Another Election Day

Today is Election Day, at long last, and we are glad of it. No matter how the races turn out, we will welcome a respite from the relentless campaigning.

Kansas is usually spared the worst of it, but this year a confluence of unfortunate events have made the state’s gubernatorial and senatorial elections unusually competitive, and as a result the state’s politics have been unusually pervasive. One can turn off the radio and television to avoid the barrage of advertisements, and curtail the evening walks to avoid all the yard signs proclaiming the neighbors’ poor choices, but there’s no escape in the internet, no avoiding the mailbox stuffed with fliers, and the phone has constantly been ringing with robocalls. Our avid interest in politics led us to consider all of it carefully in the beginning, but by now the fliers go to the trash unread and the commercials are ignored and the robocalls are hung up on as soon as they begin. Not that we’re shirking our civic duty to be well informed, as we knew all the arguments and had made our choices the day after the primaries, and although we’ve taken care to be apprised of any new revelations there haven’t been any worth noting.

The polls and the pundits give no indication of what the results will be, which is also unusual for Kansas at this late date in an election. Part of the problem is that the war within the Republican party between the “tea party” and “the establishment” has been especially hard fought here, leaving its candidates bruised and battered. Gov. Sam Brownback’s aggressive tax-cutting and budget-cutting was accomplished with help from like-minded “tea party” types who pulled off a remarkable primary purge during the movement’s high-water year of 2014, and a number of “establishment” types who had grown comfortable with expensive and bloated state government so long as they ran it have bolted from the party. Their support plus the wrath of the teachers’ unions who resented Brownback’s sensible proposal to allow incompetent teachers to be fire and all the liberals who hate Brownback with a red-hot passion that can not be explained in any possible terms have given a good chance of victory to Democratic opponent Paul Davis, a typical liberal from the typically liberal college town of Lawrence who has plenty of money to spend on adds that make his typical tax-and-spend politics sound some sensible and mainstream. Sen. Pat Roberts would be considered a “tea party” type in most jurisdictions, by contemporary Kansas Republican standards his 86 percent rating from the American Conservative Union is considered wimpy and he barely survived a primary challenge by a more rock-ribbed amateur only because of the opponent’s amateurishness and the fact that a couple of no-name votes split a crucial share of the widespread anti-Roberts sentiment. The Democrats still withdrew from the race, however, in order to clear the way for a self-proclaimed independent named Greg Orman whose personal fortune and the donations of some even more well-heeled out-of-state liberals have allowed him to run a very professional campaign positioning the former Democratic candidate and longtime Democratic donor as a non-partisan centrist. Throw in a widespread anti-incumbency mood among that significant bloc of voters too stupid and lazy to consider which party’s incumbents they hate most, and it’s a rare nail-biter in this state.

We remain cautiously optimistic that both Brownback and Roberts will survive close calls, but won’t make any wagers. All the tiresome cliches about how it all comes down to turnout are applicable, and it’s hard to figure who has the edge in this regard. The Democrats are fired up with their red-hot hatred of Brownback, but his ardent supporters in the anti-abortion movement are reliable voters with the extra incentive of Davis’ radically pro-abortion record and the more libertarian among the party will be spooked by the prospect of handing another two years of control of the Senate to Democrats.and we expect that many of the “establishment” types who don’t actually hold jobs in the state government and party establishment are still Republican enough that they won’t vote for what is after all a tax-and-spend platform. All those Democrats itching to vote against Brownback will also vote against Roberts, even if without the enthusiasm of voting for an admitted Democrat, but we expect that Republicans will also wind up voting for Roberts, even without the enthusiasm of voting for a more full-throated and rock-ribbed Republican. Numerous politicians with impeccably conservative credentials have pitched in on the campaign, that vanquished primary opponent has belatedly offered his endorsement, and the non-stop argument that a vote for Orman could keep the Democrats in control of the Senate should limit the number of conservatives sitting this one out.

So it really all comes down to getting out those voters who haven’t been paying attention, and there’s no telling how that will unfold. The National Rifle Association has spent a great deal of money to get the state’s sizable population of gun owners revved up on behalf of both Brownback and Roberts, a ridiculous referendum proposal to raise Wichita’s already sky-high sales taxes will bring out a lot of tightfisted taxpayers in the state’s largest city and will probably add a few votes to the Republican totals, the weather is forecast to be chilly, Roberts has a party organization while Orman will be piggybacking on the Democrats efforts, Kansas State University’s beloved football coach has come out strong for Roberts, and the same anti-Obama sentiment that is said to be brewing a Republican wave has been washing over Kansas for the past six years. Only the most hard-core of the Democrats seem fired up, too, and the all-important hipsters down at the local dive seem not to have noticed all the pervasive politics. It’s enough to make us confident, but quite cautiously so.

We’ll take our biennial stroll to a nearby Lutheran church and cast our votes, then anxiously follow the results here and across the nation. We’re watching the Wisconsin gubernatorial race and the Iowa Senate contest and of course will be keeping track of the Republicans’ numbers in the Senate and House, so it will be a full day of politics. After that we’ll try to take a day off from the stuff, and savor of the sound of the phone not dining with robocalls.

— Bud Norman

Segregated Media and Segregated Politics

Imagine our surprise when Pat Boone called us on the telephone Tuesday afternoon. We immediately recognized the famously mellifluous voice, but to avoid any possible confusion with some other Pat Boone he identified himself as “that ‘Love Letters in the Sand’ guy,” so we’re sure he was the real deal. It was only a pre-recorded and robo-dialed pitch on behalf of Republican Sen. Pat Roberts’ re-election campaign here in Kansas, so we didn’t get a chance to chat, but we appreciated the call.

The message stressed Roberts’ record on issues of importance to senior citizens, an important voting bloc and the only one likely to have heard of the octogenarian crooner, so we wondered if we’d been selected for the call because we’re presumed to be part of that demographic. In this high-tech age of marketing techniques political advertisements are tailored to appeal to very specific audiences, and we’d be slightly offended if the Roberts campaign has prematurely put on us on the senior phone list. We’re no spring chickens, and plenty old enough to use such an antiquated cliche, but we’re still young enough to prefer Little Richard’s raucous original rendition of “Tutti Frutti” to Boone’s more sedate cover version and aren’t yet benefitting from any of the federal largesse to oldsters that Roberts has apparently been protecting.

Those high-tech marketing techniques are well suited to the modern media landscape, which has been fragmented into a multitude of segregated niches. For years we have noticed the different political ads that run on the country stations, which have a good ol’ boy-sounding narrator touting some Republican or another’s staunch support for Second Amendment rights, and on the rap stations, where an Ebonics-speaking narrator warns that the Republicans are itching to gun down innocent black youths on the streets and can only be restrained by some Democrat or another, and now that there a gazillion or so cable television serving small slices of the public you’ll find the same method being applied there. If you log on to certain web sites you’ll likely be hit with certain sorts of advertisements, and on distinctly different web sites you’ll see a distinctly message. Sports magazines with a mostly male readership and fashion magazines with a mostly female readership consistently show similarly different political advertisements even when they’re touting the same candidate. If you’ve ever signed a petition opposing abortion your mailbox is probably full of fliers praising some Republican’s pro-life position, and if you inked an abortion rights petition it will be all about some Democrat’s enthusiasm for the procedure. We’re too old for texting and “tweeting” and the rest of the newfangled social media, but we presume that they are also being exploited with the same scientific specificity.

Mass buying occasionally pops a Democratic advertisement up on the Republican web sites we prefer, youthful hipsters such as ourselves get the occasional call from Pat Boone, and the inevitable ineptitude of political campaigns will also make the methods imperfect from time to time. An old school chum of ours is running for the state House of Representatives in our district and has an add running on the local right-wing talk radio station warning that his Republican opponent is intent on cutting taxes and state spending, and although we don’t support his candidacy we still like the fellow enough that we’re tempted to tell him his charges probably aren’t going to scare the typical Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity listener as intended. Somehow we have wound up on the mailing list of a local abortion rights group calling itself “Trust Women,” and the return address on their frequent envelopes always gives us a slight chuckle when we think back on a romantic history that has taught us to be just a bit wary of the fairer sex. For the most part, though, our politics are now played out in specific markets with a specific message.

None of which is conducive to a unified America. Rather than explaining what a candidate can do for middle-aged lesbian Latinas or gun-owning white twenty-somethings or cross-dressing tax protestors or whatever other group that might be watching a certain cable reality show or visiting a particular web site or signing some weird petition or another to chat up the comely young woman with the clipboard, a campaign should be making a case for what he can do for the country at large. The identity group politics that the modern marketing techniques seek to exploit, offering this or that preference or subsidy at the expense of that other hated group, are the cause of much of the country’s current and considerable troubles. The solution will require sacrifices from everyone, and needs to be explained in terms that can be crammed into a 30 second spot that could have run on the old Ed Sullivan Show back when everyone in the country was tuned in. That was back in the Pat Boone days, though, and we’re probably just pining for the old days like old men.

— Bud Norman