Controversial Senator Pulls No Punches in Fight to Keep Seat

“I’m really quiet and shy,” claims Carol Moseley-Braun. “I just had to get this ferocious because of this job.”

Most people who have seen Moseley-Braun in action during her nearly six years as a Democratic senator from Illinois would have trouble believing that she was ever in the least bashful. But nobody doubts her ferocity, particularly when it comes to holding on to her job in the Senate, where she is widely considered to be the most vulnerable of all Democratic incumbents seeking reelection this fall.

“She is a born fighter,” Jimmy Smits, the poker-faced detective of TV’s “NYPD Blue,” told a recent Moseley-Braun campaign rally in Chicago as he urged fellow Latinos to support her and “make our brown power Braun power.”

Moseley-Braun attracts the support of celebrities like Smits because she herself is a celebrity, the first black female senator in U.S. history. In 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman, when the Anita Faye Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy brought feminist political juices to a boil, Moseley-Braun’s election transformed her into a powerful symbol of achievement for members of her gender as well as her race.

But since then Moseley-Braun’s image has lost some of its sheen, and now she is struggling against problems she appears to have created for herself, ranging from accusations of Medicaid chiseling and campaign law violations to charges of casting her Senate vote to help a corporate benefactor and hobnobbing with an African dictator.

The outcome of Moseley-Braun’s battle to overcome these controversies will help determine the future balance of power in the Senate, where Republicans are hoping to expand their 55-45 majority closer to filibuster-proof proportions of 60 to 40.

But in broader terms, this Illinois Senate contest will test how much importance voters place on controversies about a politician’s extracurricular conduct in judging performance in office, much the same issue raised by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation of President Clinton.

Like Clinton, Moseley-Braun rejects charges that she is at fault for the controversies dogging her career, blaming instead harsh treatment by the media. “If I had a bigger press staff, I might have a different image,” she said.

And her supporters echo the arguments made by Clinton backers that her good works in office far overshadow any indiscretions committed off the job.

“The real issues are what she is doing for black women, what she is doing for single women, what she is doing for families,” said Portland Reed, a recent law school graduate who attended the Chicago rally. “Those are the only things that matter.”

But that’s not the way Moseley-Braun’s Republican challenger, 37-year-old state Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, sees it. “The most important qualification for a U.S. senator is that people be able to have faith in the ethics and judgment of their U.S. senator,” he told a reporter. “I think she is vulnerable on questions of ethics and judgment.”

And in talking to his supporters thronging Peoria’s River Station restaurant, Fitzgerald recalled his opponent’s visits to Nigeria, most recently in 1996, when she outraged human rights advocates by suggesting the United States should take a less negative view of the country’s strongman, Gen. Sani Abacha, who died this summer. “I think if Carol Moseley-Braun over the last six years had spent more time in Peoria and less time in Nigeria, she would have understood better the needs of people in this state,” Fitzgerald said.

Critics point out that Moseley-Braun’s former campaign manager and ex-fiance, Kgosie Matthews, worked for a firm that represented the government of Nigeria, although he had left that job before 1996.

For her part, Moseley-Braun charges that there is a double standard on international policy. “If other senators can travel to places like China,” whose government is also criticized for its repressive policies, “what makes Nigeria so different?”

Other criticism of Moseley-Braun has been more personal, such as the flap over the disclosure in the midst of her 1992 campaign that she and her siblings had shared a $28,750 timber royalty inheritance owed to her mother, who was a Medicaid patient in a nursing home. Blaming this on a misunderstanding, Moseley-Braun ultimately paid $15,239 to the state to defray Medicaid payments made to cover her mother’s medical expenses.

Then came a Federal Election Commission audit of her campaign’s financing operations that found about $85,000 in excessive contributions. The commission took no further action, and as Moseley-Braun points out, imposed no fine. But a commission staffer speaking on background said the decision not to investigate further was due in part to a shortage of staff, adding, “We did not give them a clean bill of health.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice in 1995 twice turned down requests by the Internal Revenue Service to conduct a criminal investigation of charges that about $280,000 in Moseley-Braun campaign funds reportedly had been used to pay for such things as her personal travel, clothing and jewelry. When news of the Justice Department decision leaked out, the nonpartisan Congressional Accountability Project called upon Justice to investigate whether “improper political intervention” had influenced the decision not to investigate.

Like most traditional Democrats, Moseley-Braun depicts herself as a champion of the average working family, citing her sponsorship of Clinton’s plan for public school rehabilitation, her support for reinstating the tax deduction for college student loans and her opposition to raising the retirement age for Social Security.

But at least one key vote she cast went in the other direction, critics say. They cite her 1996 Senate Finance Committee vote to allow the drug giant Glaxo-Wellcome to retain proprietary rights to the big-selling ulcer medicine Zantac. The provision, according to former Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), among others, helped cost consumers millions of dollars they could have saved by buying a generic version of the drug. Moseley-Braun was the only Democrat to vote in favor of Glaxo, and her critics pointed out that she had received a $15,000 honorarium from the company in 1992 just before she was sworn in as a senator.

“There rarely is a vote you make that someone cannot stretch the cord and find a relationship,” said Moseley-Braun about accusations that she had a conflict of interest on the issue. She pointed out that ending Glaxo’s patent would have required an amendment to the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. “I did not think it made sense to open up GATT over an internecine fight here at home.”

Whatever the merits of these various controversies, they have combined to make certain that in this campaign, Moseley-Braun herself is the dominant issue.

Fitzgerald acknowledged as much when he told his supporters in Peoria: “The greatest single gift we could give to the voters of Illinois in 1998 would be to unseat and defeat Carol Moseley-Braun.”

His chances of doing that, most analysts believe, depend heavily on his ability to persuade the nominally Republican “soccer moms” in the Chicago suburbs, many of whom voted for Moseley-Braun in 1992, to return to the GOP fold.

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To prevent that, Moseley-Braun is striving to depict Fitzgerald as a far-right conservative, citing his support for state legislation easing the ban on carrying a concealed weapon and for a flat tax, which she contends would amount to a tax break for millionaires like Fitzgerald, and his opposition to abortion.

But that strategy could be undercut by the record of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, U.S. Rep. Glenn Poshard, from conservative downstate Illinois. Poshard, whom Moseley-Braun has endorsed, is just about as opposed to abortion as is Fitzgerald. And because of his votes in Congress against the Brady Bill and for lifting the ban on assault weapons, his opponent in the governor’s race, Republican Secretary of State George Ryan, has condemned Poshard’s “extreme views” on gun control.