The Kansas GOP gubernatorial debate was an ideological clown show
Four men who want to be the next governor of Kansas got together on a stage Thursday night. And they pretty much forgot to talk about Kansas.
Given the state’s sputtering economy and mounting financial woes, the debate at Johnson County Community College brought to mind a crowd of people sitting around an intensive care unit and blustering about everything except the patient that brought them there.
Jeff Colyer, the sitting governor since Sam Brownback hightailed it out of town a few months ago, rises for his opening statement and of course goes right to the blazing topic of The Flag. Yes, an art project featuring an image of a fractured United States drip painted on the surface of the stars and stripes is the Kansas crisis du jour.
In a demonstration of his leadership ability, Colyer tells the crowd he speed dialed the chancellor of the University of Kansas and the president of the state Board of Regents as soon as he learned the offending flag was flying on the KU campus.
“I say, ‘Not in Kansas and not on my watch!’” he tells the crowd, to big applause.
Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who was recently thrashed in court by the dreaded American Civil Liberties Union over suppression of voter registration, follows Colyer in the introductions, and promptly shows that he is also deficient about the constitutional right to free speech.
“I too called upon the university to take down the flag, about four hours prior to the governor,” he says.
Whatever. Whoever. KU caved quickly to the manufactured uproar and moved the flag into its on-campus art museum. Crisis averted, except in Kansas Republican circles, which are in high agitation in the runup to the Aug. 7 primary that will decide the party’s nominee for governor.
After the “who’s faster?” competition between Colyer and Kobach, it is kind of a relief when Ken Selzer, the state insurance commissioner, gets up and says, “I want to tell you what we did in the insurance department.”
Patrick Kuchera, the fourth candidate allowed to participate in this debate sponsored by the Kansas Republican Party, at least uses his opening statement to talk about Kansas and his solution for pulling the state out of its doldrums.
That would be industrial hemp. Kuchera, who describes himself as a visionary, sees the cultivation of the Cannabis plant for industrial purposes as “the secret sauce” for the Sunflower State. It’s a bit out of the GOP mainstream, but it is an idea, and those are sadly lacking as the evening wears on.
A lot of the blame for the sound-bite-only debate lies with the moderator, Kansas native and now American Conservative Union President Matt Schlapp. He asks the candidates questions like: Would they use a potential bump in sales tax revenues from internet purchases to reduce other taxes or “would you use it to spend and grow government?” And would they use the governor’s office to protect the unborn or “continue the status quo of abortion on demand?”
No disagreements there. Every candidate on the stage would ban abortion in Kansas under all circumstances if they could. All of them would hew to the Republican creed of cutting taxes and reducing spending — as though that “shot of adrenaline” prescription by Brownback and Kansas conservatives hadn’t already forced the state to understaff its prisons and Highway Patrol, raid its highway fund to keep the lights on, and cut services that help citizens and entice employers.
Schlapp also wastes valuable time by asking the candidates if they would end the state’s policy of allowing the children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Kansas’ public universities and community colleges.
As the moderator well knows, this is Kobach’s wheelhouse issue. He’s been waging a hateful campaign against Kansas “dreamers” long before he became secretary of state. So this segment quickly devolves into a sparring match over whether Colyer, in his time as lieutenant governor and now governor, has done enough to make sure that promising young people can’t afford to attend colleges like the one where the debate is being held. Only Selzer, bless him, has the guts to observe that relatively few undocumented students attend Kansas colleges at in-state rates and their presence is hardly the biggest problem on the state’s education front.
Everybody on stage loves Donald Trump. Kobach wastes no opportunity to mention that he “advises” the president. He even has his cell phone number! Colyer and Kobach are strongly in favor of Trump’s trade war, even though it is cratering soybean prices and threatening the state’s agricultural industry.
Everyone hates Obamacare, although the discussion about what to do about health care in Kansas is disjointed and turns up no viable ways forward.
Kobach and Colyer can’t stand each other. Colyer accuses Kobach of lying about a myriad of issues and mentions that a federal judge fined him for being dishonest in the courtroom. Kobach smirks and shakes his head and says Colyer is ineffective and a champion of the status quo.
“If you want to shake things up, if you want full-throttle conservatism in the governor’s office, then I humbly ask you to vote for me,” says Kobach, who hasn’t understood “humble” since he graduated from kindergarten.
A phalanx of 20-something young men, who all look kind of alike, sits near the front of the auditorium and lustily cheers for everything Kobach says and does. If you went by volume alone, you’d think Kobach was the crowd’s choice.
Farther back, though, where I am sitting, a lot of folks are shaking their heads in disbelief at some of the things Kobach says. And they quietly love it when Colyer calls Kobach “a show pony who thinks he is a war horse.”
A debate sponsored by the party and attended mostly by Republican Party faithful is hardly the ideal place to gauge the state of the Kansas governor’s race. But it does expose the leading candidates as showing more allegiance to conservative ideology than to the state of Kansas and its very real problems.
Pay no attention to the patient in the sickbed. There’s taxes to be cut, rights to be trampled, and a flag to be gotten rid of.
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