July 2008

July 31, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 28, 2008)

Statehouse gang watching 5th Senate District

There are 41 primary elections on the ballot next week to be decided for Kansas Senate and Kansas House of Representatives districts.

Those are Republican vs. Republican and Democrat vs. Democrat scuffles which will in the vast majority of cases decide which candidate goes onto the November general election for a chance to serve in the Legislature. A handful of those races are primary-only races, with no major party opposition in the general election, so for those lucky candidates, the campaign season will likely be over when the votes are tabulated on Aug. 5.

Oh, and 48 Republican and Democratic candidates, four in the Senate and 44 in the House, will be on the ballot, but have no major-party primary or general election opposition. They’re very practically already reelected.

But for all the contests, there is one in the entire state that the political insiders are going to be watching and talking about for the next week.

That one highly scrutinized primary election, and the reason the Statehouse gang is so interested?

It’s the 5th Senate District. The district is western Wyandotte and parts of Leavenworth counties.

And, it is a Democratic primary contest in which three-term Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Gilstrap, D-Kansas City, is opposed by former Wyandotte Unified Government member Kelly Kultala, Kansas City. What makes it the spotlight race statewide is that Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, have both endorsed Kultala.

In the political circles in the Statehouse, that makes the contest the hottest corner of the ballot.

It’s not often that a governor intervenes in a legislative primary race, just a handful of times in the last 20 years. And the minority leader of the Senate, who is literally in charge of keeping the now- 10-member delegation on track, rarely ventures into the primary election battle, especially when it involves a three-term incumbent.

The governor and Hensley, not so incidentally, have also sent a letter to lobbyists, political action committees, unions, virtually anyone who can be counted on to make contributions to campaigns, suggesting that those folks contribute $1,000 to the Kultala campaign.

We’ll know soon just how persuasive Sebelius and Hensley were in their “suggested contribution” level. The contributions will show up, of course, in the campaign finance report of Kultala.

And…if you were a lobbyist for virtually anything or anyone with issues likely to surface in the 2009 Kansas Legislature wouldn’t you want to be on the good side of  Sebelius, and Hensley, too?

Imagine you could get on their good side by making the $1,000 contribution? Probably, though the governor says she isn’t making a list of people who got the letters (though such a list exists, of course, because someone printed up the mailing labels) and she won’t be checking it twice to see whether people who got the letters pony up the $1,000.

So, it’s not only contributions that Statehouse insiders will be watching, they’ll be measuring the political clout of the governor, making their assessments of who is listening to the governor with two years left in her last term in office…

Sure, there is the campaign, both candidates are out knocking on doors, planting signs, making their pitches to potential voters, but to the insiders, this is a primary election about the governor and what clout she still has left in the latter half of her second term and which campaign contributors recognize that clout.

Oh, and whoever wins the primary still has a general election race against Leavenworth Republican Steve Fitzgerald, who came within two percentage points of beating Gilstrap four years ago.

July 24, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 21, 2008)

Statehouse professors?

What if your kid went off to college and decided to major in…everything?

Nope, not just one or two subjects, but everything.

That’s essentially what legislators do when they come to Topeka. The farmer needs to learn the complexities of banking, the banker needs to figure out highway building, the teacher needs to get up to speed on insurance.
When you vote for a legislator, you’re sending someone to Topeka who will at sometime during his/her term have to deal with virtually every issue that involves living, working, learning, even dying in Kansas.

It’s a big plate, and it requires some pretty decent sizing-up skills by voters to figure out whether the candidate—newbie or incumbent—us up to learning all that he/she will need to know on your behalf as your legislator arriving in Topeka.

And, of course, right in the middle of the flying short course in managing the state are lobbyists, dreaded lobbyists who generally show up in hazy black and white photos in campaign commercials. We’re generally led to believe that lobbyists are the problem with government, both in Washington and in Topeka. Well, maybe yes, but probably no.

Because lobbyists—representing unions, chambers of commerce, banks and farm groups, educators, doctors, corporations, utilities, insurance companies—virtually live in the Statehouse during the legislative session they come under scrutiny at election time when people wonder what they want for their clients and what they’re doing to get deals for those clients.

It’s easy to forget, and hardly any legislative candidates mention when they’re promising not to hang out with lobbyists, that those lobbyists have a pretty important informational role for legislators who come to Topeka not knowing the complexities, the industry norms, and the intersection of state law, federal law and even local government ordinances.

There’s a lot more going on than just passing laws that you read about in the newspaper. There are complexities that legislators need to know about and why something that on its face seems simple might not be.

For example, you probably didn’t read much about the small but complicated issue of “one call” to get utilities to identify where their water and natural gas pipes, electric wires and water and sewage lines are. That’s a big deal if you add onto your home or build a shopping center or even just want to dig a hole to plant a tree and don’t want to cause an explosion or a massive power outage or cut the water or sewer line for your neighborhood.

It was a festival of lobbyists, all with their own clients’ interests to protect—from the contractors to the gas companies to the municipalities and water districts and even to the lawyers who want to make sure that liabilities for foul-ups don’t become unreasonable.

Think your candidate for House or Senate understood the complexities without the assistance of lobbyists, without talking to people who are affected by the “one-call” bill? Probably not. That’s what lobbyists do.

For some voters, their legislators are going to be a long way from home, and they’re going to be trying to learn everything they can about complexities of state government, about issues that just don’t come up at home. They’ll learn much of what they need to know from lobbyists.

And they’ll probably attend receptions when the legislative day is over and go to lunches or dinners with lobbyists. But those are generally low-key—it is bad manners to browbeat legislators or lie to them, and lobbyists who do that are quickly identified and become useless to their employers.

That’s the Statehouse/legislative culture at work.

July 10, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 7, 2008)

Does primary date matter?

For years Kansans—mostly Republicans, though Democrats chime in, too—have talked about the split in the Republican Party that makes interesting but predictable news stories.

It’s the “social conservatives” vs. the “moderates” who battle every cycle in primary elections to win the nomination and the right to put the still respected “Republican” party behind their names on the general election ballot in a state that is overwhelmingly Republican by party registration.

In dozens of Kansas House and Senate districts across the state, the “R” behind a candidate’s name is good for about 45 percent of the vote. The label “Democrat” is worth, by registration, 27 percent of the vote statewide. Now, that’s just registration, and it doesn’t mean that Republicans vote only for Republicans or that Democrats vote only for Democrats. But there’s an inclination for Republicans and Democrats to stick to their party label when they don’t know something specific about the candidates.

That leaves, at least this year, statewide, about 27 percent of voters who don’t have a party affiliation, show up just for the November general election and essentially decides who wins in House and Senate districts and ultimately which party holds the majority in the Legislature.

That’s a big deal. And for more than a decade, the moderate Republicans have quietly, amongst themselves, wondered whether a simple change in state law would eliminate that social conservative-social moderate infighting, or at least—and maybe that is the reason there’s been no change yet—settle the intraparty fight.

That change?

Moderate Republicans believe that just moving the primary election date to sometime after Labor Day, or at least after school has started, would shed light on whether it is the social conservatives who have the hearts of Republican voters or whether it is social moderates who Republicans want running the state.

What’s the effect of the change?  Moderates believe that conservative Republicans don’t vacation in early August and that moderates are so busy squeezing in a vacation before school starts that they don’t bother to vote. Moderates believe the date of the election (Aug. 5, this year) benefits conservative Republicans in primary elections, and socially conservative Republicans don’t spend much time fretting about it, they just vote.

Is the date an important watershed for the GOP? Maybe, but early voting, voting by mail, that sort of thing, is spotty. In some counties, there’s a lot of early voting, in many counties there’s not much. Whether having kids in school and more organized use of time when kids are in school make a difference really isn’t known. It’s all just speculation.
Legislative Democrats really don’t’ wonder aloud much about the primary election date.

There aren’t a lot of Democratic primaries for legislative seats in Kansas, and there isn’t the noisy and divisive socially conservative-socially moderate split among Democrats. Just isn’t.

And moderate Republicans, while wishing that they could get the primary election date moved, are troubled by the likely defeat of that idea. Why would socially conservative Republicans give up what might or might not be an advantage in getting their candidates through the primary election?

And why would Democrats do anything that would un-roil the waters of the Republican primary? What’s the upside there for Democrats, who in many cases pick up thousands of moderate Republican votes for their candidates when a too-socially conservative Republican is nominated by the party for the general election scrap?

Nope, no reason for Democrats to do anything that settles the infighting and turmoil in the GOP. Democrats, essentially, are fairly eager to hold Republicans’ coats while they fight amongst themselves, battle each other, burn up campaign money on primary election battles and scuff up the GOP primary winner.

Which weighs more? A pound of primary election ballots in early August or a pound of primary election ballots in early September?

We may never know…

July 3, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 30, 2008)

“Known for your friends” gets complicated

Your mother probably told you that you can tell a lot about a person by the friends that he or she has.

That works, pretty well, for election politics, and you quickly get the idea that if, say, paint manufacturers contribute heavily to a campaign, they probably want something painted.

That “known for your friends” that mom talked about is easy when you can tell who the friends are and what their interests are.

But that is likely to change this election cycle.

What if those paint manufacturers didn’t say, “We want Jane elected because she wants everything painted,” but instead said, “We are a nonprofit association of mothers who don’t want our kids to see filthy graffiti on bathroom walls and we like Jane because she doesn’t either.”

Does the campaign shift from people just wanting to sell more paint and people (mothers are always good) who want to protect children from graffiti that nobody wants kids to see?

That’s the difference, in very clear terms, from “express advocacy”—elect Jane so the government will buy more paint—to “issue advocacy”: we are against graffiti and so is Jane, isn’t that nice?

That blurry misdirection by the paint folks—no there isn’t a big paint lobby in Kansas, but it makes for a cool example—is the sort of issue that the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission is likely to be sorting out in the coming weeks.

Already a law firm has asked the commission to say whether a group (say, the anti-graffiti nonprofit organization sponsored by the paint makers) can run those ads and not show up as contributors to Jane’s campaign and not have Jane have to report the group—and its contributors—as having made a campaign contribution to Jane.

Now, if the group just bought an ad and said to vote for Jane, that would be “express advocacy” of the election of Jane.

But if the group’s ad said that among people who support the issue of painting over graffiti is, well, son of a gun, Jane!—then that’s “issue advocacy.”

Of course, if Jane reads the ad, or hears it on the radio or sees it on TV for the first time, and was completely surprised by it, well, she wouldn’t be responsible for it, and nobody would have to say who paid for the ad.

That happens. In fact, it happened this year, when some legislators were surprised to see their names in ads that said that the legislators did good things for children.

But the element of surprise—and possibly accounting for the cost of the ad and who ponied up the money for it—changes if Jane helped write the ad or consented to being included in it.

What’s that? Is it “express advocacy” for Jane, or is it an issue ad in which Jane just happened to be included?  And at what point does anyone find out it was the paint makers who want Jane elected?

It gets complicated. And what if the anti-graffiti issue is also being supported by the paintbrush makers? And what if the paintbrush makers want to use polar bear fur for their paintbrushes or the paintbrushes are made by children in China? Do we ever get to the bottom of who wants Jane elected and why?

There isn’t a hard and fast rule now, and the Ethics Commission is likely to be deciding what “express advocacy” is and what “issue advocacy” is this summer. It’s apparently going to be one of those “we’ll know it when we see it” type deals.

That’s the issue of transparency. So we can see all the moving parts, figure out who Jane’s friends are, and whether we like Jane’s friends and whether we vote for her.

It’s getting complicated, this freedom of speech business as it applies to campaigning.