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Hot Contender: If looks count, Sarah Steelman may be your next governor

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"I used to be amazed at how she could do it," says Ken Jacob, a former Democratic senator whose office was next door to Steelman's for several years. Jacob is one of the few politicians who knew Steelman before her marriage in 1985. In graduate school at the University of Missouri-Columbia, they ended up in the same class on a primitive form of computer programming.

"I do recall being totally stuck and needing that class for graduation," Jacob says. "We were on the same team. Sarah saved me. She's deceptively smart. I think sometimes people don't give her the credit she deserves."

Steelman's consultant, Jeff Roe, boasts on his firm's Web site that he turned five Senate and thirteen House seats in northwest Missouri from blue to red. Should a Republican adopt a slogan associated with the Black Panthers? Roe didn't think it was a good idea. Steelman didn't listen. "I liked it," she says. "I'm the one running."

She says the slogan defines her career, which began in 1998 with a run for Senate against a sixteen-year incumbent. Democrat Mike Lybyer was chairman of the appropriations committee, and he had endorsements from the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and members of the Missouri Farm Bureau.

In the late 1990s, the legislature's attempt to ban partial-birth abortion consumed state politics. Lybyer cast the vote that let stand Governor Mel Carnahan's 1997 veto of the ban. "That was the beginning of the end," says Catherine Lange, a Republican from Cuba who worked on Steelman's campaign.

Steelman was helping her husband host a local radio show called Right Talk, and she thought Lybyer was out of touch with the conservative district. She had the backing of Missouri Right to Life, but she didn't draw many supporters to the campaign trail. Two weeks before Election Day, she held a fundraiser at a winery near Hermann, and only two men showed up. "There were a lot of empty picnic tables," she says. David Steelman recalls how it looked as though his wife wouldn't win even conservative Gasconade County. "We left that fundraiser feeling pretty down."

Steelman, though, bested Lybyer with a stunning 58 percent of the vote. "I beat him. I even beat him in his own township," she says in a voice full of satisfaction. The headline in The Salem News, the twice-weekly newspaper in her husband's hometown, trumpeted: "Power to the People."

Steelman thought the headline was perfect. "We need to keep power in the hands of the people."

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