Party Crasher

Since Congresswoman Karen McCarthy’s drunken fall on a Washington, D.C., escalator in March, chatter about her political future — or possible lack thereof — has been growing louder. The tumble alerted the press and Kansas City’s newspaper-reading public to a problem McCarthy couldn’t deny.

With the gash in her head healing, McCarthy pleaded for forgiveness, labeled herself an alcoholic and spent a month drying out at a clinic in Arizona.

According to a May 21 story in The Kansas City Star, McCarthy is back on the job in Washington, “working to restore balance to her daily routine” and looking very pretty. “People say I’m glowing, I look beautiful, I’m smiling all the time,” she told reporter Steve Kraske. “This has been an extraordinary journey, a very exciting and positive journey for me.” Kraske reported that McCarthy told him she was attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

But the scarlet AA letters that McCarthy has sewn onto her power suit strike some political observers — and recovering alcoholics — as disingenuous. One of the tenets of the “fellowship,” as its participants call AA, is a ban on naming the group publicly.

“The traditions say not to make this a public display,” says one Kansas City political aide who also is a recovering alcoholic. “I would hope it isn’t just for public relations and that she’s serious about her sobriety.”

McCarthy tells the Pitch that she doesn’t remember her exact conversation with Kraske, but she insists she’s respectful of AA’s tradition of anonymity. “I talk about my ‘journey,’ that’s how I reference it,” she says. “What I do recall from the conversation was [Kraske’s] honesty and genuineness. Who said ‘AA’ out loud, I don’t know.”

Other questions surround McCarthy’s public meltdown. The day before the Star story, a much different account landed on congressional desks. On May 20, the weekly insider D.C. newspaper The Hill ran a front-page story about how morale in McCarthy’s office had “reached an all-time low” following her return from rehab. (The next day’s Star story included a paragraph acknowledging The Hill‘s account.)

The Hill reported that McCarthy had repeatedly called her D.C. staff from rehab to blame them for her drinking problem and that the harsh words had continued upon her return. “She’s back to screaming at her staff,” the paper said, quoting an unnamed Democratic source. “Everyone’s paranoid about being fired.”

McCarthy tells the Pitch that she called her staff from Arizona “when there were issues [she] needed to discuss with them.” She granted Kraske an interview on the same day The Hill published its story, though she says she reads neither The Hill nor its competitor, Roll Call.

She has reason to avoid them. Last June, Roll Call reported that “two sources familiar with the scene” had spotted McCarthy “on the House steps ‘screaming her brains out’ at her chief of staff, Phil Scaglia.”

“You don’t care about me!” she reportedly yelled. “My staff doesn’t care about me! Nobody cares about me!”

Now McCarthy is warding off charges of ethics violations concerning $25,000 she agreed to pay Fenn & King Communications for a “management and operational audit” of her office. (The political consulting firm stuck around to help McCarthy’s staff during her desert retreat.)

McCarthy says she planned to pay the company through her campaign fund, which she believed other members of Congress had done in the past. But after she learned that House members are not supposed to use campaign funds for official government business, McCarthy issued a press release saying she’d pay half the contract through her congressional office budget.

“With my seniority and with my committee assignments, it’s becoming more and more important for me to have those ‘best practices’ in place,” she tells the Pitch, referring to Fenn & King’s contract to enhance her office’s efficiency and redesign her Web site.

But that might not wash, either. House rules prevent representatives from hiring consultants through their congressional budgets, and McCarthy’s strategy was criticized by Ohio Representative Bob Ney, the Republican chairman of the House Administration Committee, which approves such expenses. The rules prohibit McCarthy from spending tax dollars for management or legislative purposes, Ney’s spokesman Brian Walsh tells the Pitch.

McCarthy says Ney didn’t understand the nature of the contract. “He was given a hypothetical of consulting rather than contract services,” she says. She adds that her office has clarified the situation for Ney. “We are awaiting his word,” she says.

Back in Missouri, McCarthy’s tribulations have earned her an increasingly rapt audience.

Republicans are letting themselves dream that they might actually defeat her in next year’s election. Before last fall, Democrats could count on McCarthy holding her office as long as she wanted it — Missouri’s 5th Congressional District has been dominated by Democrats since before World War II. “The wheels are falling off quickly, it seems,” says Scott Baker, spokesman for the Missouri Republican Party. “They’ve got this momentum heading toward disaster.”

In recent memory, Baker and his fellow Republicans have pretended that the 5th District didn’t even exist. Democrats ruled the territory that covers most of Jackson County and a sliver of Cass County, leading Baker to believe his party’s campaign dollars would be better spent elsewhere.

“We have, over the last several years, taken an approach if you’re going to lose, just lose,” Baker says. Now, though, “[The 5th District] has gone from the back burner. It’s transferred quickly to the front burner.”

For their part, Democrats have begun discussing a primary challenge to unseat McCarthy — though so far none of them will admit that such discussions are serious or sanctioned by the party establishment.

McCarthy says primary opponents would be nothing new.

“I’ve always had primary challenges,” she says. “The primary is the challenge.”

But except for her first election, when McCarthy emerged from a pack of fourteen Democrats, she has had little competition. In her last two primaries, she faced restaurant cook Charles Lindsey.

The names being mentioned this time are much better known. They include Jackson County Legislator Scott Burnett and Kansas City City Council members Troy Nash and Jim Rowland.

Burnett says friends have asked him whether he’d be interested, but tells the Pitch he doesn’t want the job. “I’ve been in D.C. and worked in the White House,” he says. “Being one of 435 [congressional representatives] is not something I want to do.” He says he doesn’t know of anyone who is actively seeking someone to try to unseat McCarthy.

Burnett says he’s heard Nash’s name more than once. “I’ve had a number of people saying they think we ought to have someone who better represents the district,” Burnett says. “But I don’t know if anybody seriously will challenge.”

Nash won’t comment on his own interest in the seat, but he acknowledges he’s hearing the same buzz as his Democratic colleagues. “The rumor mill is just totally out of control,” he says.

Rowland says he’s heard Nash’s name along with his own and a few others: Jackson County Executive Katheryn Shields, Jackson County Legislator Dan Tarwater and even Scaglia, McCarthy’s ranking aide. (Shields says through her spokesman that she is “absolutely not running for Congress.” Tarwater didn’t return a message left at his county office. Scaglia declined to comment.)

Rowland won’t say how many people have asked him if he’ll run. “Lots. It’s been a significant number of people.” Although he won’t say who’s trying to recruit him, he acknowledges that calls haven’t come just from Kansas City — they’ve also come from Jefferson City (where the state Democratic Party maintains its headquarters) and from Washington.

He’s not surprised. Like Nash, he says, he fits the profile: “a young Democrat who’s in elected office who is now term-limited out.”

But all the trolling for a possible new candidate stretches an informal honor code among Jackson County Democrats, who rarely challenge incumbent members of their own party. “I do sense eyebrows have gone up, way, way up,” says political consultant Steve Glorioso. “If you’re really calculating, you say, ‘Is she damaged goods?’ I don’t think so yet. The fact is, it’s not to that point yet.”

Rowland says he has supported McCarthy in past elections and hasn’t thought about running. “I think there’s a lot of question as to whether or not Karen will run,” he says. And any challenger, he notes, will have to ask him- or herself a tough question: Would I want to be part and parcel to dividing the party?