She Rules

It's a sunny Friday afternoon in June. In Independence, the parking lot of the Hilton Garden Inn is crammed with cars sporting every left-wing bumper sticker imaginable. Free Tibet. Bush Cheated. Hate is Not a Family Value. If You Want Peace, Work for Justice. Shiny Lexuses are parked alongside battered Corollas. Inside the hotel, political heavies and wide-eyed young campaign workers are gathered for an evening of schmoozing. The festivities will last late into the night, kicking off the Democrats' big annual party known as Truman Days.

Kansas City's political organizations and candidates have reserved suites. Groups with clout, such as Freedom Inc. (the city's longtime black political organization) and Four Freedoms (a gay group), have snagged the prime spots. Smiling club members stock tables full of crudités and brochures while politicians wander in and out, chatting in small huddles.

Toward the far end of the hall, one suite is occupied by leather-clad bikers wearing long, frizzy hair and bandanas -- the Freedom Road Riders are dedicated to ending helmet laws. Across the hall from them, the grandmotherly women of the Friends of Historic Lone Jack sit in Civil War-era costumes, hoping to talk to lawmakers about saving a battlefield in rural Missouri.

In one dimly lit suite, Jackson County legislators Victor Callahan and Bill Petrie hunker down in a far corner, sucking on fat cigars. Smoke swirls around them as they swig from sweating cans of Coors. Deeply engrossed in conversation with a few other men, they sit for the better part of an hour.

Close allies, the two have made no secret of their almost rabid dislike for County Executive Katheryn Shields.

Just a month and a half earlier, the two publicly fumed that pro-labor candidates had filed to run against them; they accused Shields of conspiring with AFL-CIO President Bridget Williams to try to oust them. Callahan, president of the legislature, is Shields' biggest foe.

Later, when Shields arrives, she barely even glances into the room where Callahan and Petrie sit. Wearing a matching taupe shirt and pants, her arm in a sling from recent bone surgery, Shields strides into the hotel, her blue eyes glistening. Her husband, attorney Phillip Cardarella, hovers by her side, expertly playing the role of doting political spouse.

The two work the rooms, Shields smiling broadly, shaking hands firmly and laughing assertively at the right moments while Cardarella tosses in self-deprecating humor. Someone jokingly asks Shields whether she broke her arm in a scuffle with Callahan. Someone else asks her husband if he did it.

"Yeah, right! I'd have been carried out on a stretcher!" Cardarella calls out with an impish grin.

Cardarella knows to make light of Shields' reputation for being domineering and aggressive. During disagreements with county legislators, she hurls sharp zingers and laughs haughtily; sometimes she shows her disapproval by folding her arms across her chest and glaring. Shields says she is simply a strong woman and that some men can't handle it. But Shields didn't win two terms as Jackson County executive -- and isn't poised to win a third -- on toughness alone. In Jackson County politics, a good-ol'-girl network is alive and well and working for Democrats.

On November 5, if Shields wins a third term as county executive -- a position she's held since 1995 -- it will be a Jackson County first.

For most of its 175-year history, the county was governed by a triumvirate of judges -- Harry Truman was one of them. In 1970, though, voters did away with that system, creating the elected position of county executive, a sort of CEO for the county. The executive appoints all county department heads and oversees assessments, tax collections, purchasing and other daily operations -- all of the county's mundane business.

But the position is supremely important to local party politics. "County executive is clearly the most important partisan position out there," says Dale Neuman, a retired professor and former chair of the political science department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who still conducts research on American politics, elections and voting. "If she appoints the head of the Jackson County jail, somebody's got to get the contracts for food and the contracts for bed linens. If she appoints the head of public works, somebody's got to get the contract to plow roads in the wintertime ... there's a lot of power there in terms of appointment of key personnel, recommending to the legislature certain plans and programs, guaranteeing that business comes the way of your political supporters and so on."

Although management skill -- not liberal politics -- may be the most important attribute for successfully running a large county day to day, local voters have never elected even a moderate Republican to the position.

But Shields' administration has been fraught with allegations of patronage as well as mistakes and bad press.

Notorious sniping between Shields and Callahan has prompted newspaper columnists to scold the two as if they were children and to beg for an end to petty bickering.

Shields has called Callahan "a sick man" and yelled that he's a "dictator." She's accused the men on the legislature of being "sexist" and has stormed out of legislative meetings in the middle of arguments.