Is Claire McCaskill really the centrist that she claims to be?

Feb. 24--WASHINGTON -- It was political theater, replete with pork barbecue and a bottle of Arthur Bryant's Kansas City sauce, which Sen. Claire McCaskill made sure to hold up for the cameras.

The real menu was bipartisanship, however, as McCaskill, D-Mo., and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., ate a few bites together in a sparse Senate office room.

They had come to promote their bill outlawing "earmarks," those local "pork" goodies thrown into spending bills that were largely banned a decade ago, but were being considered again after President Donald Trump suggested they would be good grease for seized-up legislative gears in Congress.

McCaskill derided earmarks as the "swampiest of swamp creatures," and Flake echoed the sentiment. The word "bipartisan" came up a lot, a word you are likely to hear from McCaskill in the Senate campaign this fall in Missouri, one of the country's marquee matchups of 2018.

Legitimate claim?

Bipartisanship is an elusive state, subject to the beholder's ideology. One person's give is not always another's take.

McCaskill does have a history of working with Senate Republicans, and for sometimes voting with Republicans on contentious issues, although sometimes not as frequently as other Democratic senators from Republican-leaning states. For instance, McCaskill was one of four Democrats who, this month, voted with Republicans to clamp down on so-called "sanctuary cities" during a string of failed immigration votes in the Senate.

But on major votes, ranging from taxes to health care to abortion rights, McCaskill is often tethered to her party's line, although she says that's not for the lack of seeking bipartisan compromise in a polarized Senate.

Flake, who is retiring at the end of this year, was asked about McCaskill's claims of being a centrist solution seeker.

"I think it is very genuine," he told the Post-Dispatch.

But for some, that will be seen as damning with faint praise. Flake, one of the biggest Trump critics among Senate Republicans, has been vilified by conservative media as a "RINO" -- Republican In Name Only.

Another Republican -- Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley -- says that McCaskill has "voted the liberal party line on every major issue."

Hawley also argued that, culturally, McCaskill is not middle of the road, either. Last week, Hawley highlighted a fundraiser McCaskill had with Disney President Robert Iger to portray McCaskill as a Democrat following a familiar trail to deep Hollywood pockets.

"She voted liberal on every Supreme Court nominee," Hawley, the front-runner to oppose McCaskill in November, said, referring to McCaskill's support for two Barack Obama nominees and her opposition to Donald Trump's one.

"She has opposed every major item of President Trump's agenda. That doesn't make her a 'consensus seeker,'" Hawley said.

The case

"I know this sounds hokey, but most of us came here to get something done," McCaskill said at the anti-earmark event with Flake. "We got really good at the rhetoric, throwing out the political 'gotcha' phrases on cable TV. But we have gotten really rusty on getting in a room and trying to find common ground."

Days before, McCaskill and Flake and 23 other senators -- 11 Republicans and 12 Democrats -- had gathered in the office of Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to force the end of a budget impasse that had shut the government down for three days. Those involved said they hoped the meeting was a spark for more bipartisan legislating, but the Senate exposed its divisions a few weeks later in the failed immigration votes.

McCaskill, who has long tried to portray herself as a raging centrist, touted the meeting as an example of her willingness to work with anyone on solutions. To her detractors, it was window-dressing over the fact that on the signature issues of the new Trump administration, McCaskill has held steadfast to the Democratic line.

Partnerships

In recent years, the former Kansas City prosecutor has worked with Republicans on issues that do not always draw the top-drawer Washington attention but still make headlines back home.

In 2016, she and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, pushed through the first contempt of the Senate legislation in two decades in forcing the online advertising site, Backpage, to comply with an investigation into whether that site was advertising sex trafficking of children. McCaskill and Portman issued a scathing report on the site's activities.

McCaskill joined with Collins on legislation that increased generic drug competition. McCaskill co-sponsored legislation to extend health care benefits for retired coal miners with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and others. McCaskill and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, jointly inserted provisions strengthening military assault protections into a defense bill.

She and Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., co-sponsored a new law making it easier for World War II vets exposed to mustard gas experiments to get help from the Department of Veterans Affairs. It came after McCaskill championed the case of Missourian Arla Harrell; 17 World War II veterans have made successful claims under it.

When McCaskill worked with Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., on legislation aimed at preventing terrorism against agriculture, Roberts said that "if you want to pick somebody to work in a bipartisan manner and get something done ... you ask Claire McCaskill."

But a few months later, McCaskill and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., got into a public spat over Johnson's assertion that the opioid crisis was to blame, in part, for the expansion of Medicaid. McCaskill issued a report on opioids with Johnson, the chair of the committee from which the report came, refusing to join in it.

McCaskill has voted for some Trump nominees for Cabinet or other administration positions that were opposed by a majority of her Democratic colleagues. She has voted for some contentious issues favored by Republicans, like aid to Saudi Arabia, which garnered just four other Democratic votes when it narrowly passed.

Over the first 13 months of Trump's presidency, McCaskill had voted for roughly two-thirds of Trump's nominees overall, including almost all related to homeland security. McCaskill was one of 10 Democrats to vote for current Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen; 37 of her Democratic colleagues voted against Nielsen.

But McCaskill joined a majority of Democrats voting against Rex Tillerson for secretary of state and Jeff Sessions as attorney general.

Flake, who once spent a Senate recess on a deserted island with Democrat Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico to prove that a Democrat and Republican could get along, has also worked with McCaskill on immigration and border issues.

That bipartisanship happens "not as much as it should, but there is more than people think," Flake said.

The perpetual divides

But on many issues where there is no abiding consensus, McCaskill often stands with her Democratic colleagues, even when other center-left Democrats vote with the other side.

And in trying to thread the needle as a Democrat in a Republican state, McCaskill risks alienating different factions. Her intense focus on rural Missouri during 2017 and early 2018 -- most of her more than 50 town halls were held in rural communities -- prompted this headline in the St. Louis American: "Why should blacks be motivated to vote for McCaskill?"

A McCaskill aide argued that the senator was among the first politicians on the ground during the Ferguson unrest, that she has a 94 percent voting record from the NAACP, and that McCaskill's votes against Neil Gorsuch, the tax cuts and her support of voting rights and criminal justice reform initiatives were supported by many black Missourians.

Perhaps McCaskill's highest-profile vote of the Trump era was to oppose the confirmation of Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court -- a judicial nomination that Trump often invokes as a signature success of his presidency. Three other Democrats also in potentially tough 2018 Senate races -- Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota -- voted with the Senate majority for the nominee.

McCaskill went through the raw political calculus of the Gorsuch vote with donors at a 2017 fundraiser that was leaked to the press. Her argument: If Gorsuch was voted down, Trump might nominate a justice even less acceptable to Democrats, who didn't have the votes to stop Republicans from approving that nominee.

"The Gorsuch situation is really hard," McCaskill said, according to a recording of that private meeting. "There are going to be people in this room who are going to say, 'no, no, no.' Let's assume for the purposes of this discussion that we turn down Gorsuch. ... What then?"

She voted no, decrying the "polarized politics" that surrounded the nomination fight. Because her vote ultimately did not decide the nomination, her critics can say the vote allowed McCaskill to have it both ways by placating a liberal base while decrying the partisanship of the moment.

On other issues where no supermajority consensus emerged -- tax cuts and health care -- McCaskill voted with fellow Democrats.

She also did on legislation that would have essentially banned abortions after 20 weeks. Late last month, that failed to get the required 60 votes to move toward passage, with two Republicans -- Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska -- voting with the Democrats. Three Democrats -- Donnelly, Manchin and Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa. -- voted with the Republicans.

McCaskill and other Democrats said they were open to negotiations to improve the Affordable Care Act and reform the tax code. She was invited to the White House in a bipartisan meeting with Trump to discuss tax reform, and the president said on a trip to Missouri that McCaskill should support tax reform or be voted out in November.

She voted no, attacking the final bill as skewed to the rich.

Now, Republicans are citing that bill as a spur to the economy and more money in the pockets of wage earners. Americans for Prosperity, the political arm of the Koch Brothers empire, has been on the air in Missouri attacking McCaskill for promising to support "tax cuts for hardworking Missourians," but that "when she had the chance, she said, 'no.'"

McCaskill complained that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had made a strategic decision to pass tax cuts and reform health care with Republican votes alone.

"They didn't include us in hearings, they didn't include us in negotiations, they didn't let us know what the bill was going to be, they wouldn't talk to us about it, they wouldn't tell us what was there," McCaskill said.

"So the partisanship that you saw over the last year was the product of Mitch McConnell, not the product of Claire McCaskill," she said.

"Frankly, stop almost any Republican in the hall and ask them to name five or six Democrats you could work with, and I am pretty sure I'd make most of those lists," McCaskill continued. "Now maybe they wouldn't this year because they don't want me to win. I certainly am not afraid to buck my party on many occasions, and we have a lot of proof points for that."

Ratings

The online legislative analysis site Govtrack.us studied legislation introduced and passed in the Senate from 2013 into 2018, and assigned each senator a partisanship score.

McCaskill was just one of eight senators to appear in the middle quintile, a testament to the shrinking ideological center. The other seven in the middle were the Republicans Murkowski and Collins, and Democrats Manchin, Donnelly, Heitkamp, as well as Sens. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Jon Tester, D-Mont.

But another analysis of the Senate from 2015 to 2017 had McCaskill ranked behind Blunt in the Lugar Center's ratings of the most bipartisan senators. In that rating, which done by a nonpartisan political group set up by former Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, Blunt was ranked the eighth most bipartisan senator, McCaskill the 26th.

McCaskill did not make the top 10 in the Senate in this year's annual Valentine's Day bipartisanship rating by Quorum, a legislative database.

In her 2015 autobiography, "Plenty Ladylike," McCaskill wrote that female legislators were inclined toward collaboration, and that the rising number of women in the Senate has resulted in "a relationship of trust" among female Democrats and Republicans.

"The extent of collaboration among women is sometimes overstated," she wrote, "but I do believe that women are willing to listen, to compromise, and to share the credit."

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