Our mailbox — the metal one affixed to our front porch, not the silicon one embedded in our computer — has lately been overflowing with correspondence from the various candidates competing in the upcoming Republican primary. Smart campaigns reduce their postage costs by checking the voting records to see who actually votes before sending out their mail, and because we haven’t missed an election since 1977 we’re very popular at the moment.
The most intriguing advertisements concern the race for this district’s state Senate seat, which has posed something of a dilemma for us. The race pits the longtime incumbent, a locally famous exemplar of moderate Republicanism, against her upstart challenger, who espouses a more conservative platform. We’re more inclined to agree the latter’s stands, but Wichita is a small enough town that politically active social gadflies such as ourselves often have an opportunity to chat with the candidates and we thus have formed a more favorable impression of the former. The challenger is a nice enough young fellow, and unmistakably earnest, but he seems a bit wet behind the ears, as we old-timers are wont to say, and with his rather baby-faced appearance we worry that he’ll soon be the butt of the same old jokes they used to tell about Dan Quayle. Already a group calling itself Kansans for Kansas — a name that defies parody — has sent us a flier that portrays him wearing a diaper and sucking on a milk bottle.
We’ve been wary of the incumbent, however, ever since an early candidates’ debate when she took a stab at winning the fourth district congressional nomination during the mid-term election in 2010. Each of the candidates were asked if they would vote to repeal Obamacare, and after all the others had finished trying to outdo one another with their determined disgust for that hated law she proudly announced she would not vote for repeal. We gave her credit for being willing to express an unpopular opinion and endure the boos that immediately arose from the crowd, and thought that it might even prove a smart strategy to win a plurality by staking out a “moderate” position while the rest of the field divided the conservative vote four ways, but we also decided to vote against her.
She wound up losing that race, of course, which is why she’s now working hard to keep her job in Topeka, and the issue continues to dog her. It’s a valid issue, because if the bill is not repealed in Washington it can only be thwarted by states refusing to implement its numerous provisions, and it seems to be of great interest to the voting public. The challenger has made much of his angry opposition to Obamacare, a flier from his campaign has warned that the incumbent “is prescribing a big dose of Obamacare for every Kansan,” and the incumbent has been forced to respond with her own flier citing some anti-Obamacare votes she has recently made.
Perhaps she has undergone a conversion since that ill-fated debate in the ’10 campaign, but there’s no way to tell if she’ll lose enthusiasm for repeal in the general election. Our friends at the invaluable Voice for Liberty in Wichita web site have discovered a couple hundred or so changes of party registration in this state senate district, presumably because the Democrats around here aren’t bothering to seriously contest any of the races so they want to help defeat the more outspoken Obamacare opponent in the Republican primary, and we’ve also noticed yard signs for the incumbent in yards that once touted only Democratic candidates, so it does seem clear which candidate is more certain to fight the good fight.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 