What Obama Values in Kansas

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

CAPITAL JOURNAL
By GERALD F. SEIB

What Obama Values in Kansas
August 5, 2008; Page A2

For a sparsely populated state that's often a political afterthought, Kansas has something close to a starring role in this year's presidential drama. Consider: Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback ran for the Republican presidential nomination. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential contender, Sen. Barack Obama, makes much of the fact that his mother and grandparents hailed from Kansas, and he lauds the Kansas "values" they gave him. Now Sen. Obama is weighing as his running mate the governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, as well as Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, who grew up in Kansas and whose mother happens to be from the same small town as Sen. Obama's mother.

(snip)

From a distance, Kansas may not look quite that interesting. It has gone Republican in every presidential election since 1964 and hasn't elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 78 years. During the past century, it has produced a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, and two Republican presidential nominees, Alf Landon and Bob Dole. But looks are a bit deceiving. Historically, Kansas has carried a wide streak of progressive activism and populist sentiment alongside its reliable Republicanism. Early in the 20th century, it was ahead of its time -- and other states -- in advancing workers' compensation and the right of women to vote. The state's legendary small-town newspaper editor, William Allen White, was a national cheerleader for the progressive Republican politics of his friend, Theodore Roosevelt. More recently, its citizens have shown an unusually high propensity to cross party lines to balance power between the parties. Even as Republicans have dominated overall, the state has had a Democratic governor for 29 of the past 50 years.

The politics of the past two decades, though, have been particularly raucous. In the 1990s, the Kansas Republican Party, long run by traditional Main Street fiscal conservatives, came to be dominated by social conservatives who rode the waves of the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions into power. They made the state known as not just antiabortion but ground zero in a national effort to shut down abortion clinics and doctors who staff them. The movement to allow concealed weapons gained a big foothold. And, famously, the conservative-dominated state school board sought to block the uncritical teaching of evolution in its schools. For a while, this social conservative wave worked well for Republicans. In 1996, the state's governor and entire congressional delegation were Republican. Ultimately, though, many Republicans came to fear that their party was coming to be seen as not just conservative but extreme. Business conservatives pushed back against social conservatives, and a civil war erupted. Some prominent Republicans, including the state's current lieutenant governor, became Democrats.

Out of this maelstrom emerged Gov. Sebelius, who benefited from the Republican civil war in winning her first term in 2002 and re-election in 2006. Even before becoming governor, she had appealed to the state's populist streak when, as a pro-consumer insurance commissioner, she blocked the merger of the Kansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield health program with an out-of-state firm. More important, since taking office, she has proved skillful at working the political middle. Kansas today has essentially three political parties -- social conservative Republicans, moderate Republicans and Democrats -- and Gov. Sebelius has succeeded by binding together the latter two groups against the former.

(snip)

The partisan minefields of Topeka, the state capital, aren't all that different from those of the nation's capital. The Sebelius experience in navigating them may be the example of Kansas values Sen. Obama finds most useful.


URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121787787575610759.html (subscription)

[Mabus]

1. Yay. Some props to Kansas

Sebelius won in 2002 because the Republican primary split the party vote between the extremist faction and the conservative faction. When the extremist won the primary, the conservative Republicans voted for Sebelius in the general. The trend continued in 2004 and 2006 with more Dems taking traditional Republican seats. The Kansas GOP imploded a while back and thanks to Dean's 50 State Strategy Kansas Dems have been able to capitalize on it more effectively than before.

[question everything]

2. Thank you for your insight. I have heard Dean's "50 states" strategy

being criticized on DU. Glad that it is working.

[Mabus]

3. Dean is right, you have to ask people for their vote

and you need to talk more about the common concerns than political differences. Being able to keep some of the money we raised at local Dem functions, instead of sending most or all back, really helped with the GOTV effort. It also allowed the state party to buy up the voter lists, computerize and update them. It made canvassing so much easier. Also, having paid staff rather than volunteers doing things in their spare time, made a helluva lot of difference.

I'd also work people when I was out canvassing. I'd invite them to fundraisers or suggest that they hold one. I also signed up volunteers to work at HQ and to do canavassing.

As someone who had been working on the ground, in my Kansas district, on Democratic campaigns since 1979, I saw how much Dean's strategy helped.

I should also disclose that I was a Dean delegate in 2004. I went to the convention and gave my floor credentials to my alternate on the night of the nomination so she could vote for Kerry. She was running for office in Kansas and I thought it was something she could brag about during her campaign.