October 2006
Oct. 26, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Oct. 23, 2006)The money trail
Next week you are going to be hearing a lot about campaign finance because Oct. 30 is the date candidates for public office are supposed to turn in their campaign finance reports to the state and then those reports quickly become the fodder for lots of news coverage.
Now, like most things in life, more is obviously better. The more money that a candidate has the more yard signs, the more radio commercials, the more mailings and other appurtenances of what you’d consider a businesslike, take-no-prisoners campaign that the candidate can field.
All that is great, of course, but it’s all a poor substitute for actually meeting the voters face-to-face and asking them questions.
The ideal campaign? It’s when every voter in the district, whatever the district is, meets every candidate face-to-face, sizes ‘em up, asks a question or two and makes a decision. It doesn’t get any better than that but it seldom happens in House races or statewide races because there just isn’t time. If it was possible, no candidate would need more than a couple bucks for a brochure and maybe gas money. It’s not like that.
So, candidates raise money and have money sent to them for the campaign that they need to wage to get elected.
Candidates with not as much money as their opponents make a big deal out of who gives the other guy money. It’s not entirely unreasonable to note that people or political action committees with specific viewpoints give money to candidates who share those viewpoints, but it’s a little tricky to make that into a campaign issue of its own.
After all, you’d like to think that people or PACs smart enough to have money to contribute are also smart enough to donate it to candidates who share their views on specific issues.
Side note: There are candidates out there who refuse to accept campaign money from even PACs that they agree with. Don’t know what that’s about, why anyone wouldn’t take money from friends or why a candidate would demonize people who agree with them. But it’s a campaign tactic that some like, even if their explanation of it is printed on fairly flimsy brochures.
Anyway, you can tell something about candidates, probably, from the people and PACs supporting them. If a bunch of pro-life PACs send money to a candidate, you can probably figure that the candidate is pretty pro-life. If pro-choicers send money to a candidate, the opposite is likely. If that’s the only issue that a voter is interested in, there you go.
But campaigns are a blend of interests and viewpoints. What if a supported-by-pro-choicers candidate also is opposed to use of eminent domain for eliminating blight in cities or in favor a highway bill that shortens your commute?
Making a campaign issue of where a candidate’s money comes from is, of course, fair but is it a major issue? We may find out in a handful of races in Sedgwick County.
There the issue is that a handful of incumbents who oppose expanded gambling took money from northeast Kansas Indian tribes that operate casinos and, intelligently, also oppose the expansion of gambling. They have the corner on the market and why would those tribes want anyone else to collect the quarters that flow into their slot machines?
Some candidates are making much of “gambling money” being taken by candidates who oppose gambling.
Does it make sense for tribes to oppose expanded gaming and for like-minded legislators to take their campaign contributions? Want to draw fine distinctions between why people oppose expanded gaming or if you oppose expanded gaming, does it really matter?
We may find out…
Oct. 19, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Oct. 16, 2006)Getting courted
If you are a voter, you are being courted by everyone whose name will appear on the Nov. 7 general election ballot and like most courtships there are interesting little turns taken, strategies deployed and hopes…
You want to hear candidates say what you want to hear. And in a Republican-by-voter registration state, there’s another dynamic that might link the top of the ballot and the middle of the ballot to legislative races in a surprising way.
Let’s take a look at what voters are hearing—or not.
In the governor’s race, Democratic incumbent Kathleen Sebelius is on a campaign glide path that will be almost relentlessly upbeat. She’s the winner in public opinion polls so far and her best tactic is to make sure that Republican challenger Sen. Jim Barnett, R-Emporia, doesn’t generate major news stories.
That’s why the past three gubernatorial candidate debates have been pretty tame, sending reporters to re-reading their notes to figure out whether news has been committed. Most of the conflicts have been low on the Richter scale. That’s good for Sebelius, bad for Barnett. He needs to be generating issues that get press coverage on the race, so-called “earned media” coverage, by making news and sparking conflict. If he can find an issue to put Sebelius on the “wrong” side, so much the better for Barnett.
But, that only works if Sebelius rises to the bait, and so far, she’s letting some issues Barnett raises just lounge there. Not a bad strategy, one that seems a little counter-intuitive, but it is working so far.
One subtle surprise in the debates is that Barnett hasn’t used the term “pro-life” to describe himself. Why? Probably because the Republican Party is badly split over the issue of abortion, and while the majority of GOP voters are likely pro-life, probably a third of the GOP is pro-choice. Many pro-choice Republicans realize Barnett isn’t one of them now, and if that is the issue that wins their vote, Barnett being quiet on the catch phrase may keep some of them in his column.
But that is a risky choice in itself because pro-life Republicans want to hear the words. They want to hear them in public forums, they want to see them reported in the press and they want Barnett to be not only pro-life but proud of it.
If pro-life Republicans don’t hear the words, Barnett runs the risk that they will stay home on Nov. 7. That works for Sebelius, too, because while she’s not going to accumulate much of the pro-life vote, denying votes to Barnett is almost as good as winning them herself. She can count on many pro-choice Republicans, or maybe just those who don’t believe that the abortion issue is crucial, to vote for her.
There’s another little thing working this election cycle that might show up next month. It’s the concept of mid-ballot “comfort food” for moderate Republicans.
What?
Here’s that concept: moderate Republicans, who may vote for Sebelius and might go Democratic in the divisive and bitter attorney general race, are by that time probably wondering what they’re doing, if they really are Republicans.
And, then they come to the sweet spot on the ballot. Those are the races for Secretary of State, Treasurer and Insurance Commissioner, which barring something cataclysmic are going to be won by Republican incumbents. It’s like comfort food, those middle-ballot statewide offices, a chance for moderate Republicans to validate themselves as Republicans.
But the concept goes, after that reaffirmation of party identification, those voters might get a little, well, “frisky” on the legislative races, maybe straying again to a Democrat if there isn’t a moderate Republican House candidate on the ballot or if they are just unsure of the leaning of their party’s nominee.
Now, that’s an interesting turn in a courtship.
Oct. 12, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Oct. 9, 2006)A complicated issue
The reason magic works, magicians will tell you, is the simple concept of “misdirection.”
It’s getting you to look the wrong way for just an instant while the elephant disappears or the hat yields up a rabbit or two. (It’s also the reason that magicians’ assistants don’t wear burkas.)
And while the race for attorney general of Kansas is only peripherally a magic act, one of its key issues involves some misdirection of the public’s attention early in the trick.
When Republican Attorney General Phill Kline came onto stage, he was talking subpoenaing records of two abortion clinics, one in Wichita, one in Overland Park. The concept that the public was watching was the possibility that those records would reveal instances in which girls who are legally too young to consent to sex under Kansas law have had abortions—essentially providing the proof that a law has been broken, and leading to the backward-tracking of the male involved and the charging of that male with rape of a child.
Rape of a child is so abhorrent that it tends to misdirect the public’s attention, and it is an area Democratic nominee for attorney general Paul Morrison needs to be careful about wading into. Morrison has prosecuted persons who have raped children, and he has, after the crime was alleged, obtained medical records that help in the prosecution of those rapists. That’s the order that the public is comfortable with: a crime is reported, the police and prosecutors investigate the crime and that often includes medical records of the victim, and then someone is charged and, with a little luck, convicted and taken off the streets for a long time.
The medical records search to learn of abortions—and therefore sexual activity—by young girls seems a little backwards to most people. We’re used to a crime being reported, investigation, charges, a trial, and conviction.
If Kline’s backwards-investigating procedure had yielded up examples of young girls being raped, and then tracking down the men involved, maybe the procedure would be less controversial. Maybe, not certainly, but maybe. But, that hasn’t happened, won’t before the election, and Kline isn’t going to have any men to charge with rape based on his attempt to sift through abortion clinic records.
But, that may be the misdirection.
The actual trick Kline is attempting to perform is more likely closing down abortion clinics by sifting through medical records of grown-up women to determine whether those records provide the fodder for closing down abortion clinics and charging those who provide abortions with crimes. That’s what Morrison, as gently as possible, is talking about when he talks of “fishing expeditions” through medical records.
Imagine medical records that wind up putting a woman who had a late-term abortion in the gristmill of a prosecution aimed at closing down an abortion clinic. She didn’t commit a crime, someone else did, and suddenly, she’s in the public eye to some degree.
That puts for many a considerably different spin on subpoenaing medical records.
That’s the part Morrison talks about, the part Kline doesn’t talk about.
If Kline was after child rapists, he could have asked just for records on young girls’ abortions, not those of women well above the age of consent to sexual activity.
That’s the misdirection.
There is probably near-unanimity among Kansas voters that if Kline—or anyone else, for that matter—can catch child rapists through abortion records, that person ought to be elected attorney general. But that hasn’t demonstrably happened yet. And there is a smaller number of Kansas voters who believes if Kline can subpoena women’s medical records and close down abortion clinics, he ought to be elected attorney general.
But it is not known how many Kansans don’t want medical records of women presumably old enough to vote to be involuntarily seized and used in attempts to close down abortion clinics.
That may be what Nov. 7 is all about…
Oct. 5, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Oct. 2, 2006)Hot-button issue: Immigration
The hottest button this election cycle for candidates is immigration.
Whether candidates are asked about it on the doorstep or bring it up themselves or put it in their campaign literature, it’s an issue that at some level is making its way into campaigns for the House and at a lesser level, the governor’s race.
There’s nearly always a hot-button issue in an election cycle. Two years ago it was gay marriage. That issue was resolved when the Legislature approved in time for local elections in the spring of 2005 a proposed constitutional amendment that passed handily.
The issue of illegal immigration and what happens to illegal immigrants has more moving parts and can be explained—which takes time—or turned into a simple “us” vs. “them” issue which is simpler to pose.
Reduced to “us” which is basically American citizens and “them” which is presumably the balance of the earth’s people, it becomes pretty simple. “Us” wins.
But immigration isn’t a new issue. And, to a large degree, it isn’t a state-level issue because citizenship is a national process for those who weren’t born in the United States.
But nationally, the borders have been porous for decades. There may be 12 million or so people in this country who aren’t U.S. citizens or who don’t have official federal government approval and documentation to be here.
So for this election cycle, Kansans are hearing about “immigrant tuition” or the state’s two-year-old law that allows people in Kansas who aren’t citizens or who don’t have legal documentation allowing them to be here, to pay in-state tuition rates at state colleges.
It’s not like these people are strangers. They’ve attended at least three years of high school in Kansas, got accepted to a college or university, and pledge to do whatever it takes to become U.S. citizens as soon as they are old enough to do so.
They might not be “us” as citizens, but after three years, you gotta figure that they’re Kansans—and not quite “them.” Their parents might not be citizens, and they might not be, but they’re here and are pretty much “Kansans.”
Now, the tuition break—they pay the same as the U.S. citizen from, say, Hutchinson and that is a problem in some House districts and among some voters. In some districts it’s not a big deal.
Out west where immigrants, many probably without documentation, are needed to do the work that is done in western Kansas—say, “disassembling” cattle and hogs for the meat market—the tuition business becomes somewhat important because you don’t need a degree to slaughter and process cattle. A view held by some: we don’t need college-educated illegal immigrants to do the jobs we need done around here.
In military base areas, say around Fort Riley where the war in Iraq has heightened “us” vs. “them,” there is concern that U.S. soldiers and their families freshly moved to Kansas and maybe resettled after serving in Iraq, may have to pay out-state tuition to state colleges while undocumented students who have been in Kansas three years get the in-state rate.
And, there are districts where undocumented workers take generally low-paying jobs that most voters wouldn’t take and the presence of undocumented workers is just not on the radar screen—except possibly if your kids are competing for an entry-level first job.
It’s a tough issue, and there are probably many good reasons why Kansans are on either side of the tuition controversy. Did an undocumented student take the last available seat in the computer sciences class or crowd Brandon or Caitlyn out of the 9 a.m. college algebra course?
The issue is a big one and the catch phrase “what part of illegal don’t you understand” probably is more correctly “what part of immigration don’t you understand?”
But it is a key issue and one worth watching, maybe thinking about whether it is the make-or-break issue for a vote.