‘My mouth gets me in trouble with some regularity. I am not afraid to tell people where I stand…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As polls showed GOP candidate Josh Hawley beginning to pull ahead in Missouri’s Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill took to Fox News in an apparent effort at damage control.
McCaskill took direct aim at “crazy Democrats” who have promoted incivility, as well as obstructionist politicians like her Senate colleagues Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who resist the efforts of Congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump under any circumstances.
“Some of my colleagues are knee-jerk against the president,” she said. “I don’t get up every day figuring out how I can fight the president. I get up every day figuring out how I can fight for Missourians.”
McCaskill hoped to counter claims from a recent video produced by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas that she attempted to conceal a radical liberal agenda from conservative voters. In it, she acknowledged having voted for Draconian gun control measures, while staff members in her campaign said she would support impeachment, oppose a border wall and had quietly accepted funds from Planned Parenthood.
But while she was forceful in some areas, she hedged in others, making it unclear whether the message might resonate with her constituents or backfire against her.
On the surge of illegal immigration, McCaskill said, “I do not want our borders overrun. And I support the president’s efforts to make sure they’re not.”
However, she stopped short of mentioning the funding of the wall, focusing instead on using technology to streamline the asylum process.
McCaskill also did not refute her positions on gun control, although she said she had never attempted to mislead.
“My mouth gets me in trouble with some regularity. I am not afraid to tell people where I stand—and Missourians know that,” she said. “The NRA’s come after me in every single election—this isn’t like some state secret.”
She implied that she was at odds with some of her fellow Democrats, such as Warren and Sanders.
“I would not call my colleagues crazy, but Elizabeth Warren sure went after me when I advocated tooling back some of the regulations for small banks,” she said. “… I certainly disagree with Bernie Sanders on a bunch of stuff.”
However, when questioned by Fox’s Bret Baier about how she had only supported Trump about 45 percent of the time while voting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., 80 percent of the time, McCaskill said it was because there had not been enough votes on the Senate Floor since Trump took office.
And despite Missouri having gone for Trump by a margin of more than 20 percent, McCaskill stopped short of repudiating Hillary Clinton. “I thought she certainly had the breadth and depth of experience that qualified her, but I’d rather look forward and not backward.”
She also took to the spin zone to explain her costly vote against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, saying it was his position on campaign funding and not the uncorroborated sexual assault allegations against him that caused her to oppose.
“I’m watching this tsunami of dark money that is drowning our process,” she said.
McCaskill touched on the Project Veritas video also. In its immediate aftermath, she called on her opponent Hawley, who is currently the state attorney general, to investigate it as fraudulent under a law that regulates deceptive business practices.
Unable to get in front of the narrative, however, she told Baier it was not what was said in the video itself that was at issue so much as the devious way it was produced.
“The thing about those films that bothered me is not what was on them … it was that they had embedded themselves into our office for weeks on end and that guy had accessed our computers. He wasn’t in our computers to help me,” she said. “There was fraud, and I think that’s a ‘new normal’ that we’ve gotta do something about.”