In Missouri, Carnahan's widow vows to carry on husband's fight

ST. LOUIS, Missouri (CNN) -- The widow of Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan said Sunday she would carry on her late husband's work and add some of her own if voters elect him posthumously to the U.S. Senate and she fills his seat.

Jean Carnahan's husband, Mel, remains on the Missouri ballot, despite the fact that he died in a plane crash October 16 while returning to St. Louis from a campaign trip to Kansas City. One of the couple's sons and a campaign aide were also killed in the accident.

Voter polls show Carnahan -- who was a Democrat -- slightly ahead of the Republican incumbent, Sen. John Ashcroft.

Roger Wilson, the Democrat who succeeded Carnahan as governor, has said he will appoint Jean Carnahan, 66, to serve in her husband's stead if he is elected.

"The two of us worked together and lived together for 46 years," Jean Carnahan told ABC's This Week. "We shared not just a lifetime, but the ideals, values and the visions he had. I felt that those things were just too important to let die. I had to keep them alive."

Carnahan said she and her husband agreed on most things, including the need to pay down the national debt, "shore up Social Security, have a real patients' bill of rights, prescription drugs under Medicare" and "targeted tax cuts to working families so they could send a child to school, or they could care for an elderly parent or buy a home."

Also on their shared list of priorities was "a new, major commitment on a national level for education. These are things he believed in, and those are the things I believe in."

Still, she added, "Like most couples, you have occasional things you don't agree on."

Carnahan said she "perhaps" would make an additional commitment to women's issues, including pay equity, child care and breast cancer research.

Asked how she would respond if her candidacy were challenged on a legal basis, she said, "I can't really believe that anyone would attempt to thwart the will of the Missouri voters, if they vote and say they want to continue the ideals and the things my husband stood for."

Asked on the ABC program if he planned to challenge the outcome should the late Carnahan be elected, Ashcroft demurred, saying, "I haven't wasted one second thinking about a challenge to this election. I don't believe it's going to be a consideration."

The Republican halted campaign efforts for a week "out of respect for the office and for Mel Carnahan as a person, and because we thought it was the right thing to do."

Since resuming the campaign effort, he said, he has been focusing "just on the issues that are very important to people: better, safer schools with a classroom trust fund that takes the resources not to the bureaucracy in Washington and not to state capitals."

Carnahan said she asked Cokie Roberts to conduct her first interview since the accident because the ABC correspondent's own father, the late Rep. Hale Boggs, D-Louisiana, was killed in a 1972 campaign plane crash.

Roberts' mother, Democrat Lindy Boggs, succeeded her husband in Congress.

Carnahan said she had been working at her computer on a campaign speech she had been planning to deliver the next day for her husband when he called her, shortly before the crash.

"He said, 'I am on the plane.' I could hear the roar of the motor. He said, 'I'll be home early.'

Carnahan said she had spent the day visiting schools and was anxious to tell him about it. "He said, 'You can tell me. I'll be home early.' That was the last I heard."

An hour later, the governor's wife of 46 years was called by a security official, who said one of the officers wanted to talk with her. "I knew something was wrong right then," she said. "He came up and he knelt down in front of me, and he took my hand and he told me, and it seemed like the light of my life went out."

Carnahan said the full effect of the deaths was still sinking in.

"Some things don't really seem real. Occasionally, I'll feel like I'm sitting in a play, watching a play or even a part of a play, and it will end and that I'll get up and go out and life will be like it was, but I know that won't be the case."