Newz(AP) — Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Kansas governor’s daughter who became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate without following a spouse into office, has died. Kassebaum Baker died Friday of natural causes, according to her son, Bill Kassebaum.
She loved people from Kansas and representing Kansas for 18 years in the U.S. Senate,” he told The Associated Press. “She was an independent-minded Republican who was willing to stand up for what she thought was right, even if that meant going against the party.” She was elected to the U.S.
Senate in 1978 and served three terms. Her modest demeanor endeared her to voters of all political stripes, though she shared the moderate, progressive Republican politics of her father, Gov. Alf Landon, the unsuccessful 1936 GOP nominee for president.
Even after leaving the Senate early in 1997, she continued taking on public service roles. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, in 1996. Kassebaum Baker remained an icon for Kansans generally.
She could work with Senate colleagues of all political philosophies, and a 1996 health insurance law bore her name, along with that of liberal Massachusetts Sen. A centrist politician from America’s heartland Her election to the Senate brought her immediate national attention. When she announced her retirement, she was among eight women senators and the only one to chair a Senate committee, the Labor and Human Resources panel.
She was also in a dwindling bloc of moderate-to-liberal Republicans, having supported for example a ban on assault weapons championed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Yet she never polarized Kansas conservatives as other GOP moderates did. She connected with voters because she never seemed caught up in the trappings of power, and when she retired, she acknowledged, “I’d rather cuddle up and do needlepoint all day.” She was born on July 29, 1932, as her father, an oilman from Independence, was running for the first of his two terms as governor.
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