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

Continued from page 4

Published on March 26, 2008

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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