Herseth

Here's a funny story from my hometown paper about Stephanie Herseth, which makes clear her ambitions to run for the Senate:

A panel of 600 fearless interviewers grilled Stephanie Herseth for nearly an hour Friday morning.

She stood exposed by the onslaught, fielding questions about her ideology, her political aspirations and even her personal life.

“How much money do you make?”

“Would you ever run for president?”

“What’s the difference between Democrats and Republicans?”

They were the kind of blunt, plain-spoken queries that Herseth doesn’t usually expect, especially from an audience like the one she faced Friday: the student body at Mitchell Middle School.

“That’s the nice thing, that all their questions were very respectful, but perhaps missing the tone of subtlety or diplomacy that you get from the adult audiences,” she said afterward. “It’s actually very refreshing. They’re very direct, but very honest.”

Herseth, the 35-year-old Democrat who occupies South Dakota’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, never declined a question but appeared to struggle with a few answers. Seventh-grader Andrew Rozum put her on politically dangerous ground with his curiosity about the differences between the two major political parties.

Herseth, a former college instructor, responded with a cautious but revealing five-minute discourse on the politics of moderation.

She said the perceived differences between Democrats and Republicans are traditional ones that may not apply to the parties’ modern realities. Democrats have been derided for years as the party of big government, large spending and high taxes, she said, but she added that Republicans haven’t done much in recent years to earn their opposite reputation as the party of smaller government and lower spending.

After pausing to think several times during her carefully worded answer, she seemed to realize that she hadn’t matched the candor displayed by her audience.

“I’m making it sound like I’m maybe not answering the question correctly,” she said, “but I sort of feel like I can’t answer it fully without taking a lot more time, because Democrats and Republicans, even amongst themselves, differ a lot … it’s hard to pigeonhole each Democrat and each Republican.”

She rallied, though, with some standard-sounding rhetoric about the dangers of extreme partisanship. It’s her hope, she said, that members of both parties will “work together” and “put the politics aside” like she and other South Dakota leaders did when they helped save Ellsworth Air Force Base from the Pentagon’s closure list last year.

The next question came from eighth-grader Sarah Magnuson, who wanted to know if Herseth aspires to the nation’s highest political office. Herseth turned the question around, asking Magnuson if she herself would ever consider running for president. Magnuson said she would, and Herseth said “Great! Then I would, too.”

Actually, Herseth said, she does not foresee herself running for anything except “the Congress” until “2010, 2014 or 2020.” Interestingly, those last two dates are separated by the same number of years as a term in the U.S. Senate.

Another member of the audience, sixth-grader Casey Talaga, wanted to know about congressional salaries. Herseth, who stood with a handheld microphone on the floor of the school gymnasium, said she makes $155,000.

The statement sent a shiver through the mass of students, seated in the bleachers on one side of the gym.

Herseth acknowledged that her salary is far higher than that of most South Dakotans.

“But you know, I’ve got to tell you I’m really glad that I can put some of my extra earnings toward paying back my student loans,” said Herseth, referring to her Georgetown education.

Herseth delved further into her personal life when she responded to a question about her childhood goals, posed by seventh-grader Brooke Mathey.

Herseth said she took naturally to politics, having grown up in a family that included a grandmother who was secretary of state, a grandfather who was governor, and a father who was a legislator. As Herseth progressed through her junior year of college, she thought of returning to South Dakota to practice law and run for the Legislature or even attorney general.

“And then my parents got divorced, and I was not much into politics anymore, and I wanted to get fluent in Spanish,” she said. “So I went down to Ecuador for a summer, turned my back on politics and thought, ‘I’m just going to get my law degree, I’m going to practice law and I’m going to teach.’ ”

Later, her passion for politics was re-ignited when she was invited to a Democratic retreat in the Black Hills by former U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle. It was there that people began encouraging her to run for the state’s open U.S. House seat, which she eventually lost to former Gov. Bill Janklow.

After Janklow resigned the seat following his involvement in a fatal traffic accident, Herseth won a special election and served the remainder of Janklow’s term. She won a full term in the next election and is seeking re-election this year.

After the assembly ended, Herseth took a tour of the school. In one of the two classrooms she visited, a student asked Herseth about her marital and family status.

Herseth, who has never married and has no children, said she is dating a man from Texas who has children from a previous marriage. She was apparently speaking of former U.S. Rep. Max Sandlin, D-Texas, with whom she has been linked in numerous Washington gossip articles and political Internet blogs.

Herseth’s appearance was the result of an invitation she received from Mitchell seventh-grader Marissa Tubbs. The school visit lasted almost two hours, until Herseth left for an appearance at the local hospital. She was on the last leg of a whirlwind travel schedule that took her recently to Iraq, the state capitol in Pierre and numerous other locations in South Dakota.

Her many travels and speeches have been contrasted by silence from the Republican Party, from which nobody has stepped forward as a November opponent.

“I’ll eventually have one,” she said as she left the school. “It may not be until after the state Legislature, but I hope that it’s taken them this long to recruit someone because many people, even Republicans, feel that I’m doing a good job representing South Dakota.”