McCaskill faces GOP’s Hawley plan
“No, no, no,” CONWAY, MO —
Josh Hawley said, suddenly animated. “No. No. No. Not on the agenda.”
It was a flash of unguardedness from the relentlessly on-message Hawley, the Missouri attorney general, who is seeking the Republican nomination in the state’s Senate race. Riding in the back of an SUV last month, he was responding to criticism raised by both Democrats and Republicans that his swift rise made him a political opportunist who was looking ahead to a Senate bid when he ran for attorney general two years ago.
“That’s a hard no,” he said, as he headed to a campaign stop at a factory in Springfield. “It was not anything — no, that was not on the brain.”
It is a sensitive subject for Hawley, who campaigned for attorney general with a message of disdain for “ladder-climbing politicians.” One campaign ad showed him walking through a forest of ladders with legs scrambling up them while he remained firmly rooted on the ground.
Ten months after he was sworn in, Hawley announced his Senate candidacy. He was recruited by party leaders who thought his résumé — Stanford and Yale graduate, law professor, father of two — made him the perfect candidate to challenge the incumbent Democrat, Claire McCaskill, for a seat that Republicans believe is one of the most vulnerable in the Senate this year.
And he was backed by a who’s who of the state’s conservative donor class, including former Sen. John Danforth, businessman David Humphreys and former ambassador Sam Fox.
Polls suggest it could be a close race against McCaskill in November, and Hawley has opened a new front against her with President Donald Trump’s nomination this week of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
McCaskill opposed the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch last year and said Monday that she would be “thoroughly examining Judge Kavanaugh’s record in the coming weeks.” Hawley has taken an aggressive stance on the issue, warning voters in an ad campaign that “our way of life is at risk.”
“The eyes of the nation are on Missouri,” Hawley said in the ad. “Claire McCaskill wants liberals in charge. That’s how she votes. That’s not Missouri’s way, and it won’t be my way.”
In a wide-ranging interview over a day of campaigning, Hawley rejected criticism that he is a candidate in a hurry, as well as complaints from some in his own party that he has exhibited a sense of entitlement about the nomination by skipping local party dinners and declining to debate his primary opponents.
He said he was surprised when party leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, and strategist Karl Rove encouraged him to run.
“I guess I was surprised at the depth of antipathy toward Claire McCaskill and the sense of real urgency folks had,” he said.
He has delivered that message to voters in blunt, sometimes ominous tones. At an event organized by the Missouri Dairy Association, he stood in bluejeans and leather boots before a line of picnic tables and warned a crowd of farmers that McCaskill was a threat to everything they hold dear.
“Farming is a way of life, it’s a way of life that you live everyday, it’s a way of life that I grew up in, it’s a way of life that is worth preserving, but it’s a way of life that is also under threat,” he told the group.
Hawley said the threat came from federal bureaucrats, “folks on the coasts” and members of “the D.C. cartel” like McCaskill. If elected, he said, he would “fight for us and for our way of life.”
Republicans are counting on Hawley’s record as a vote-getter to propel him to victory in a state that Trump won by about 19 points.
As a first-time candidate in 2016, he earned more votes than anyone else on the Missouri ballot, including Trump, Sen. Roy Blunt and former Gov. Eric Greitens, who resigned in May amid a series of scandals that had threatened to weigh down Hawley’s campaign.
“He ran ahead of everybody,” Danforth said in an interview. He described Hawley, who wrote a biography of Theodore Roosevelt for Yale University Press at the age of 28, as “a scholar, really.”
“He is very well read,” said Danforth. “He is not just some glad-handing politician.”
Raised in the small town of Lexington, Missouri, Hawley is a telegenic 38-year-old with impeccable conservative credentials, including leadership of the Federalist Society at Yale Law School, work with a conservative religious liberty group and a clerkship with Chief Justice John Roberts (where he met his wife, Erin, a fellow clerk).
After practicing law in Washington, he returned to his home state and taught constitutional law at the University of Missouri before running for attorney general.
He exudes a friendly enthusiasm, but the timbre of his voice hardens when he talks about “liberals” or “elites.”
“I’m not happy that people in Washington, D.C. — and, let’s be honest, New York, on Wall Street, in Hollywood — look down on the kind of upbringing I had,” Hawley said.
Hawley wants Missouri voters to think McCaskill looks down on them, too. He says she has “sold out the whole Midwest way of life,” a narrative that McCaskill — who grew up in a small town and waited tables to pay her way through the University of Missouri — rejects.