With One Week to Go

Some very consequential elections here in Kansas and from coast to coast are now a mere fleeting week away, but you wouldn’t know it from the front page headlines or any of the cable news networks’ top-of-the-our stories. Instead of any in-depth analysis of the very complicated economic and social issues to be decided next Tuesday, it’s all about the mad bomber who was sending improvised explosive devices to Democratic politicians and activists through the mail, and the hateful loser who slaughtered 11 Jews and injured several others as they worshipped God in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and those few thousand Central American migrants who are walking and hitch-hiking to the thousand-mile-away American border, and of course all the arguments about whose overheated rhetoric is to blame.

Those “enemies of the people” at the “fake news” Washington Post reported on Monday that someone had fired at least four bullets into the Volutsia County Republican Party headquarters in south Florida, and even without confirmation from Fox News and conservative talk radio we’ll assume the report is entirely true. We’ll concede that perhaps the Post’s daily reporting about Republican outrages had something to do with it, but the Post’s editorialists also make a convincing case that the rhetoric of President Donald Trump’s Republican party has something to do with the rest of the bad news, so for now there’s too much craziness afoot on all sides to calmly consider all the complicated economic and social issues that are on that ballot in just a week.

We’re doing our best to keep all those complicated economic and social issues in mind as we consider our electoral options, and to judge them according to our longstanding conservative economic and social principles, but one must also take account of the rest of the latest headlines into account. This election is being contested at a time when the economy is so healthy that the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates and therefore tanking the stock markets, and according to longterm trends the business cycle might well be up against its inevitable downturn, and for now we don’t trust either party to properly deal with it. We don’t much like the way both parties are pointing a damning finger at the un-American bastards on the the side, too, but we have to admit that our side is looking pretty damned stupid these days.

Here in Kansas there’s a close gubernatorial race between Democratic nominee and longtime state Sen. Laura Kelly and two-term Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and the big issue is tax policy. Twice-elected Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback proposed a program of radical and tax and budget cuts, and with the accord of a Republican legislative majority he helped get elected it was passed, but although we personally know Brownback to be a good guy his time-tested economic theories it didn’t pan out this time around and the state state wound up in a budget hole that required further budget cuts, some of which proved quite painful to the state’s roads and public schools and prisons and other essential services. The establishment Republicans that Brownback had primary-ed out to get his tax plan passed wound up primary-ing out the anti-establihments insurgents two years later, and with help from those damned Democrats they wound up largely repealing Brownback’s tax plan, and although the state ain’t exactly booming the state budget is closer to being balanced and the schools are still open five days a week, which is more than we can say for some school districts just to the south of us in even blood-red Republican Oklahoma.

Along with every living Kansas Republican ex-governor except our old pal Brownback, we’ve reluctantly decided to vote for the damned Democrat for governor this time around. She’s not proposing any further tax hikes but is promising to at least keep the roads paved and the schools open five days a week, which seems realistic enough. Kobach is promising that none of those few migrants still a thousand miles away from the southern border will ever vote in a Kansas election, and he once took the lead in trying to prove that millions of illegal voters robbed Trump of a rightful win in the last popular vote for the presidency, and he’s got Trump’s ringing endorsement, but for now that makes us all the more inclined to vote for the damned Democrat.

There are a few more down-ticket damn Democrats that we’re also thinking about voting for, as well. Here in our very fashionable and homosexual and damnably Democratic Riverside neighborhood of cosmopolitan Wichita our state representative is a crazed far-left guy we happened to grow up with back in suburban Bel-Aire, and although he’s a crazed lefty we also know him to be an honest and likable sort, and since we haven’t heard a thing from his Republican opponent, if there even is one, we might even give him a vote. So far we don’t know who the Republican candidate for Sectary of State is, and can’t find much fault with the Google maps creator who’s running on the Democratic ticket. Our part of Sedgwick County currently has such a rock-ribbedly small government Republican conservative County Commissioner that he routinely votes against locally beneficial programs the state an federal government are willing to pay for, and by now all the local business interests and other mainstream Republicans around here are fed up with him, and given that his opponent is such an attractive and amiable female folk songstress w’re inclined to vote for her despite the credible socialist leanings her opponent alleges in his mailings.

As much as we want to keep Kansas’ taxes low and its roads paved and its schools open five days a week, and as keen as we are to see that Sedgwick County keeps doing mutuably beneficial business with the private sector, all the rest of the headlines and the 24-hour news cycle figure in as well. All the rest of it is quite distracting, and quite divisive, but at least around here those damned Democrats suddenly seem reasonable.

— Bud Norman