A recent poll shows Senator Claire McCskill trailing all three of her potential GOP challengers in spite of the fact that it would be charitable to characterize these particular GOPers as leftover dog’s breakfast. And this is occurring even though McCaskill has carefully avoided identification with the progressive viewpoint and honed her “moderate” credentials, usually thought to be just the ticket for purple state Democrats.

McCaskill has tried hard to present herself as a pragmatist who takes a reasonable, open-minded approach, calibrating just which right-wing memes she needs to validate in order to buy a little credibility with out-state voters and which progressive principles are too precious to abandon. Take the recent senate vote on extending the Bush tax cuts for the middle class but not for the wealthy if you want an example of how McCasill balances one step on the left with a second step to the right:

Illustrating the potential high-voltage political impact of the vote, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who is in a tight re-election race, announced she had introduced a bill preventing the estate tax from rising next year, and Tester co-sponsored it. She issued a news release to that effect just minutes after voting for the Democratic bill, which would let estate taxes go much higher in 2013.

If the polls are to be believed, this strategy has done little for McCaskill apart from almost alienating progressives. I say almost because most progressives know how to balance reality with their druthers and can live with ambiguity in the person of politicians teetering on the centrist tightrope, at least when the other choices are wallowing in rightwing mud.

Conventional wisdom is that McCaskill is trying hard to please those amorphous creatures we usually term “independent” voters. There’s some doubt that this designation actually pertains to a real entity, but McCaskill seems to be convinced that there are a few – or, at least, some erstwhile Republicans who are alienated by the circus freak show that now dominates the Republican party. The hope seems to have been that this group, if sufficiently cosseted, would provide her just enough votes in outstate areas that, combined with the Kansas City and St. Louis metro areas where she’s gold, it would enable her to prevail. It’s worked before, but I’m wondering if conditions haven’t changed since the election of America’s first black president.

There’s either not enough of these “independents,” or they are, as many have claimed, low information types who’re easily stampeded by negative sloganeering – of which we’ve had a steady barage since the election of Obama. Nasty, dishonest attacks of the same type used to slime the president and all of his initiatives have been lobbed at McCaskill as well, and it’s likely that the rate of fire will accelerate even more as we approach election day. After all, corporate interests with a lot to gain from a a GOP win also seem to have nearly bottomless pockets.

Lot’s of progressives sought to remind McCaskill that few among the GOP-leaning types were going to vote for a Democrat when they could get the real thing in the GOP shop. Nor does it seem that “moderate” is going buy McCaskill anything in an environment where the crazies are taking over, emotions are running high, lies are daily currency, facts – such as her “moderate” voting record – are easily overlooked, and where reasonable is just too … reasonable.

One can only hope that McCaskill will still pull it out, and that the endgame will justify her strategic gamble. After the primary, when she knows which variety of dufus she’ll be facing, she can direct a steady light on his or her particular strain of know-nothing Republicanism and maybe peel off a few real, erstwhile GOP moderates. Meanwhile, it’s hard to resist saying I told you so even though we know how much is at stake.

RELEASE: McCaskill Opens Kansas City Campaign Office at Event with Volunteers and Supporters

Office Will Serve As Hub of McCaskill’s Grassroots Campaign in Support of Missouri’s Middle Class Families

Kansas City, Mo. — Today, Senator Claire McCaskill joined supporters and volunteers at the opening of the Missouri Democratic Party’s Coordinated Campaign office in Kansas City. At the event, Claire thanked the crowd in attendance and delivered brief remarks about the clear choice in this campaign between a Senator who’s on the side of Missouri’s middle class families and three extreme candidates who are beholden to the Washington special interests.

“I know that TV ads won’t elect me and the millions of dollars in outside spending certainly won’t be what decides this race,” said McCaskill. “It’s all of you, here in this room today, when you’re knocking on doors and making phone calls, that will make the difference between now and November. It’s incredible to see so many of people here in Kansas City who are committed to working every day to ensure we win this thing in November.”

Today’s event was Claire’s first 2012 campaign stop in the Kansas City area, and the first local stop for the new McCaskill for Missouri RV, which will criss-cross Missouri over the next six months as Claire takes her message directly to voters.

Video by Jerry Schmidt

Via David Weigel, find below the first map of the electoral college for the 2012 election produced by Carl Rove – who Weigel notes, has been surprisingly accurate in the past.  Weigel observes that it is “more optimistic than some Democrats I talk to are willing to be,” adding the parenthetical “Rove, you prince of trickery!” I wonder what he could possibly mean?

Of especial interest: Rove considers Missouri to be a toss-up, which, if it pans out, should be good news for Claire McCaskill. There’s nothing like a good set of coattails (and “toss-up” constitutes better coattails than “leans Romney” – which better conforms to conventional wisdom).  Of course, as far as McCaskill’s chances go, there’s also nothing like a set of potential opponents who are, as Ed Kilgore puts it, engaged in “one of those look-at-me-I’m-the-craziest GOP primaries.”

Addendum: Missouri’s toss-up status probably explains why Carl Rove’s Crossroads GPS is ginning up its ad campaign against McCaskill once again:

Crossroads GPS, the nonprofit affiliate of the GOP-aligned super PAC, is launching an $1.2 million ad blitz against five Democratic Senate candidates on Tuesday, using its early financial advantage to attack the candidates’ records on spending and taxes.

The ads are targeted against Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., former Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine, and former North Dakota Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp.

Be prepared for some big time lies – and remember there’s lots more $ where these ad buys come from.  

Todays big Roy Blunt news:

Sen. Roy Blunt, a key Republican political insider, will head Mitt Romney’s effort to secure congressional support for the former Massachusetts governor’s presidential bid, the latest move by the GOP establishment to close ranks for 2012.

According to both Romney and Blunt, this political marriage is based on their mutual concern for “job creation.”  Or is it their mutual concern for “job creators,” as in big corporate campaign contributors?

Then there’s this observation:

A longstanding conservative as well as an establishment figure, Blunt could help polish Romney’s image among both conservatives and Washington insiders.

I think that this means that the Romney camp recognizes that Blunt has managed the essential balancing act between serving GOP corporatist goals and numbly spouting Tea Party bromides. So far, Romney’s efforts to straddle that line looks looks like nothing other than the crassest sort of flip-floppery. My own personal theory about this distinction is that Blunt’s demeanor is so wooden and his delivery so rote that it is taken as unstudied by the literally unstudied Tea Partiers, whereas the glib and relatively animated Romney only excites distrust from the less-polished denizens of Tea Party Land.

It also helps that Blunt never really bothers to explain or justify his past actions; he just grunts and stays on the GOP point du jour. Maybe he can teach Romney to shut up about Romneycare, the forerunner of “Obamacare,” and help him jettison his efforts to justify his abysmal job creation record in Massachusetts. Blunt’s rule is don’t explain, just attack, no matter how crude your weapon, and, so far, it has the  advantage that, as a way to divert attention from his past record, it’s worked.

Blunt and Romney also have one other singular commonality:  They resemble ventriloquist’s dummies popular in the middle of the last century, respectively Howdy Doody and Charlie McCarthy.* This fits well with still yet another narrative attendant upon the announcement of Blunt’s role in the Romney campaign, which is that Romney’s rival, Rick Perry, scares the party establishment silly:

There has been talk in Republican circles that Perry might be too dangerous to run in 2012 because he demonstrates little appeal to independents. Some in the GOP point to 1972, when liberal Sen. George McGovern won the Democratic nomination for president and lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide with long-lasting political consequences.

I can easily imagine that predictable corporate puppets are preferable to the GOP movers-and-shakers – though not necessarily to the GOP base – than the perpetually foot-in-mouth loose-cannon, Rick Perry.

*Sentence edited for clarity.  

You may have read about St. Louis businessman John Brunner, the chairman of health care products company Vi-Jon Inc., who is pondering a run against Claire McCaskill in 2012. Brunner has the advantage of being an unknown in a field of characters who are all probably too well known. However, if you’re interested in reading between the lines, Brunner’s announcement could be interpreted to indicate that he’ll probably fit right in with the GOP lineup du jour:

I’m very serious,” Brunner said. “We’ve got a fire raging here in our country and our economy. It’s going to take an additional level of character and competence to deal with the crisis.

Doesn’t that “fire raging” image suggest the apocalyptic hyperbole that seems to characterize the usual GOP response to issues that would almost definitely benefit from a more measured, pragmatic approach?  Not to mention the hubris that allows Mr. Brunner to make the assumption that he alone has that “additional level of character and competence” that would allow him to play fireman and extinguish the flames.  

Also, since I become very cranky when confronted by the perennial GOP assumption that running governments and businesses are the the same things, I was decidedly put off when Brunner declared, as if it was a brand new insight that he alone was bringing to the table:

What was true of my company is true of our country,” Brunner said. “You can’t borrow your way to prosperity, it takes competence and character, and the only true hope is returning to the basic fundamentals that got you to a good position before you got off track.

I’ll grant that there are some elements of competent management that pertain to most organizations, private, public, for-profit or not-for-profit.  However, few of these business loving GOPer pols seem to understand that businesses and governments are different in significant ways. For one thing, they differ in their ultimate goals – achieving government goals often mandate a much wider set of approaches and skill sets and lots more flexibility than is required of the typical businessman. I hate seeing folks who think that because they are able to squeeze a profit out of a few narrowly focused activities, they are competent to insure the welfare of 300 million diverse Americans.

And since Brunner seems to think character and competence are so important – he mentions them twice – I wonder what it means about his character and competence that he has, in the past, showered dim-witted Rep. Todd Akin (R-2) with significant campaign donatons. Given this fact, I bet that his conception of those “fundamentals” that “got you to a good position” might arise from a very different view of reality than that of most students of 20th century history. Could be fun, though, watching Akin and Brunner campaign against each other.

I like to be fair, so I’m willing to wait and see on which side of the crazy line Brunner actually positions himself, but it doesn’t look too promising so far, even allowing for the fact that it’s the 21st century GOP we’re talking about. From this point of view, I understand why Politico‘s David Catenese thought the most important thing to emphasize about this relatively unknown potential contender is that he is a “self-funder.”  

Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, has summarized his admittedly very early take on the status of the 33 senate seats that will be up for grabs in 2012 in this table.  Not surprisingly, of the 23 seats now held by Democrats, Claire McCaskill joins Ben Nelson (NE), Sherrod Brown (OH), and Independent Joe Lieberman (CT) as “very vulnerable” – the most troubling category since it denotes a shakier status than the “potentially vulnerable” or “vulnerable” status of many of the other Democratic incumbents.

Sabato has this to say about his early-on expectations for the coming Missouri race:

This will be a barn-burner of a contest. Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill narrowly edged out Republican Sen. Jim Talent in the Democratic tilting year of 2006. Since 2008, when President Obama came within a whisker of carrying the Show Me State, Missouri has moved back toward the Republican camp, at least temporarily. McCaskill will be opposed by either Talent, who gives every indication of desiring a rematch, or former state treasurer Sarah Steelman. McCaskill has been a visible, forceful senator but she may be too liberal for Missouri, unless President Obama recovers strongly prior to November 2012. In any event, McCaskill is quite vulnerable.

So, when McCaskill twists and turns in the coming months, just remember that she fears the conventional wisdom that sees her tepid centrism as “too liberal.”

The philosophical question here? Is it better to adhere to one’s principles and go down fighting, or dance in tune to the music they’re playing at the time? Doing the latter may keep the real barn-burners at bay (Talent, Steelman, or, God deliver us, Peter Kinder) – assuming that the fancy steps McCaskill will be called upon to execute are ultimately successful. And of course, there’s always the possibility that McCaskill and her coterie of advisors are too tone-deaf in the first place to pick-up on the right political beat – which could change really, really fast as people get a load of the clumsy bunch of GOPers they just sent to Washington.

Now that the midterms are a couple of weeks behind us, it is time to take stock of where we stand and what the makeup of the new Congress means for the next two years, especially in Missouri, a state that is rapidly losing it’s moderate, bellweather status and turning an ever-deepening shade of red as the differences between the cities and the rural areas grow more stark and more divided in their political views.

It is against that backdrop that the woman who will be Missouri’s Senior Senator in the 112th Congress, freshman Claire McCaskill, launches her campaign to retain her Senate seat, a seat that has a special significance in this state because it happens to be the same one that Harry S Truman occupied before he was selected to be FDR’s Vice President.

Missourians are proud of Harry Truman and the job he did in the Senate, especially his work on the Truman Committee, a position from which he delighted in knocking greedy, corpulent, war-profiteering snouts out of the public trough while he threatened the heads of big businesses with serious jail time if they failed to meet the terms of their contracts. Claire has done a worthy job of filling the seat, and she has established a solid record to run on that the more practical and pragmatic, less ideologically driven people in the rural areas can bring themselves to vote for. If she reprises the same sort of campaign she ran in 2006, she ought to be able to stitch together the same constituency that got her elected to the Senate in the first place.

That is because she has created her own brand of independence from the Democratic Party, with only three other Democratic Senators having lower party loyalty scores. That record could help to immunize her against charges that she is a “big-government, tax-and-spend liberal.” Her record is one of going after waste and fraud and she is just about the only Senator in Washington doing so. She has been tireless in going after the fraud that military contractors have been perpetrating since 2001.

She was also way ahead of the curve on refusing earmarks. I happen to disagree with her on earmarks, but that doesn’t change the fact that the issue can be a winner in the outstate areas.

Yet in spite of the fact that on a multitude of issues she is where the so-called tea partiers say they want their candidates to be – earmarks, going after waste, fraud and abuse, no to Cap and Trade – they make no bones about saying they “want her running scared.” But of course, everyone knows that the so-called “tea partiers” are not really independent voters. They are just conservative republicans who are embarrassed to admit that they are the same conservative republicans who supported the previous administration and their wild and reckless ways, and are now trying to pretend otherwise because they are – or should be – embarrassed.

How tough her bid for reelection will be will depend a lot on the republican field and how bloody and bruising the primary gets and who comes out of it the last man or woman standing. If she faces Jim Talent in a rematch of the 2006 battle she won to unseat him, she should win fairly easily because he was such a lazy, do-nothing Senator when he held the seat, and the contrast that can be drawn between the two known quantities will be stark.

While Claire McCaskill has used her chairmanship of an Armed Services subcommittee to relentlessly go after military contractors who have defrauded the taxpayers and failed to deliver the goods and services they were contractually obligated to provide, Jim Talent failed to attend 65 of the 95 Senate Armed Services Committee meetings that were held during the time he held his seat on the committee.

That salient fact matters to a lot of outstate voters, because they all either have someone in their family who is currently serving or who has served recently. If you have a son, daughter, niece, nephew or friend who ever takes a shower in Halliburton-constructed living quarters, you tend to care that troops who were safely inside the wire where they should have been able to relax and unwind have been electrocuted in the shower, and they appreciate the fact that they have the only Senator in all of Washington who is trying to do something about it.

I have long lamented the loss of Democratic Party infrastructure in the outstate areas, especially the northern tier. Claire McCaskill won in 2006 because she didn’t just concentrate on the urban areas and Columbia. She went to every county and she shook hands and she asked people to vote for her. She is a skilled politican as well as an effective legislator, and while there are a lot of people who are one or the other, Claire McCaskill is one of the few who is both. As their Senator, she has been back for town halls and kitchen table chats and kept the voters informed as to what she is doing for them in D.C., and she realizes that while the population in the northern tier of the state isn’t dense, the people aren’t either, and she is smart enough to go get the votes that are there to be picked up by any Democrat who will bother to ask for them.