Missouri's "Senator Two-Face"

Carol Platt Liebau | February 02, 2011 10:33 PM

Throughout her political career, Missouri's Democratic US Senator, Claire McCaskill, has made a practice of talking like a centrist and voting like a liberal. There have been plenty of examples;

listen to her call for Americans to pick up "pitchforks" if the Bush tax cuts are extended and even admit to beating the class-warfare drum (so much for "civility"!), even as she and her husband have, in the past, used Bermuda as a tax shelter.

But now, McCaskill has taken the two-faced act to a whole 'nother level.

Even as she gave every appearance to her constituents of trying to use her influence -- as one of the President's best friends in the Senate, and one of the first to have endorsed his presidential bid -- to help St. Louis secure the Democratic Convention, she was privately lobbying behind the scenes to have her city passed over. (And after it happened as she wanted, McCaskill had the nerve to proclaim herself "bitterly disappointed" that St. Louis didn't get the convention!).

It seems that McCaskill was worried that having the convention in St. Louis would have taken attention and money from her re-election bid. So too bad for a magnificent city -- which has suffered terribly from the erosion of its manufacturing base and the departure of many of the big companies (like McDonnell Douglass and Anheuser Busch) that used to be headquartered there. Claire couldn't share.