Kris Kobach knows how to bag the limit

“The Koch brothers out with the Republican secretaries of state — that’s a news story I don’t need,” Allen Richardson, a Koch lobbyist, joked, unaware that a reporter was in attendance.

So goes one graf in this essential New York Times story, in which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach figures with depressing and obvious prominence.

The hunting weekend described in the story took place last month — a time that, on the eve of this historically blinkered election, already seems oddly simpler.

Certainly it was a simple weekend for lobbyists and politicians such as Kobach, who had convened to shoot pheasant and rub rifle stocks while talking about ballot initiatives and fundraising and how to make sure that paid hacks write legislation. It was an ideal networking opportunity for the spotlight-loving Kobach, one that actually kept him in the Sunflower State for a few hours rather than inspiring him to argue immigration and voter-ID policy in states that aren’t paying his salary. He’s the hardest-working man in disenfranchisement politics, and he remains a pretty good shot in the wild (if not on paper). Here’s how the Times ends its story:

At the three-day hunt — where corporate donors and secretaries of state from Kansas, Mississippi, Georgia and Arkansas shared a one-story, wood-frame hunting lodge, with stuffed deer and elk antlers mounted on the walls — there was little discussion of formal election matters.Instead, it was an opportunity for the corporate executives to cement personal connections. Together, they set loose Labrador retrievers on acres of prime high-grass hunting grounds, flushing pheasants and quail from their hiding spots.

“I was 60 yards away,” Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, said as he showed off two prairie chickens he had shot earlier in the day.After a dinner of shredded beef, the state officials and political contributors, some in pajamas, drank beers. The only apparent disappointment the next morning, after their first hunting outing together as a group, was that they had bagged only 58 birds, two short of their legal limit.

“The two that got away,” Mr. Kobach said.

“We’ll get ’em tomorrow,” said one of the corporate executives.