The Man From Kansas

Robert Dole, who died earlier this week at 98, was a lion of the Senate much like twentieth-century senators such as Robert Taft and Hubert Humphrey and nineteenth-century figures such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.  A right-of-center Republican from Kansas - a state that has been reliably Republican for most of its 160 years of statehood - he took a pragmatic approach to governing by standing up for his own principles in advocating for leaner government.  Yet he supported Social Security and worked with George McGovern to shore up the nation's food-stamp program and worked with Edward Kennedy o pass the Americans with Disabilities Act  - a personal issue for him, given the limited ability in his right arm that resulted from being severely wounded in World War II.  He proved to be the adult in the room when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich initiated government shutdown in late 1995 and helped broker a deal to pass a budget and re-open the government.   He was also very resourceful, as he got himself name recognition in Kansas politics by serving Dole pineapple juice in his campaigns, boasting once that he had drowned his electoral opponents in pineapple juice.

Dole had a quick wit and a penchant for brief statements that led him to be thought of as a sour man, but he was always straightforward and to the point.  He had no desire to indulge in the flowery language of his peers and he did not suffer fools gladly, even when he was on the receiving end of skullduggery at his expense, such as when George H.W. Bush discombobulated him with misrepresentations of his record in the contest for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination.  But he regarded people like Bush and Bill Clinton as opponents, not enemies, and toward the end of his life he lamented the polarization of the times.   

If you come to bury, not praise Dole with snide comments under this post, those comments will be deleted.  Dole was a decent person, which is more than I can say for today's Republicans, and he served his country well in a career that reminded all of us that politics is the art of the possible.  RIP. 

Bleeding Kansas

If you want to know how out of whack the Republican Party is these days, just look at the situation in Kansas.

Kansans went to the polls in the state's primary election this past Tuesday, and while the Democrats have their nominee - a woman named Laura Kelly - the GOP still doesn't know who's going to oppose her. The choice was between incumbent Governor Jeff Colyer and Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  While Colyer, who assumed the governorship following the appointment of elected Governor Sam Brownback to an ambassadorial post, is an establishment conservative who has the support of old-time regulars like the 95-year-old Robert Dole, Kobach, infamous for helping the party suppress the votes of Democratic-friendly demographic groups, has the backing of Trump.  The race is too close to call, with Kobach leading by a hundred votes or so with many ballots still to be counted.  A recount may be necessary. 

Oh yeah, as the Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach runs the office in charge of vote certification.

Kobach finally got around to recusing himself from the process this past Thursday, but Governor Colyer is not entirely pleased with how it's been handled so far, and he charged that Kobach's office told counties not to count mail ballots. "Those clearly have to be counted under Kansas law," Colyer said.

The linger this drags on, the more of a head start Democratic gubernatorial nominee Laura Kelly will get and the more disunited the Kansas GOP will be.  But the eventual Republican nominee might be helped in the form of a spoiler campaign from independent candidate Greg Orman, who also ran for governor in 2014.

Kansas, it turns out, is no stranger to ill-run elections.  When the state was first organized as a territory in 1854 with the decision of whether or not to allow slavery left to the voters, pro-slavery activists in neighboring Missouri crossed the border in droves and voted for slavery illegally, and President Franklin Pierce appointed pro-slavery administrators to tip the scales for the slave interests.  And while the elections were rigged in favor of Slave Power, Pierce's Secretary of War expanded the property of a military installation to include an antislavery town that would be eliminated by the expansion.  (The Secretary of War's name?  Jefferson Davis.)   The discord led to the Kansas Civil War of 1854 to 1859 - "Bleeding Kansas."  Free-soil Republicanism brought Kansas into the Union as a free state in 1861 when the territory's population proved to be pro-Northern, and Kansas has been a Republican bastion since then - the names of Edmund Ross (the senator whose vote acquitted President Andrew Johnson on impeachment charges brought by the House), Charles Curtis (Hoover's Vice President), Alfred Landon, Frank Carlson, Keith Sebelius, and Robert Dole are the stuff of legend there - but this dust-up between "frenemies" Colyer and Kobach could not just lead to a crack-up of not just Kansas Republicans but open fissures in the GOP nationwide.