Minnesotan tapped for role as federal election commissioner

In a decision first floated last fall, President Bush has nominated Minnesotan Cynthia Bauerly to the shorthanded Federal Election Commission. Tapping Bauerly, a Democrat and top aide to Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. who’s also worked for Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., is meant to sweeten the strong medicine of another Bush FEC pick: vote-suppressor Hans von Spakovsky, whose name Bush won’t withdraw after two years despite widespread Senate aversion to him. Bush needs Senate confirmations to fill the four of six FEC chairs currently empty. Approval of John McCain’s request to withdraw from the federal campaign-financing program and go on a private-funds spending spree instead, depends on a functioning FEC.

In this drama, the president thrusts Senate staffer Bauerly, a Concordia College grad who’s an expert in election law and voting rights, onstage with the notorious von Spakovsky — Bauerly’s arch-rival in the sense that they battled as volunteers on opposite sides in the 2000 Florida presidential election recount.

Oddly, it’s not the first time Bauerly has figured in a drama orchestrated by someone with the power to make members of Congress walk and talk. “Cynthia Bauerly” is a character in the play “Among Friends” by Chicago playwright Kristine Thatcher, whose works also include a play about the late U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan. Reached by phone, Thatcher said she’d made up the name. The real Bauerly, who got her law degree not far away at Indiana University, isn’t a friend or acquaintance — draining all post-Indiana primary political significance from this “Among Friends” line: “Maybe you can buy Dick Mills at the Sun Times, maybe you can buy Cindy Bauerly and the Lake County Board of Commissioners. But you can’t buy me, Dan. You can’t buy me.”