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Gov. Nixon’s political future suddenly in doubt

The Columbian
Published: August 24, 2014, 5:00pm

ST. LOUIS — At the beginning of the month, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was in a position most politicians would envy.

As the moderate two-term Democratic governor of a Republican-leaning state, he could tout a stellar state credit rating, a scandal-free personal resume and a folksy persona that plays well in middle America. His one brief brush with the national spotlight — in the aftermath of the Joplin, Mo., tornado in 2011 — portrayed an effective and empathetic leader.

With two years left in his term-limited tenure as governor, he appeared to be poised for the national stage, with potential options including a U.S. Senate run or a Washington Cabinet position. He has been on national pundits’ lists of dark-horse, vice-presidential possibilities. There have been trips to Iowa and Colorado, and the attendant presidential murmurs.

Then came Ferguson.

As the tear gas clears from the civil strife that followed the Aug. 9 shooting death of Michael Brown, one of the few things that voices on all sides of the controversy appear to agree upon is that Nixon’s performance through the crisis was unsteady and flawed.

Protesters and African-American leaders say he engaged too slowly and tepidly, waiting days to visit the region as violence grew and then flailing for the right response. Police supporters say he has shown outright bias against the officer involved, as when he called for “vigorous prosecution” before knowing whether there would be criminal charges.

Both sides have decried his shifting, sometimes contradictory strategy, with the police presence first being “demilitarized” and then being augmented with the National Guard, and a curfew being imposed and lifted two nights later. He has infuriated both the supporters and detractors of embattled St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch, offering him virtually no public support against allegations of bias, but refusing demands to replace him with a special prosecutor.

“He is getting criticized from all sides,” Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Rothenberg Political Report, said in an interview. “A Democrat from Missouri isn’t a bad position if you are coming out (onto the national scene) with great strength, but the attention he has received over the past week has been consistently between critical and bad.”

How that bodes for Nixon’s political future is an open question. Two years represents an epoch in national politics. But virtually no one thinks it works in his favor.

“Nixon has time to reshape the future … if he was planning to pivot to the national stage,” Donna Brazile, the longtime Democrat strategist and commentator who ran Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, told the Post-Dispatch in emailed comments. But, she added: “Nixon waited too long to show up and when he came forward, he didn’t have any of the answers that the community demanded.”

Others on the national stage have been less diplomatic.

“Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has VP aspirations,” tweeted the Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas, to his 120,000 followers. “His handling of (hashtag)Ferguson ends that conclusively.”

Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and top adviser to Mitt Romney in his past two presidential campaigns, asserted that, for many Americans, “their first introduction to Jay Nixon is a negative one. That disengagement and indecision has been commented on by many people.”

A New York Times national poll released Thursday found that only 32 percent of Americans were satisfied with Nixon’s response to events in Ferguson, with 34 percent saying they were dissatisfied, and 34 percent saying they didn’t know.

The phone poll of 1,025 adults nationwide also found that African-Americans were less happy about Nixon’s performance than the general public, with almost half dissatisfied with how he has handled it and less than one-quarter satisfied.

Race long has been a political conundrum for Nixon.

As Missouri’s attorney general for 16 years, he alienated black leaders when he tried to end court involvement in the St. Louis Public Schools and phase out the voluntary busing program. While he moved to patch up those relationships when he first ran for governor in 2008, they are still somewhat strained. Today, there are no Cabinet-level African-Americans in his administration, a fact he admitted uncomfortably in an interview with KMOX-AM last week, with the quick follow-up that “we have a lot of sub-Cabinet (officials) and judges” who are black.

“The governor doesn’t care about black people or the black community unless it’s politically expedient,” Missouri state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a Democrat, told MSNBC, summing up a common criticism among some black leaders in Missouri.

But Nixon has undeniably taken pains to reach out to the black community during the Ferguson crisis, speaking at black churches and talking about poverty and justice. His appointment of the Missouri Highway Patrol to lead security efforts in Ferguson, with State Trooper Capt. Ronald S. Johnson, who is African-American and a native of the Ferguson area, at the helm was an unabashed olive branch to the community.

That outreach also was evident during an interview with the Post-Dispatch last week. When asked whether he thought the protesters had accomplished anything, Nixon first separated the peaceful protesters from what he called “the lawbreakers.” He then proceeded to laud the peaceful ones in language that wouldn’t have sounded out of place coming from Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson.

“The protesters certainly have (accomplished something) . The eyes of the world are on us,” said Nixon. He credited them with shining a spotlight on “the challenging issue of our times – what can we do about poverty, education, race . the difficult relationships between law enforcement and communities, especially some of the urban communities … these are big, deep issues, and the protesters are forcing all policymakers to think about them . to dig deeper.”

While those kinds of sentiments may help, Nixon has struggled to effectively convey them — particularly under the unfamiliar glare of a national audience. When off-script, he tends to speak very quickly, in long strings of sometimes-unrelated sentence fragments, punctuated with false starts and awkward pauses. Missouri journalists and audiences are used to it. The rest of America got its first earful of it over the past two weeks.

“The first (news conference) he had was atrocious . with all the ‘uhhs’ and ‘huhs’ and ‘duhs,'” said Steve Glorioso, a longtime political strategist and media consultant in Kansas City, Mo., who works for Democrats. He added: “In fairness to him, I’m sure he was very concerned that one wrong word could exacerbate the situation.”

*Anyone who watched Nixon’s handling of the aftermath of the Joplin tornado damage three years ago might have a hard time reconciling that politician with this one. He drew widespread plaudits for his role overseeing recovery efforts in the storm-wracked town in May 2011.

But a tornado is not a racially charged killing.

In Joplin, Nixon was adept at solving “structural problems,” said Democratic state Rep. Jeremy LaFaver. “You go in and talk about building and money. But issues related to race and poverty, it requires a level of diplomacy and leadership that isn’t necessarily the same skill set you would need in response to a natural disaster.”

Even so, no one says the governor’s task – protecting the right of angry protesters to have their say while ensuring public safety – was easy.

“There’s no playbook for this,” said Democratic state Sen. Gina Walsh, who was part of a small group of St. Louis-area legislators who met with Nixon at a Ferguson coffeehouse on Thursday.

“I think he has an impossible task in front of him,” Walsh said. “This isn’t about something that happened two weeks ago. This is all about racism, education, socioeconomics.”

Other defenders include Democratic state Rep. Courtney Curtis, who represents part of Ferguson. “There were some tough calls that had to be made, and he (Nixon) made them,” Curtis said. “And ultimately, we’re seeing results from that. This situation could’ve been a whole lot worse.”

Nixon’s office, when asked for a comment on this story, responded with a written statement: “The Governor’s attention has been and will remain focused on making things better for the people of Ferguson and the entire region – not politics.”

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