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Bond Supporting Hanaway In Her 2016 Bid For Governor

Sen. Kit Bond.
(UPI)
/
Sen. Kit Bond.

Former Missouri House Speaker Catherine Hanaway, the only announced Republican candidate for governor, has the support of one of the state’s political icons who used to be her boss: Former U.S. Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, R-Mo.

Bond and his wife, Linda Bond, are special guests at a reception/fundraiser Tuesday in Kansas City for Hanaway.

Before she ran for office herself,  Hanaway worked for Bond in the mid-1990s.  He has been a key mentor for her, and among those backing her presidential appointment in 2005 as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District, based in St. Louis.

Bond, by the way, rarely endorses in contested primaries. And Hanaway is likely to get a GOP opponent soon.

Other notables on the list of the reception’s cohosts include former U.S. Attorney (for the Western District) Todd Graves, state Sen. Will Kraus, R-Lee’s Summit, and former state Sen. Luann Ridgeway, R-Smithville, who’s currently a commissioner in Clay County.

The event is at the Kansas City home of Ann Dickinson, a former national committeewoman in the Republican Party and a delegate to the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Hanaway appears to be gearing up her campaign, and fundraising, since it’s expected that state Auditor Tom Schweich is expected to announce his own bid for governor shortly. 

Schweich, by the way, has his own big-name mentor and former boss: retired Sen. John C. Danforth, R-Mo.

Hanaway already has the backing of the state’s top political donor, Rex Sinquefield, who gave her several contributions of $10,000 apiece last week. That’s in addition to his huge October donation of $750,000 to her

Jo Mannies has been covering Missouri politics and government for almost four decades, much of that time as a reporter and columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She was the first woman to cover St. Louis City Hall, was the newspaper’s second woman sportswriter in its history, and spent four years in the Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau. She joined the St. Louis Beacon in 2009. She has won several local, regional and national awards, and has covered every president since Jimmy Carter. She scared fellow first-graders in the late 1950s when she showed them how close Alaska was to Russia and met Richard M. Nixon when she was in high school. She graduated from Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, and was the daughter of a high school basketball coach. She is married and has two grown children, both lawyers. She’s a history and movie buff, cultivates a massive flower garden, and bakes banana bread regularly for her colleagues.

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