Before last month's events in Ferguson, Nixon had looked firmly secure in his role. What is Jay Nixon thinking?

Jay Nixon was headed into a news conference last Wednesday, ready to announce his new choice to lead the Missouri Department of Public Safety, when he spotted one of his old law school classmates in St. Louis’ Wainwright State Office Building. Stopping to speak with Mary Nelson, the governor shared a terse appraisal of his new life at the center of a national firestorm.

“It’s been a hell of a week,” Nixon told his former study group partner.


The governorship has never been a smooth ride for Nixon, a 58-year-old Democrat who took office in the midst of a national recession. Under his watch, the state has been buffeted by ice storms, tornadoes and all-out political warfare pitting Nixon against an array of stridently conservative opponents.

Still, as he approached the midpoint of his second term, Nixon looked firmly secure in his role: limited in his power to enact a legislative agenda, but plainly in command of the Missouri political world.

( Also on POLITICO: Why Ferguson might prompt real change)

That world has turned upside down in the three weeks since a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man. Now, Nixon’s early-summer trip to Iowa is all but forgotten. Far from preoccupied with 2016, he is working overtime to rescue his state and administration.

The governor himself is frustrated and exhausted amid the ongoing emergency, according to Missouri political veterans and Nixon’s longtime associates, some of whom were granted anonymity in order to speak bluntly. Already, Nixon has run repeatedly into the bounds of his own political capacity: a stubbornly procedural mind set shaped by 16 years as state attorney general and a long-tense relationship with leaders of Missouri’s black community.

Amid weeks of protests, Nixon has faced a barrage of questions about his management of the volatile situation and sharp denunciations from certain African-American leaders. There is no end in sight: A grand jury has only just begun to examine evidence in the case of Brown’s killing, a process likely to last until October. Nixon faces intense pressure from black officials to remove the local prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, from the case, a demand he has so far rejected.

( Also on POLITICO: Why Officer Wilson will probably walk)

A round-the-clock workaholic who has long relied on a tight cluster of aides for advice, Nixon has scrambled to calm his state, imposing a temporary curfew on Ferguson and calling in the National Guard to hold down the police command center there. He has received briefings on the situation in Ferguson starting at around 6:30 a.m. or 7 a.m. daily.

Sources say he has spoken repeatedly with President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in “businesslike” conversations. His staff has been in touch with senior White House officials, including presidential confidante Valerie Jarrett. Nixon has met privately with groups of local mayors and black members of the Legislature, and spoken by phone to leaders of the NAACP and ACLU.

Missouri state Rep. Tommie Pierson, a black pastor who recently hosted Nixon at his church, described the governor as a man earnestly “searching for answers” amid incessant incoming criticism that Pierson called unproductive.

( PHOTOS: Scenes from the Ferguson protests)

“He’s frustrated, that’s for sure. I don’t know if he’s angry, but he’s frustrated,” Pierson said. “This is a complicated issue and this is an issue that he doesn’t know anything about, really. He hasn’t lived in this community.”

Missouri state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, one of Nixon’s most vocal Democratic antagonists, questioned whether the governor has a clear view of the situation from inside a bubble of advisers. She described him as “calm” but impassive in a meeting last week with black lawmakers.

“He was calm and he listened. When he walked out of the meeting he shook my hand and said, ‘I appreciate your strong views.’ But his actions don’t reflect the interests of African-Americans,” Nasheed said.

Nixon allies fiercely defend his handling of Ferguson. Overlooked in the national melée, they argue, have been some of the assertive steps Nixon took early on to calm the situation: As early as Aug. 11, just two days after Brown’s death, Nixon formally requested a Justice Department investigation of the incident.

Sources familiar with Nixon’s activities say that on the night of Aug. 13, as national headlines began attacking Nixon for failing to visit Ferguson, the governor was huddled with aides until late into the night. He made a decision at 1:30 a.m. to replace local law enforcement with the Missouri Highway Patrol.

Nelson, the Nixon classmate who also served in his administration, said the governor’s less-than-hasty response to Ferguson was both appropriate and characteristic. “Anybody could have jumped into that situation and tried to be superman. Jay is not that kind of person,” said Nelson, who is black. “I swear to God, I believe that he saved people’s lives.”

“He understands there are people who will want things to be decided quickly,” said Craig Hosmer, a former state party chairman who served with Nixon in the Legislature. “That is not Jay Nixon. Never has been. … You have to let the civil justice and criminal justice system work.”

But even Nixon’s admirers acknowledge what a profoundly alien predicament the Ferguson crisis represents for the governor. A law-and-order Democrat from conservative Jefferson County, Nixon has faced unaccustomed strain in his relationship with law enforcement thanks to his decision to remove local police from control in Ferguson and the police department’s incendiary release of a video purporting to show Michael Brown participating in a convenience-store robbery.

As a process-oriented lawyer, Nixon has little patience with demands that he views as simply outside the bounds of proper legal methodology. Removing McCulloch from the Michael Brown case at this point, in his view, would compromise a procedurally appropriate prosecution.

And after decades in public life, even some allies say the Nixon repertoire has never included real mastery of black Democratic politics. He first ran for statewide office as an opponent of litigation to force desegregation of St. Louis schools. Nixon came up in electoral politics not during the age of Barack Obama but the early end of the Clinton era, when national Democrats were preoccupied with proving to white voters that they cared about fighting crime. (He still leans to the right of his party on certain law enforcement issues: Where other Democrats have evolved in a liberal direction on drug control and the death penalty, Nixon hews to traditionally conservative stances on both.)

To call it disorienting for Nixon to suddenly face Al Sharpton on his doorstep and a national outcry for failing to take John Lindsay-style walks through riot-torn streets might be putting it mildly.

“He made some very good decisions, but I think [he] also failed to set a tone that gave the black community any confidence that the governor was in charge of the situation,” said Chris King, editorial director of the St. Louis American, the city’s African-American newspaper.

Chuck Hatfield, a former Nixon chief of staff who now works as a lobbyist, said that Nixon had been typically “cautious” throughout the spiraling crisis.

“Part of it is process and part of it is just his style,” Hatfield said. “He prefers that the people he’s managing work a problem out before he has to intervene. … It didn’t work out in this case.”

While he has won some praise from local leaders — including black leaders — for ultimately easing an explosive situation, Nixon faces a fraught path as a potential prosecution unfolds.

Pierson, the St. Louis-area legislator and preacher, declined to blame Nixon alone for tension between the governor and his black constituents.

“Maybe we haven’t put more pressure on him to make more an effort,” Pierson said. “He’s feeling the pressure now, that’s for sure.”