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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Kit Bond, one of the Senate's premier practitioners of cronyism, is up for reelection in Missouri. And he's likely to win despite the ethical questions raised by some of his relationships.
Oct 11, 2004 | Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., is an unusual member of the most exclusive club in the nation. He arrived as a millionaire, but in a reversal of fortune managed to lose it all. Then, in a turn of good luck, he was able to rebuild his wealth. The senator's ability to sustain his political career and replenish his personal portfolio is a classic story of cronyism worthy of the era of the robber barons.
Bond, a three-term Republican, achieved his new riches in part by legislatively helping the companies in which he and his family had begun to invest -- one of them, Kansas City Southern Industries, a Missouri-based railroad, soon after his former chief of staff became its vice president and chief lobbyist. The former colleague is now a major Bush-Cheney campaign official. Kansas City Southern, meanwhile, has been one of Bond's top corporate campaign contributors.
Bond's survival is essential for the Republican Party's hopes of holding on to its one-vote majority in the Senate. Though he has never pulled in more than 53 percent of the vote in his three elections, Bond is strongly favored to win again next month, not because of conservative consistency but largely because of his pork-barrel fiscal values, reflected in big federal spending for his constituents. Bond's work in bringing federal dollars to Missouri has also had the fringe benefit of helping him line his own pockets: When Bond used his influence to aid Kansas City Southern, he was also rewarding himself as a stockholder in the company.
Now Bond is squaring off against Democrat Nancy Farmer, the Missouri state treasurer. She figures to be badly outspent by her incumbent opponent, but is nonetheless an energetic campaigner.
Bond was elected governor of Missouri in 1972 at the age of 33, the youngest chief executive in the history of the Show Me state. He built a reputation as a moderate that would help him in later years, pushing affordable-housing programs and starting the state's Parents as Teachers program, which trains new parents in how best to raise their children. "Bond has been able and continues to be able as a candidate to avoid being typecast as a particularly conservative Republican," said Terry Jones, a political science professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. One veteran Missouri Democrat said, "The thing about Bond is, the less you know about him, the more inoffensive he is."
"Pork is a mighty fine diet for Missourians," a Bond spokesman told the nonpartisan, nonprofit Citizens Against Government Waste in 2002. "It is low in fat and high in jobs." Indeed, as a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee and the chairman of its subcommittee on VA/HUD-independent agencies, Bond has had a front-row seat at the federal trough. One of Bond's greatest hits is the $1 million he obtained this year for the Missouri Pork Producers Association, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. And the large sums he brings in for urban renewal, including $2.5 million in 2003 for the Applied Urban Research Institute, have helped carve inroads among Democrats. "He uses the appropriations process to buy friends," a Democratic operative explained matter-of-factly. Just last month, Bond's office announced a total of nearly $50 million in new federal spending for Missouri, not including $2 billion in national spending for veterans.
Bond's career has been a gyrating series of ups and downs. He lost reelection in 1976, but regained the Statehouse four years later. He took two years off after finishing that term before making a successful bid for the Senate in 1986, winning with 53 percent of the vote. Unlike other successful incumbents, however, Bond has not been able to broaden his support, winning with 52 percent in 1992 and 53 percent in 1998.
In the Senate, Bond has built a typical Republican record. In 2002, National Journal gave him an 84 percent economic conservative rating, a 57 percent social conservative mark and a 76 percent foreign policy conservative rating. He has been a reliable if unremarkable cog, supporting the Iraq war, for example, and opposing full funding for the No Child Left Behind Act.
Bond had a complicated relationship with the other Republican senator from Missouri, John Ashcroft, before Ashcroft was appointed attorney general. When President Clinton nominated distinguished black jurist Ronnie White to the federal bench, for example, Bond gave a warm, supportive statement at his confirmation hearing. But when the right-wing Ashcroft opposed White, Bond crumpled, joining in the vote against his nomination. Black leaders say that Bond had promised he would support White, an assertion Bond disputes. "He did not mislead us," the Rev. B.T. Rice, president of the St. Louis Clergy Association, told the Associated Press, "he literally lied to us."
