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Missouri: Senior Senator Sen. Christopher (Kit) Bond (R) Last Updated July 14, 2003
Christopher Bond was first elected to statewide office in 1970 and was first elected to the Senate in 1986. Bond grew up in the town of Mexico, Missouri, where his family were part owners of the largest business, A.P. Green, makers of heat-resistant bricks, which was sold to another firm in 1998. He graduated from Princeton and the University of Virginia Law School, then clerked for Judge Elbert Tuttle, one of the great pioneers on civil rights in the Fifth Circuit in Atlanta. He returned to Missouri, practiced law and ran for Congress in 1968, at age 29, and narrowly lost. He was elected state auditor in 1970 and was elected governor at 33 in 1972, and became one of the youngest governors in the nation's history. He lost in an upset to Democrat Joseph Teasdale in 1976 and won a comeback victory against Teasdale in 1980. As governor, Bond pushed reorganization, open meetings, merit hiring and campaign finance in his first term; he wrestled with fiscal problems, crime and early childhood education in his second term. After two years in private life he ran for the Senate against Harriett Woods, who had come close to beating Bond's longtime ally, then-Senator John Danforth, in 1982. Woods ran a three-part ad showing a farmer breaking into tears as he and his wife told Woods about their foreclosure and named Bond as a board member of the insurance company that foreclosed; evidently this struck voters as either demagoguery or an invasion of privacy, and Woods fell in the polls. Bond won, 53%-47%. Bond has a moderate voting record in the Senate. He has usually worked behind the scenes, trying to forge bipartisan consensus. He was the chief Republican sponsor of the Family and Medical Leave Act, vetoed by George H.W. Bush and signed by Bill Clinton. He has been the lead Republican senator on housing, starting on the Banking Committee and now as chairman of the VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee. There he has worked in bipartisan fashion with ranking Democrat Barbara Mikulski, funding the space program in which she takes an interest and projects affecting Missouri. Bond has sponsored many amendments aiding inner city organizations and encouraging small businesses in troubled urban areas and has worked cooperatively with many black community leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City, to the point that Kansas City's mayor declined to endorse his Democratic opponent in 1998. When Citizens Against Government Waste named Bond as the number six promoter of pork barrel projects between 1995 and 2002, a Bond aide replied, "Senator Bond always said pork is a mighty fine diet for Missouri, low in fat and high in jobs." He has opposed companies and European nations which have sought to ban genetically modified food, of which the chief producer is St. Louis-based Monsanto, and has sought tougher FDA regulation of compounded medicines in pharmacies. On the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he has worked hard to keep in operation the F-15 production line at Boeing's (formerly McDonnell Douglas's) plant next to the St. Louis airport. Bond objected vigorously when the Air Force said it would quit buying F-15s and looked for other customers. In 1999 and 2000 he got $700 million for the purchase of 10 F-15s over the objections of the Clinton administration. He has made numerous trips to South Korea since 1989 to promote the plane and at one point warned the Koreans that "very unfortunate things could happen" to their relationship with the U.S. if they bought European planes. He was overjoyed in April 2002 when Boeing announced that South Korea would buy 40 F-15s, keeping the production line open at least till 2007, and he was pleased when Boeing won a $42 million contract for the Air Force's Programmable Armament Control Set Production Process. Other Missouri interests have prompted Bond initiatives. He was the co-sponsor with Carl Levin of the amendment, passed 62-38 in March 2002 that delayed any increase in CAFE auto mileage standards for two years. In January 2003 he became chairman of the Environment and Public Works Subcommittee that has jurisdiction over reauthorization of highway and other transportation spending. He held hearings around Missouri on road issues in 2002. Another important local issue is the level of the Missouri River. Bond opposed Clinton administration proposals to allow a spring rise by releasing water at Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota; the idea was to restore the natural flow of the river to protect endangered species like the least tern and pallid sturgeon. Bond argued that this would cause floods in the spring and low water levels in the summer and fall and destroy Missouri's barge industry. In 2000 Bond inserted a rider in an appropriation preventing the Army Corps of Engineers from spending any money to restore the natural flow; in September 2000 Bill Clinton announced he would veto the bill unless the amendment was removed. So it was, but with political cost: This controversy, invisible nationally, was big news in Missouri and may have had something to do with the fact that Al Gore lost the state to George W. Bush. In 2001 and 2002 his riders stayed in the bill, much to the irritation of South Dakota's senators. An avid fisherman, he sponsored a law to encourage voluntary activity to clean up rivers; it would create watershed councils which would give grants to help farmers establish buffer zones, fence off livestock, and reduce runoff of fertilizers and farm chemicals without onerous regulations. Bond's Senate suite includes Harry Truman's old Senate office. Bond got his political start as part of a group of young reform-minded Republicans--his former Senate colleague John Danforth was another--working against the Democratic political establishment in Missouri, and he can be a strong partisan on occasion. On election night 2000 he was furious when St. Louis Democrats persuaded a state judge to order the polls opened three extra hours in the city; an appeals court overturned the order within 45 minutes, but Bond, who charged that Democrats tried to keep the St. Louis polls open till midnight to defeat him in 1972, said the election had been stolen, and indeed Republicans Jim Talent and John Ashcroft lost by narrow margins. He was further outraged when 3,000 registration cards were dropped off at the city's election board, filled out in the names of people who were dead or already registered to vote; one carried the name of Ritzy Meckler, a Springer spaniel whom Bond later brought to press conferences. Even Democrats admitted there were irregularities in St. Louis; in April 2001 Governor Bob Holden removed the entire election board. In Washington Bond became heavily involved in the election procedures bill that was an obvious item of business after the 2000 Florida controversy. The centerpiece of the bill was its national standards for voting equipment coupled with $3.5 million in federal aid and statewide voter registries. Bond argued that the motor voter act had installed and kept on the rolls many names of those not entitled to vote, and insisted on a provision requiring mail-in registrants to vote in person the first time they vote and to present a driver's license or photo identification. He negotiated this with lead Democrat Christopher Dodd; "I've told him [Dodd] that I will agree with his concept that we need to make it easier to vote, if he agrees with my concept that we need to make it harder to cheat." But in February 2002 Charles Schumer and Ron Wyden proposed an amendment dropping the photo identification requirement; Schumer said that lots of people in New York don't have driver's licenses and Wyden said the requirement would destroy Oregon's mail-in voting system. The Schumer-Wyden amendment passed 51-46. Bond said it was a deal-breaker and launched a filibuster. A deal was made: Democrats abandoned Schumer-Wyden in return for making the new provisional voting system, setting to one side disputed ballots like those in St. Louis in 2000, effective at the same time in 2004 as Bond's anti-fraud provision. The issue resurfaced in September in conference committee, but the bill was eventually passed in October 2002. Bond was reelected 52%-45% in 1992, a year in which Missouri Republicans lost every other major race. In 1998, against Attorney General Jay Nixon, he was reelected 53%-44%. This was a raucous race in which Nixon was attacked by black Democrats for arguing the state's case against school busing orders in St. Louis and Kansas City; Bond built on the work he had done in inner cities and won 33% of the black vote. He lost metro St. Louis by only 49%-48% and carried metro Kansas City (where he lived between his two terms as governor) 51%-45%; he carried rural Missouri 57%-39%. He may have lost some of his support among blacks when he joined John Ashcroft in 1999 in opposing the judicial nomination of Justice Ronnie White; in December 2002 he had little to say in public about Trent Lott's comments at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, but in a private meeting told Lott he should resign as majority leader. Bond has naturally been on national Democrats' target list for 2004. In his three Senate races he has not won more than 53% of the vote, and of Republican senators up in 2004 only two won with smaller percentages in 1998. But in mid-2003 no prominent Missouri Democrat had stepped forward to run. Governor Bob Holden was running for reelection and Auditor Claire McCaskill was mulling a race against him. Attorney General Jay Nixon had already lost two Senate races. Lieutenant Governor Joe Maxwell announced he would not run. Congressman Dick Gephardt was running for president. Bond is an indefatigable campaigner and fundraiser and seems well positioned for the race. But Missouri is a closely divided state, and this could be a seriously contested seat.
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