Going To Work For Missouri
Jean Carnahan is taking to the Senate quietly, hoping for a smooth transition and planning to focus on Missouri issues - especially education.
"Right now, she is in the process of moving to Washington to accept the Senate seat, to which she has been appointed," her spokesman Tony Wyche said. "In the Senate, her focus will be on carrying out her husband's legacy."
Mrs. Carnahan's path to Congress' upper chamber was anything but smooth. Her new political role was borne out of the death of her husband, Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, who was running for the job and won posthumously after an October plane crash took his life and two others, including the Carnahans' son.
"I had been visiting schools on the day of the accident," she said this month. "He was in the airplane just before he took off - and so I told him about having been to the schools, and he said 'Oh, you can tell me about it when I get home.' So I thought it was kind of interesting that the last conversation we had was about schools."
Along with three other new women - including Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York - Carnahan will be cutting her teeth in a deadlocked Senate where little will come without compromise. Education, an issue where President-elect Bush has some very strong hopes, may be an area where progress can be made.
Wyche declined to characterize Carnahan's demeanor, but her colleagues describe her as serious and sad.
"Sen. Carnahan was a bit more somber than some of the other newly elected members," at a recent reception, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., told CBSNews.com. "But she was just as aware of the important role she will play in the 107th Congress. She was interested in committee assignments and initiatives important to the state of Missouri."
Wyche said that while Carnahan is aware of her national political role - especially in a deadlocked Senate - she will focus primarily on Missouri issues, at least at the outset.
Among Sen. Carnahan's goals will be to give wings to a campaign proposal put forth by her late husband, which would earmark $50 billion in federal funding over ten years to shore up America's public school system.
Her proposals will surely go through the Senate meat grinder. But her unique story is more likely to define her, a fact not lost on the senator herself.
"You are here because you won; I am here because I lost," Carnahan told newly elected senators in another gathering, according to a Senate staffer.
 Trying to discuss her husband, the late Gov. Mel Carnahan (AP)SIZE> |
"When people come up to me and say 'You sure had bad luck in your campaign,' I say, 'No, I didn't.' The Carnahans had unspeakably bad luck. I have three children of my own. My wife is a pilot. And if my wife and one of my children had been flying and had died in a setting like that - I don't know, it's just a terrible thing," Ashcroft told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a recent interview.
As for her political aspirations - whether she'll stand for election in two years' time when the Show-Me State holds a special election - her spokesman, who seems to have heard the question one too many times from one too many reporters, said, "Most everybody ... wants to know whether she's going to run. We'll cross that bridge when we get there. She's not even sworn in yet. She'll be sworn in on Jan. 3."