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

Roving Off the Reservation

Although we like to think ourselves rock-ribbed Republicans in the conservative tradition of Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Calvin Coolidge, we can’t quite work up the requisite red-hot hatred of Karl Rove.

Perhaps it’s just a habit ingrained during the George W. Bush years, when all the liberals tried to reconcile their contradictory beliefs that Bush was a drooling moron and his administration a brilliantly elaborate right-wing conspiracy by casting Rove as the evil genius behind it all, but the notion that Rove is now the evil genius thwarting an otherwise inevitable right-wing revolution seems implausible. The Bush years were by no means a conservative heyday, what with all that deficit spending and governmental growth and unfettered illegal immigration and the rest  of its many heresies from the right-wing religion, but given that the alternatives were Al Gore and John Kerry we retain a begrudging gratitude for Rove’s political machinations. In the unhappy aftermath of the Bush administration Rove has earned the further enmity of the true believers by backing some “establishment” Republicans over the more true-blue “tea party” challengers in Republican primaries, which is indeed annoying, but we’re still willing to assume that he did so only for fear that the upstart would lose to a even more noxious Democrat. Such pragmatism is now offensive to the many of our ideological brethren, however, and the more rigid right-wing talk radio hosts and their avid fans would have Rove banished from the party.

Ordinarily we give little thought to Rove, who seems to be shrewdly sitting out the current election cycle, but his bi-partisan pariah status came to mind when reading another excellent column by Kevin Williamson in the National Review. Williamson is lately one of our favorite writers, and The National Review has been the definitive conservative publication since before we could read, so it was interesting to see them offer even a qualified defense of Rove. Even more interesting were the voluminous comments, which were almost unanimous in their outrage. The National Review’s long tenure is enough to confer it establishment status, no matter how resolute it remains in espousing conservative causes, but its readership apparently is in no mood to forgive any deviation from the rightward path.

Which is fine by us, but the vehemence of the commenters makes us worried about the Republicans’ chances of fending off the Democrats. Most of the dissenters seem to regard anything less than the conservative ideal as unacceptable, even when it’s the only option left on the ballot other than a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, and would apparently prefer letting a Democrat win rather than voting for a impure Republican. Their theory seems to be that conservatives enjoy an overwhelming majority of even in San Francisco and Boston and Honolulu, and that far-left candidates prevail there only because the Republicans are too timid to offer up a sufficiently right-wing candidate, but we can’t shake a suspicion that a more squishy centrist sort of candidate might fare better in these jurisdictions and would at least be more preferable.

This tendency can be problematic even here in such a reliably Republican state as Kansas, where Sen. Pat Roberts finds himself in a hotly contested race against a Democrat posing as an independent because much of the Republican electorate is tempted to sit out the election in protest of Roberts’ occasional deviations from the conservative line. Roberts has an 86 percent lifetime rating by the American Conservative Union and scores much higher in the past six years of a Democratic administration, but that 14 percent of deviation might well hand the race to a far more liberal candidate if Kansas conservatives can’t bring themselves to vote for a less than perfect Republican over a far more imperfect challenger. The race might well determine which party controls the Senate and has drawn enough national attention that the right-wing talk radio hosts are covering it, with the more fervent among them touting Roberts in the most half-hearted way and with a constant admonition that the state should have nominated the scandal-tinged but more robust primary challenger, and at the risk of sounding like Rockefeller Republicans we’d like to see a more pragmatically enthusiastic endorsement.

It’s a hoary cliche that politics is the art of the possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Given the popular culture’s leftward tilt and the near-majority of Americans reliant on government largesse and lockstep uniformity of the Democratic party it is wishful thinking to believe that an electoral majority is just a matter of nominating the most conservative possible candidates, and for all our disagreements with Karl Rove we can’t blame him for seeking a least-worst middle ground. We’d prefer to enlist his formidable help in fending off the craziness of the Democrats, and then to deal with his kind.

— Bud Norman

Strange Times in Kansas

The Democrats aren’t even running a senatorial candidate in Kansas, the conventional wisdom is that the Republican is therefore more likely to lose, and it goes to show how very convoluted the state’s politics are at the moment.

There was a Democratic candidate in the race, duly nominated by a relative handful of voters in a primary where all the action was on the Republican side, but on Thursday he dropped out of the race without stating any particular reason. Our best guess is that with little money, less name recognition, and the nomination of a party that’s quite unpopular in these parts he simply decided to forgo the prolongated embarrassment of running a losing race. Ordinarily this would further ensure the already inevitable re-election of the entrenched Republican incumbent, but these are not ordinary times.

In this case the entrenched Republican incumbent, Sen. Pat Roberts, is not popular within his party. Although he has a respectable rating of 86 percent from the American Conservative Union, and has been far higher during the age of Obama, that heretical 14 percent has riled the Kansas conservatives. Over all those years in Washington Roberts has racked up a lot of debt ceiling increases and back room bargains and the sort of business as usual that Kansas’ rock-ribbed Republicans are now revolting against, and he survived a mud-slinging primary with less than 50 percent of the vote only because the anti-incumbent sentiment was split between a strong but tarnished challenger and a couple of no-names who were so little known that many people knew nothing bad about them and thus decided to award them a protest vote. Despite this desultory primary the Republicans had reason to hope that Roberts could wash off the mud and rally the base with the valid argument that he is far more conservative than the alternatives, and let the anti-incumbent sentiment split between the Democrat and the Libertarian and the independent who were crowding the ballot.

The departure of the Democrat is a boon to that independent, however, and that independent was already leading Roberts in the polls. He’s an Olathe businessman named Greg Orman, and according to his widely disseminated advertisements he’s all about non-partisan practical solutions and common sense and all the other focus group-tested cliches. There’s enough talk in those ads about balanced budgets and fighting the Washington establishment to imply that he’s a conservative, but he ran for the Senate as a Democrat in 2008, he’s been suspiciously coy about which party he would caucus with as a Senator, and the Democrats here and elsewhere seem quite pleased with the prospect that he might wind up denying the Republicans another seat in such a supposedly safe state as Kansas.

The Roberts campaign has already started deploying its considerable war chest with the message that Orman is a “closet Democrat,” which seems wise. Talk of businessmen and common sense and practical solutions always plays well in Kansas, and that nonsense about non-partisanship has eternal appeal to those apolitical voters who can’t quite understand why the mutually exclusive political philosophies of the two parties won’t allow them to get along nicely and do all the simple things that would surely make everything right, so Orman must be pressed for some specificity. We would be surprised if Orman’s common sense and practical solutions were conservative enough to garner an 86 percent rating from the ACU, and stunned if he proved anything but a partisan Democrat, and even the most disgruntled Republican should be willing to forgive Roberts’ sins against conservatism when offered that alternative. To whatever extent Orman does try to veer right of Roberts it will only diminish the enthusiasm of those Democrats who have been abandoned by their candidate. There’s still a possibility that the Democrat will be on the ballot even without a campaign, something to with a Kansas law that requires some specific reason for dropping out, and with the minuscule Libertarian vote splitting more or less equally between the free-market types and the dope-smokers it would still be the four-way race that supposedly favored Roberts.

Orman could try to exploit Roberts’ unhappy reputation in the state as an establishment sort of Republican, but it’s hard to say how that might play in these unpredictable days on the prairie. While the too-establishment Roberts finds himself in the fight of his life the incumbent Gov. Sam Brownback also finds himself vulnerable in the polls and largely because he’s been such an unabashedly tax-cutting and down-sizing Republican radical. Brownback’s feuds with the “arts community” and the teachers’ unions and the public sector at large have provoked an energized and well-organized opposition, a sizable minority of his own party’s primary electorate preferred a more polite and well-bheaved young woman who barely campaigned at all, and the Democrats around here are giddy with the expectation that a State Representative from the commie college town of Lawrence will vanquish their hated right-wing foe.

They might be right, and Kansas might turn out to be that unexpected Democratic triumph in what is otherwise expected to be a bleak election cycle. There are those polls, after all, and these are undeniably strange times. Still, we’re not putting much stock in polls that were taken before Labor Day when people were still wearing white shoes and straw hats and paying little attention to the state’s suddenly convoluted politics. The state still feels like a conservative and Republican and generally sensible jurisdiction, as it has been almost without interruption since the Republican abolitionists won that shooting war with with the Democrat slavers back in the Bleeding Kansas days, and a gut instinct suggests that it will return to form after all the momentary fussiness is dissipated. The Democratic president remains palpably unpopular here, his party is held in the same disrepute, Roberts’ sullied record is more in in opposition than any of his opponents, Brownback’s feuds with the “arts community” and the teachers’ unions and the public sector at large were all necessary, and better an establishment Republican such as Roberts as a fire-breathing right-winger such as Brownback than any old openly or closeted Democrat.

The state’s media won’t be of much of help, as they all hang out with the “arts community” and the teachers’ unions and the public sector at large, but the Republicans are well-funded and have plenty of unflattering photos of President Barack Obama to show juxtaposed against their opponents in saturation advertising. Money and media attention will pour into the state from Democrats hopeful of denting such a deeply Republican state, but that will only rile the natives. Both Roberts and Brownback will have to campaign well, but they’ll always having the advantage of making their arguments to a Republican state. We might be wrong, as we sometimes are, but we still like the Republicans’ chances here in Kansas.

— Bud Norman

Our Primary Duty

At some point today we will lace up our Converse All-Stars and walk the few blocks through our picturesque old neighborhood to the Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, where we will emphatically cast our votes in Kansas’ Republican primary. Voting is a favorite pastime of ours, right up there with minor league baseball and rock ‘n’ roll shows at sleazy dives and worship services at the West Douglas Church of Christ and the rest of the best of the glorious American heritage, so we never miss an opportunity.

Part of the fun is running into the liberal Democrat neighbors and friends whose votes we are gleefully canceling, but we don’t expect that many of them will bother to show up today. The Democratic party’s slate was pretty much pre-determined at a committee meeting last winter, where they seem to have concluded that this unfavorable election cycle doesn’t call for running any candidates who might come in handy at some later and more fortuitous time, so all the action is on the Republican side. Some of the Republican races have involved in much slinging of mud, a bit of which will stick to even the victor through the upcoming general election, and a few incumbents who would ordinarily cruise to re-election have been forced to dip into their campaign chests to stave off challenges from pesky insurgents,  but given the Republican mood in this Republican state these internecine squabbles should not prove a problem come November.

The most noteworthy challenges by pesky insurgents are an odd mix of politics by stereotype. There’s been some national attention paid to the senatorial race, where the facts rather neatly fit the press’ preferred narrative. Sen. Pat Roberts is about as establishment as one can get, having started his career in Washington a full 47 years ago as an aide to Sen. Frank Carlson, a name that only Kansans of a certain advanced age still associate with the the very establishment Kansas Republicanism of long ago, and he’s being challenged by Dr. Milton Wolf, a political neophyte best known but hardly known at all as a distant relative and vituperative critic of President Barack Obama and a radiologist who posted some of his patients’ x-rays on his Facebook page with sarcastic comments. We’ll still be debating the choice as we wander over to Gloria Dei, but at this point we’re leaning toward Roberts. He was always enjoyably salty company when we covered his previous perfunctory campaigns for major state newspaper, and although this Dr. Wolf fellow makes a pretty compelling case about the votes that Roberts and the rest of those longtime Washington guys have made over the past 47 years we don’t know him with the same familiarity. There’s a certain national talk radio host who will deride us as sell-out RINOs if we follow this instinct, but it’s such fun to hear him fulminate about establishment victories.

The state’s two contested congressional primaries turn the familiar narrative on its head. Here in the Fourth District, which is basically the relatively big city of Wichita and the relatively big town of Hutchinson and a lot of sparsely populated small towns and farmland, the impeccably conservative and unabashedly Tea Party incumbent Rep. Mike Pompeo is being challenged by his Bush-era predecessor, former Rep. Todd Tiahrt, who stepped down two terms ago to make an ill-fated stab at a Republican Senate nomination and now is arguing to get his old job back on the old promises of delivering federal spending and favorable “economic development” deals. We’ll march to Gloria Dei with enthusiasm for Pompeo, as we’ve promised the several campaign staffers who have called the house in the past few days, partly because we prefer his free market approach and partly because we find him the far more impressive individual. We hope this will placate that national radio host who fulminates against RINOs, and are fairly confident the majority of the Fourth District will reach the same conclusion.

Over in the First District, which is comprised by that huge empty place stretching from the Colorado border clear into northeastern Kansas, the race pits famously irascible Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp, who became a talk radio sensation and national Tea Party favorite with his full-throated rants about Obamaism, against the more politely Republican Alan LaPolice. The First is close enough to the Fourth that the political advertisements are permeating the local airwaves, and we note that LaPolice is trying to make hay of the fact that Huelskamp lost his seat on the Agriculture Committee by offending the more delicate sensibilities of House Speaker John Boehner and the rest of the RINO Republican leadership. It will be interesting to see how the Republican voters of the First District assess this, but we trust the judgement of a majority voters who can somehow live such enviable lives on the harsh high plains of western Kansas.

There’s an intriguing race between a deal-brokering Chamber of Commerce Republican and a stalwart stingy anti-government incumbent for the Fourth District Sedgwick County Commission seat, too, but that would probably exhaust your interest in our local politics. Suffice to say that we’re foursquare for the nay-saying skinflint, and will almost certainly wind up voting for the Republican in any case. These Democrats that the committee came up with are just awful, and even the most mud-soaked Republicans look good by comparison.

— Bud Norman