Rep. Ike Skelton (D) Elected 1976, 14th term
Born:	Dec. 20, 1931, Lexington
Home:	Lexington
Education:	Wentworth Military Acad. Jr. Col., 1949-51, U. of MO, A.B. 1953, LL.B. 1956
Religion:	Disciples of Christ
Marital Status:	married (Susie)
Elected  Office:	MO Senate, 1971-76.
Professional Career:	Lafayette Cnty. Prosecuting atty., 1957-60; MO Special Asst. Atty. Gen., 1961-63; Practicing atty., 1963-76.
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Missouri was the first state settled west of the Mississippi, and the folks who settled it were a picture of pioneer diversity. Virginians and other Southerners made their way to counties north of the Missouri River, while Germans settled around the still small capital city of Jefferson City. A taste of that diversity can be found in the Capitol, with its mural by Thomas Hart Benton, great-grandnephew and eponym of Missouri's first senator, who championed hard money and westward expansion for 30 years and lost his seat for opposing the expansion of slavery. The painting shows dance hall girls, black coal miners and a mother diapering an infant--all reminders that pioneer life was less homogeneous than many imagine.

The 4th Congressional District occupies much of this early-settled part of central and western Missouri. It includes Blue Springs and Oak Grove in Jackson County east of Kansas City, but the overall atmosphere here is rural and small-town, with political traditions dating back to the community's early days. The rural counties around Kansas City were full of pro-slavery-expansion Bushwhackers who rode across the Kansas line to thwart the Yankee Jayhawks, and these areas today vote Democratic. The German area around Jefferson City was anti-slavery and remains among the most Republican parts of Missouri, and the new resort areas around Lake of the Ozarks are mixed. The southern portion of the district, near Springfield, was Union country during the Civil War and Republican now. There are some big military bases here: Fort Leonard Wood in Pulaski County and Whiteman Air Force Base, near Knob Noster in Johnson County, from which B-2s took off and flew across the world to drop precision-targeted bombs in Afghanistan.

Much of this region is Truman country: Harry Truman was born in Barton County, at the southern end of the district, and lived in Independence, just a few miles from Blue Springs. He spent much of election night 1948, when just about everyone thought he would lose, in Excelsior Springs, on the border of Ray County, the district's one county north of the Missouri River. In his long life Truman spanned the the gaps between country and city, South and North: his mother could remember her house being attacked by Yankee soldiers, and she remained pro-Confederate even when her son was in the White House; he got his political start in urban Independence and Kansas City and desegregated the military services.

The congressman from the 4th District is Ike Skelton, who in many ways can be called a Truman Democrat; his father met Truman in 1928, when he was Lafayette County prosecutor and the future president was Jackson County judge, and they remained friends for life; his father took 17-year-old Ike to Washington for Truman's inaugural in 1949. Skelton is from a military family: his father served in the Navy, he and his brothers went to military academies and he has sons in the Army and Navy; a teenage bout with polio made him ineligible for military service. He grew up in Lexington, of old Missouri stock; he is a distant cousin through the Boone family of New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter. Skelton graduated from the University of Missouri and its law school and returned to Lexington to practice law. He became county prosecutor in 1957, at 25, and was elected to the Missouri Senate in 1970. In 1976 he ran for Congress and won rather easily; Bess Truman endorsed him. Skelton looks and votes like an old-fashioned rural Missouri Democrat: his voting record puts him near the midpoint of this Republican House on economics and foreign issues, slightly to the right on cultural issues. He supports the same expansive, assertive foreign and defense policies the preponderance of Democrats supported in the days of Truman.

Skelton is the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee where he has made great contributions to policy. He played a key role in passing the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986, which created the joint commands which have proved so successful in Iraq. He has said that the Clinton administration cut the military too much, as did Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, and he has criticized the current Bush administration for not seeking higher force levels. "At the present time, we do not have enough people in uniform to adequately protect American interests throughout the world," he wrote in May 2002. He has worked hard to improve housing and facilities for service members and their families and has proposed offering 18-month enlistments plus four years of Reserve duty to get more recruits. He warned the Clinton and Bush administrations that troops could be worn out by multiple deployments. He was reluctant to support sending troops to Bosnia in September 1995, and passed a resolution, 287-141, which called for strict neutrality in the peacekeeping effort. He supported the air war in the former Yugoslavia in March 1999. In 2000 he called for the Navy to supplement the fleet with smaller vessels that could be built in greater numbers. Missile defense is the one issue on which he says he has felt constrained by his party; in May 2001 he joined other Democrats in stressing that the technology doesn't work yet and that it is not sufficiently funded. "I'm not opposed to it at all. I just think we should take a deep breath and treat it like other weapons systems: don't rush to judgment."

But on the whole, Armed Services is one of the House's least partisan committees; most members are strong defense supporters and it usually reports bills with bipartisan support. Skelton is greatly respected by Republicans as well as Democrats on the committee. But the House as a whole is not always of the same opinion on military issues. "I have detected a growing cultural gap between military and civilian America," Skelton noted in 1997. "Fewer people today have direct contact with the military. I can tell you that as fewer sons and daughters wear the uniforms of our country, members of Congress receive less encouragement from voters in their districts to support a substantial military for our nation." In January 2002, after George W. Bush identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the axis of evil, Skelton noted, "We're going to go after these regimes. That's clear. Details are not included." He drew a historic parallel with the Barbary Pirates: "The American Navy and Marines stamped them out and stopped them. There are no more Barbary Pirates. That's the lesson that comes out of that." Yet he was cautious after Bush's September 12 speech at the United Nations. On October 9 he announced he would vote for the Iraq war resolution.

Naturally Skelton looks out for the interests of Fort Leonard Wood and Whiteman Air Force Base which, as he points out are both major bases with unique function unlikely to wind up on any base-closing list. He was instrumental in getting Whiteman, with its 12,400-foot runway, designated in 1987 as the home of the first wing of B-2s; the base had been used for the Minuteman II missile which was about to be phased out. His loyalty to Missouri only goes so far: in 1999, when other Missourians were trying to keep the F-15 line open in St. Louis County, Skelton said that he doubted any more F-15s would be built; he opposed ordering them in appropriations bills when they hadn't been authorized by Armed Services. He also worked for 10 years for the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Harry S Truman, commissioned in July 1998, and with Missourian Roy Blunt co-sponsored the 2000 law naming the State Department building after Truman. Skelton chaired the joint session of Congress held on Truman's 100th birthday in 1984 and criticized the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit for unfairly questioning Truman's motives toward the Japanese.

On non-military issues, Skelton tends to stick with other Democrats on taxes and economic issues, though he was one of only 20 Democrats who voted for trade promotion authority in 2001 and 2002: "For me it was the right thing to do. I represent a rural area. We have a lot of farms--a lot of soybeans, wheat and corn. And one-fourth of all that depends on foreign markets." In October 1998 he was one of 31 Democrats who voted for the Republican impeachment inquiry resolution. But he strongly criticized the Republicans for going ahead with the impeachment vote while Clinton's bombing of Iraq was going on, and voted against impeachment after being one of the last Democrats to announce his position.

Skelton's toughest race came in 1982, when he was redistricted in with a Republican incumbent; he won 55%-45%. He has won by very large margins in recent years; in 1999 citizens in Lexington and Lafayette Counties began raising money to build the Ike Skelton Museum of the American Armed Forces. It is widely assumed that when he retires, the 4th District, which voted 58% for George W. Bush in 2000, will elect a Republican to replace him.

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DC Office
2206 RHOB 20515, 202-225-2876; Web site: www.house.gov/skelton

State Offices
Blue Springs, 816-228-4242; Jefferson City, 573-635-3499; Lebanon, 417-532-7964; Sedalia, 660-826-2675.

Committees

• Armed Services (RMM of 29 D): Tactical Air & Land Forces.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	60	33	78	38	43	75	21	70	32	15	58
2001	50	--	67	43	--	--	25	64	64	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	56%	--	44%		59%	--	40%
Social	38%	--	61%		49%	--	50%
Foreign	43%	--	53%		60%	--	39%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts N 2. Limit Patients' Bill of Rights N 3. Campaign Finance Reform Y 4. Ban ANWR Development N 5. Faith-Based Charities Y 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts Y		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  8. Arm Commercial Pilots Y  9. Trade Promotion Authority Y 10. Bar Funds for Intl. Court Y 11. Authorize Force in Iraq Y 12. Deny Home. Sec. Dept. Union N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Ike Skelton (D)	142,204	68%	$596,705
	Jim Noland (R)	64,451	31%
	Other	3,583	2%
2002 primary	Ike Skelton (D)	unopposed
2000 general	Ike Skelton (D)	180,634	67%	$624,593
	Jim Noland (R)	84,406	31%	$11,256
	Other	4,849	2%
Prior winning percentages: 1998 (71%); 1996 (64%); 1994 (68%); 1992 (70%); 1990 (62%); 1988 (72%); 1986 (100%); 1984 (67%); 1982 (55%); 1980 (68%); 1978 (73%); 1976 (56%)

2000 presidential
	Bush (R)	147,694	58%
	Gore (D)	100,171	39%
	Other	6,024	2%
For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Fourth District, please see the Almanac 2000 online. Please note that these older returns reflect district lines as they existed prior to 2002 redistricting.

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: R +10
• District Size: 14,825 square miles
• Population in 2000: 621,690; 39.9% urban; 60.1% rural
• Median Household Income: $34,541; 12.1% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 31.9% blue collar; 51.4% white collar; 16.7% gray collar; 16.1% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 92.4% White, 3.2% Black, 0.6% Asian, 0.5% Amer. Indian, 0.1% Hawaiian, 1.3% Two+ races, 0.1% Other, 1.9% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 17.4% German, 11.0% USA, 8.6% Irish
• Click here for statewide demographic data.