This is the first of two stories about the records of the candidates for Missouri's open U.S. Senate seat. Next Sunday, a look at Democrat Robin Carnahan's tenure as secretary of state.
WASHINGTON • Running for Congress in 1996, Roy Blunt was thinking ahead. He dipped into his campaign fund to send donations to 14 GOP congressional hopefuls around the country, all but one of whom claimed victory.
When freshman orientation in Washington rolled around, most of the winners were content to shake a few hands and tour the Capitol. Not Blunt.
Appealing to new members he'd cultivated, Blunt won election as freshman representative on the Republican Steering Committee. In that job, he was able to win friends by promoting first-term members to desirable committee slots.
"A lot of us were overwhelmed at being new members of Congress. You have to get an office, get a staff," recalled Rep. John Shimkus, R-Collinsville, who came to Washington in Blunt's class.
"Roy? He was already asking, 'Who's who?'" Shimkus said.
From the start of his congressional career, Blunt was intent on climbing the ladder. He'd been Missouri's secretary of state and lost a bid for governor. Entering Congress at 47, he wanted this chapter of his political career to be special.
Blunt knew instinctively how to build alliances and work across the aisle with Democrats, colleagues in both parties say. He honed his skills at raising money for himself and for others. He recognized levers of power in Congress and pursued them.
"I don't like idleness very well," Blunt said of his maneuvering. "I can usually figure out how to get something done."
Blunt's tactical approach paved the way to distinction: He rose to become the GOP whip — his party's No. 3 job — more quickly than any House member since the 1930s. Then Blunt joined the ranks of Richard Gephardt, Champ Clark and James Lloyd — the short list of Missourians in the last century to become House leaders.
His fundraising prowess and alliances he built during nearly 14 years in Washington have propelled Blunt, 60, in the race for the Missouri's Senate seat opening with the retirement of Christopher "Kit" Bond.
But his immersion in Congress and associations over the years also add up to a vulnerability in his contest with Robin Carnahan, the Democratic nominee, in a year when the label "Washington insider" is like a scarlet letter for incumbents.
Leadership bound
That steering committee slot helped Blunt snare a plum seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, a powerful panel that handles matters from oil to consumer protection to steroids in baseball.
On and off that committee over the years, Blunt used it as a platform to press the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce requirements for anti-pollution "boutique fuels" and, more recently, as a leading foe of climate change legislation that remains stalled in Congress.
From his earliest days in Washington, Blunt angled to join GOP leadership. He volunteered for tasks, almost becoming "a nuisance," as former Rep. Tom DeLay, of Texas, a House GOP power broker, once joked. Early in Blunt's second term, DeLay rewarded his eagerness, putting him on the whip team in charge of rounding up votes.
Blunt was known as DeLay's protégé, like-minded but smoother, and became the Texan's chief deputy. When DeLay advanced to House majority leader in 2003, Blunt inherited his whip position, No. 3 in the GOP hierarchy.
With his star affixed to DeLay's, Blunt, like DeLay, became known for connections with lobbyists. DeLay's departure from leadership under a cloud in 2005 left Blunt on two rungs of the GOP leadership ladder at once during the administration of President George W. Bush, acting as majority leader even as he retained his whip position.
Leadership jobs can rearrange members' priorities. But by most accounts, Blunt held fast to his conservative moorings. He'd demonstrated early in his House career where he resided on the political spectrum: He sponsored a balanced budget requirement and was an early backer of legislation for partial privatization of Social Security. He came up short in an early quest to impose limits on terms in Congress, a pet issue of his predecessor in his Eighth District seat, Mel Hancock.
Over the course of his career, Blunt tallied sterling ratings from conservatives and business groups. He spoke often at the weekly House conservatives' luncheon founded by Paul Weyrich, the late conservative activist and commentator. Blunt maintained strong alliances with ideologues such as Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., even as he riled financial hawks in 2008 helping to engineer legislation authorizing the $700 billion bailout for the financial system.
"Once our guys become leadership, they're no longer our guys. No one in the conservative movement has ever said that to my knowledge about Roy Blunt," Pence said in an interview.
Blunt had the challenge of operating as a leader with narrow Republican majorities — fewer than a dozen seats for two terms. Those tiny margins tested Blunt's skills of persuasion and put a premium on working across the aisle.
"Part of my job was knowing Republican members better than anybody else in Washington, D.C., and knowing Democrats better than any Republicans knew Democrats," Blunt said in an interview.
Signature achievement
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., has worked closely with Blunt, and the two traveled together on congressional business in the Middle East. In 2007, Blunt and Hoyer partnered in the task of persuading skeptics to go along with amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with wiretapping and other provisions that sparked worries among civil libertarians. They succeeded.
In an interview, Hoyer recalled how Blunt also "worked hard" rounding up votes for the financial industry bailout, otherwise known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Hoyer said he was pulling for Carnahan in the Senate race but had praise for Blunt, remarking that the House might have operated in more bipartisan fashion had Blunt climbed even higher in the GOP's leadership.
"The thing about Roy is that he doesn't play political games," Hoyer said. "I think he's more inclined to work on substantive issues as opposed to simply being political."
Many in his party found Blunt's easygoing style a relief after the pressure tactics of DeLay, nicknamed "The Hammer" for cause. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, of Cape Girardeau, part of a shrinking bloc of House GOP moderates, welcomed Blunt's approach in instances in which she opposed her party.
"He never tried to make me feel guilty, and some of these guys will do that, let me tell you," she said.
In 2004, the growing specter of methamphetamine labs in Blunt's southwestern Missouri district propelled him on a legislative quest that would become a signature achievement. His aim was to impose curbs on the sale of over-the-counter cold remedies used to manufacturer meth, a plague in rural America that many in Congress were slower than Blunt to recognize.
The legislation had opposition, an instance where Blunt found himself on the opposite side of retail and drug lobbyists. It took on further complication by getting amended to unrelated legislation authorizing the anti-terrorism Patriot Act.
Finally, in March 2006, the Combat Meth Act, sponsored by Blunt and then-Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., won final Senate passage after making some concessions to retailers.
That success may have provided a tonic for Blunt after a setback a month earlier: He was upset by Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, in the election for House majority leader, the job Blunt had in acting capacity and expected to hold permanently.
Blunt went into the caucus the favorite, but uneasiness filled the room. Republicans were reeling from scandals, among them DeLay's indictment in Texas on campaign finance charges, and suspected rightly that their decade-long control of the House would end after the next election. Blunt outpolled Boehner decisively in the first round of voting in a three-candidate race.
Blunt, usually the master tactician, apparently was so confident that he forgot a second-round strategy. Boehner prevailed and now stands to become House Speaker if Republicans recapture the chamber in the November elections.
After that closed-door vote, Blunt remarked that in rounding up votes, he'd made it a point to praise Boehner.
"I may have overdone that a bit," he said.
Money politics
If Congress were a casino, Blunt would have moved swiftly to the high-stakes tables.
Early in his second term, he set up a leadership PAC, a relatively recent device gaining popularity among the most ambitious members of Congress. These entities function to spread campaign funds to friends and colleagues, a surefire way to build political alliances. They are funded primarily by corporate PACs and have fewer rules than re-election committees on personal use and expenditures, hence their appeal.
Blunt named his committee "Rely on Your Beliefs" and proceeded to rely on insurance, oil and other industry PACs to raise $146,000 in 1999. By 2002, his PAC cracked $1 million and would pull in more than $7 million over the years.
Blunt devoted considerable effort to raising money, pulling in $22 million over the years, $9.9 million from PACs, according to a tally by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. Blunt's office was involved with the so-called K Street project, an initiative begun by Delay before Blunt was elected to pressure Washington lobbying firms to hire Republicans and, in return, reward them with access.
The Carnahan campaign cites a USA Today study during a six-month period of 2009 that labeled Blunt the biggest recipient in Congress of lobbyist donations, with more than $300,000 in receipts in that time frame. The Center for Responsive Politics says other members received more in combined individual lobbyist and lobbyist PAC contributions. The center stopped tallying the data last year, calling the filings unreliable.
James Thurber, who directs American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies in Washington, led a four-year study examining lobbying ethics for a business-led organization during Blunt's heyday as a GOP leader.
"I think the Republican leadership during that time, especially Tom DeLay, pushed the limits of what I call the 'iron law of reciprocity' — I'll help you and you help me. I look at Roy Blunt as part of that," Thurber said in an interview. When pressed, Thurber added: "I'm not saying he (Blunt) did anything corrupt or unethical."
Blunt is hardly alone operating aggressively in a system where success comes from building alliances, lobbying is ceaseless and the money chase seldom stops. Fundraising is especially critical for leaders trying to keep their party in power.
Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton who wrote an authoritative book on Congress, said that people tend to "cherry-pick scandals" they focus on in a system heavily dependent on money and influence.
"But I think there are certain cases that are more egregious than others, like DeLay's, where individuals take a problematic system and abuse it beyond what many voters are comfortable with," he said.
Bond, asked about Blunt's fundraising and lobbyist connections, replied that raising money was a fact of life in Congress. Bond gave Blunt his start in politics in 1973 by appointing him Greene County Clerk. "Everybody gets funding unless they're millionaires or billionaires. The secret is, you appeal to people who agree with your policies. But if they want a special favor? No," Bond said.
In 2003, Blunt appeared to some of his GOP colleagues to be dispensing a favor in an episode being recalled in the Senate campaign. Soon after winning his No. 3 leadership slot, Blunt tried to attach a provision benefiting Philip Morris USA, a contributor, to homeland security legislation. The wording, stripped by other GOP leaders when it was discovered, would have benefited Philip Morris by placing limitations on online tobacco sales and marketing of contraband cigarettes.
Later that year, Blunt married Abigail Perlman, a lobbyist for Altria Group, Philip Morris' parent company.
In an interview, Blunt talked about perceptions of his lobbyist associations and what he regarded as unfair criticism of something that amounted to "an internal struggle" seven years ago. "It depends on whether it's the lobbyists you agree with or that you don't agree with. The lobby of the Boy Scouts or all these charities when I passed the Charitable Giving Act, they (his critics) obviously think those lobbyists are just fine," he said.
"I never saw anybody get more criticism for something that didn't happen," he said of the tobacco episode.
