eight points, but it wouldn’t be impossible for her to pull this out of the fire, even so. Her populist message has some traction.

It’s a shame it isn’t populist. She may not be a Washington insider, but she’s pro-big business. I didn’t hear any indication that she cares about regulating corporations or stopping them from looting the public treasury. What I heard was the standard Republican philosophy about small government.

John Kenneth Galbraith summed up the merits of that school of thought:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Oops. I think I just called Ms. Steelman selfish. It would be crass to call a sweet natured, determined lady that. But I take her silence for consent on many issues. Steelman stood idly by while the state lost almost two billion dollars in federal health care dollars and 400,000 poor people suffered. She didn’t object when the legislature slashed their health care and opted instead to offer tax incentives to companies that might or might not create sufficient jobs to repay those incentives.

She said nothing about her party’s attack on public education–the way funding for K-12 and public universities has been cut, the selling off of MOHELA assets, and the constant push for vouchers. She didn’t decry the attacks on an independent judiciary–without which citizens have little recourse against predatory corporations.

She wants a study of the tax code, but thinks in terms of eliminating the income tax. Short history lesson: the middle class of this country established itself in the last century because the progressive income tax equalized the wealth, because the labor movement made decent wages possible for blue collar workers, because public education gave ordinary people a chance to advance themselves, and because immigration was reined in. Steelman gets a one out of four on that list. If she were a populist, she’d be thinking in terms of redistributing the tax burden, with more of it falling on the wealthy, not eliminating the income tax.

I’m sorry, Ms. Steelman. If I knew you well, I might think you were a “nice” person. But in the end, selfish is as selfish does.