by RICK DANLEY // April 24, 2018
There was a moment sometime after the close of the 2014 election when independent candidate Greg Orman, having just conceded a high-profile, tightly fought U.S. Senate race to longtime Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, fell into conversation with another of Kansas’ political veterans, Bob Dole.
Orman recalled the exchange. “You know,” Dole told the then 45-year-old Independent, “if you’d just said you’d be a Republican, you’d be in the Senate right now.” Orman knew as much; he’d had friends, colleagues, strangers tell him the same: A third-party candidate can’t win in Kansas. Declare yourself a Republican — skate to victory. “But I said to Sen. Dole what I said to [the others]: “[If I were elected as a Republican,] would I be getting anything done?” Dole thought about it for a second. “No,” the former senator said, “you wouldn’t, and I’m really sad about that.”
“You know,” said Orman in a conversation with the Register on Friday. “There was a time when our politics worked.”
FOR ORMAN, a Kansas City-area businessman who announced his candidacy for governor in January, the path back to a functional politics begins with breaking the current two-party stranglehold, which he says restricts an elected official’s ability to seek the sort of flexible, common-sense, non-party-line solutions that the state requires. And the time for such a change, says Orman, is now.
“I think Kansas voters are frustrated with a system of government that they feel is daily letting them down,” said the candidate, pointing to a recent Gallup poll showing that 49 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats say a third party is needed. “Think about that for a second: 50 percent of the people who have chosen to affiliate with a major party so dislike their own party, they wish they had another choice.”
Whether Orman will be that other choice depends on his convincing Kansas voters to overcome their partisan prejudices and electoral habits and muster the nerve to spring for a third-party candidate. Kansas has yet to elect an Independent in its nearly 160 years of statehood.
Orman’s candidacy will also have to absorb the slings and arrows of certain major-party leaders, particularly on the Democratic side, who fear that with Orman’s support for Medicaid expansion, moderate gun control measures, and his pathway-to-citizenship views for illegal aliens, he will draw valuable votes away from whomever the Democratic candidate turns out to be and, in so doing, will guarantee a victory for the Republicans in the fall. But, to some, Orman’s views are closer to those of a moderate Republican: he is ardently pro-business, he’s wary of overregulation, he was against the Affordable Care Act, he worked for President George H.W. Bush’s campaign in 1988, and he has selected as his running mate Republican (now Independent) state senator and Garden City native John Doll. For these and other reasons, Orman is confident that he can earn votes from both Republicans and Democrats, not to mention the 31 percent of Kansas voters who remain unaffiliated with either major party.
“Look,” said Orman in a separate interview in February, “there’s nowhere in the Kansas Constitution, there’s nowhere in the United States Constitution, that says only two parties are entitled to governor. I don’t think you can spoil a system that’s already rotten.”
As for those majority party bosses who hope Orman will exit the race before the November election, Orman is clear: “I’m not going anywhere.”
KANSAS: DISTRIBUTION CAPITAL OF AMERICA
Orman, who graduated from Princeton with a degree in economics in 1991, sees in Kansas the locus of a great potential. He believes that by taking advantage of Kansas’ geographic centrality, the Sunflower State could soon be “the intermodal manufacturing … and distribution capital of America.”
But you can’t just wave a wand, says Orman, who recalled a recent conversation he had with an executive at one of the large Class I railroads. The railroad had recently built an intermodal facility in Texas. Why Texas, asked Orman, why not Kansas? “He told me it would have taken twice as long to build it in Kansas,” said Orman, “because of regulatory requirements.”
In an effort to relax those burdens, Orman has advocated entering into local regulatory compacts, which would provide targeted economic development dollars, highway dollars, etc., in exchange for accelerated permitting timelines that Orman believes would jump-start private sector investment. “Let’s say to local governments: we understand you have an obligation to protect public safety, we understand you have an obligation to protect your community, but, by the same token, there are other places that are able to get these processes done much more quickly. … The goal here is to address what is otherwise a bottleneck to economic development.”
TECH ED NOW, NOT LATER
Of course new jobs are of little use if Kansas lacks a robust, qualified workforce.
Orman recently visited a high school in Linn, Kansas, a small town in the rural north-central part of the state. The candidate was struck by one young man, a senior, who described his plans after graduation: He would hire on at a fence-building company in order to save up enough money to attend welding school.
But why should that student have to wait?
Orman pointed to the often stringent requirements that surround federal Title IV funding, which many students, especially financially disadvantaged students, come just short of meeting. “I think as a state we can look at making up that gap,” said Orman, “so that that kid who graduated in Linn, Kansas, and is going to go to work to save up money so he can afford to go to welding school… could actually go right away.”
The incremental earnings on the investment in that student, said Orman, are huge. “He’s going to more than make up the cost of the school in his first year out.” Plus, continued Orman, there are a number of studies showing that if a high school student doesn’t go into some program of higher learning after graduation — whether a technical school, community college, or four-year institution — the likelihood of their ever enrolling is low.
“The other real benefit to technical education,” said Orman, “is that when a kid gets a technical degree, they live and get a job within 50 miles.”
WORKING LOCAL
Orman, who has two daughters of his own, spoke at length on Friday about the importance of creating a vibrant and diverse work economy in Kansas, which not only aims to keep “Kansas’ sons and daughters” in the state but also draws workers from other states.
Orman pointed to a survey showing that 55 percent of Kansas State University graduates who left the state to begin their careers would prefer to return to the Manhattan area if they could find comparable jobs.
One strategy to address the flight of Kansas graduates, said Orman, would be to improve the state’s “technology transfer out of the Regents university system.” In other words, forging a public-private partnership to create a situation in which technologies and resources developed on campuses across the state could be used to the benefit of the private sector and of the general public.
This sort of public-private fix is at the heart of Orman’s theory of economic development. As an Independent, Orman is at pains to avoid falling prey to the binary descriptions of “big government” versus “small government.” “As government,” said Orman, “what we have to look at is: what are the gaps, what are the things that the private sector and local communities aren’t able to do as well, and then we need to fill those gaps.”
HEALTHCARE
Orman is on record as being opposed to the Affordable Care Act — “[I felt] at the time it was passed that we were expanding a broken system” — but he remains a strong proponent of expanding the state’s Medicaid program.
Orman’s real fixation, however, is getting “underneath the reasons why healthcare is so expensive,” which he believes stem from a misaligned system of incentives.
“[Medicine] is the only industry I know of where you get paid to fix your own mistakes,” said Orman. If someone botches the paint job on your house, when they come back to fix their mistake, reasoned Orman, they don’t then send you another invoice. “But in healthcare, we do precisely that. … We have a fee-for-services model that pays based on the number and type of procedure you perform. It doesn’t pay based on outcomes.”
Orman, then, supports a continued move toward a system of outcome-based payments, which would include withholding reimbursements to certain healthcare providers if their patients have cause to be readmitted within a specific period of time. “That gives healthcare providers an incentive to make sure that they’re addressing not just the issue, but the issues that might bring you back in. They’re held accountable for the outcome.”
He also believes that the state’s current Medicaid policies, with their extremely narrow eligibility requirements, send the wrong messages to the working poor. “I think we tell them, ‘If you get sick, quit your job, because it’s the only way you’re going to be able to get healthcare.’ … I think we need to be building pathways to allow people to improve their lives, not discourage them from working because we have a healthcare policy that provides the wrong incentives.”
ORMAN SPOKE on Friday about public education: he favors, among other things, increasing the number of quality summer learning programs, which he believes will help address the achievement gap between high- and low-income students. “We cannot underinvest in education,” said Orman, whose wife is a public school teacher. “It is [along with good roads and bridges and access to healthcare] one of the three pillars of our community.”
He spoke about guns: here, too, Orman rejects the binary language of pro-gun versus anti-gun. He supports modest firearm-control measures — stronger background checks; raising to 21 the age for purchase of military-style rifles; ending the sale of bump stocks and similar accessories; and appropriate training for concealed-carry permits — standards, says Orman, which fully honor the Second Amendment. “Far too often,” said Orman, “politicians on the campaign trail say things that are politically expedient, that might look good on a bumper sticker, that might win them votes, but which impairs their ability to govern and get anything done after they’re elected. My point of view is: if I can’t get things done, if I can’t make positive, constructive changes for the people of Kansas, then I shouldn’t be doing this.”
And he weighed in on the Department of Children of Families, where he thinks the appointment of a “true citizen’s advocate” who would report directly to the Governor could create an environment of greater accountability at the agency.
STILL, Orman knows that his greatest challenge remains finding a way to disrupt a political theology that leaves the voter with the false impression that he or she has only two viable choices in any election. Orman says he’s a political independent for three reasons: 1) he puts fixing failed policies above party loyalty; 2) unlike Gov. Brownback, who wouldn’t change course on his radical tax cuts when it became apparent that they weren’t working, Orman doesn’t cling to rigid ideological solutions (“I reserve the right to be smarter tomorrow than I am today”); and 3) he’s an independent, because he doesn’t want to be beholden to party bosses or special interests, which is “the reason that our campaign won’t take money from lobbyists [or] PACs. We want to have an obligation solely and exclusively to the people of Kansas.”
“So often in politics today, an idea floated by one party is dead on arrival with the other,” said Orman, whose campaign events are routinely attended by both Republicans and Democrats, who, Orman says, generally leave his events having found common ground.
“So much of being governor should not be partisan or ideological. It should be about effectively running the state.”
This article originally appeared in The Iola Register on April 24, 2018. *
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