by RICK DANLEY // June 16, 2018
Late last month Republican gubernatorial candidate and former state Sen. Jim Barnett took the unprecedented step of selecting his wife, Rosie Hansen, to be his running mate.
In doing so, Barnett rejected the usual bits of political advice that suggest a candidate should choose a running mate based on the running mate’s geographical home base or the amount of money or quality of political connections the running mate is able to attract, or else based on some other obvious metric calculated to project a balanced ticket and, thus, a ticket with the widest possible appeal.
“I actually pushed all those [considerations] aside,” Barnett has said. “What is most important to me is that the lieutenant governor is right on the issues.”
Since Barnett announced his candidacy last summer, the couple has crisscrossed Kansas many times over — racking up 74,000 miles in all, Barnett said, side by side the whole way, in the cab of a big red pickup truck.
“We don’t listen to the radio while we’re driving,” said Hansen. “And no audiobooks either. We talk.”
“Through those many miles of travel,” explained Barnett, “we’ve developed what we’ve called our ‘One Kansas’ agenda [and] it’s probably safe to say that our agenda is many times better because of the hours and hours of conversation we’ve had in the truck.”
In fact, it was in that very pickup that Barnett finally screwed up the courage to pop the question: Rosie, will you be my running mate?
Result: swing and a miss. “Are you crazy?” Hansen protested. “No, I absolutely won’t. I’m not a politician.”
“But that’s exactly why you’d be good,” insisted Barnett.
Barnett wisely dropped the subject. A couple of months later, however, once more out on the open road, the question resurfaced. “Once again we were talking about the need to re-create a functional state government,” remembered Hansen, “because, as we all know, that’s sorely needed right now. And I said, ‘You know, I would love to dig in and help with that,’ because that’s my background, that’s what I did for my career.”
“I would like that, too,” Barnett told her. “But you can’t do it from the outside; you have to be on the inside.”
Hansen agreed. But did she sign on? No, she didn’t. Again she demurred.
Strike two.
More weeks passed. “Finally,” remembers Hansen, it got to the point where I just realized: If you can see where you can make a difference, you have to step up and do it. And so I said, ‘Yes, let’s do it — I want to be part of Team Barnett.’ And here we are.”
On Thursday, where they were was The Iola Register, where the pair paused just long enough to talk love and politics during their latest multi-city tour.
BORN AND RAISED on a small farm in Lyon County, Rosemary Hansen counted herself one of 14 students to graduate from Americus High School in 1972. Hansen would go on to earn a biology degree from the University of Kansas, a law degree from the University of Minnesota, a master’s in public administration from Harvard, and, in 1998, she was named a National Security Affairs Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Hansen spent nearly 30 years as a foreign service officer at the U.S. State Department, where she helped establish and maintain embassies in Bangladesh, Germany, Bosnia, Australia, Thailand, and Afghanistan.
“It’s building things every day,” Hansen said of her years overseeing the operations of those U.S. embassies. “It’s problem-solving every day, it’s figuring out how to make things work and how to make things work well. To me, honestly, looking at what’s going on in Kansas right now, it’s the same kind of thing.”
“Kansas has gone off the rails in the last seven years,” agreed Barnett, “and we need someone to get it back on. [Rosie’s] expertise has been in managing efficiencies at a high level in government. … We will be a full-time governor and lieutenant governor. We represent a unity not only of purpose, but on policy, because we’ve developed these ideas together. We’re a team.”
A LANDON-STYLE Republican, who supports an increase in infrastructure spending, the expansion of Medicaid, a greater investment in public education, and a politician who offers full-throated rejections of all Brown-back-style experiments in radical tax cuts, Sen. Barnett is the only candidate on the GOP side whose key themes are still capable of tickling the erogenous zones of that vanishing beast, the moderate Republican, whose numbers in recent years seem to have gone the way of the bison.
“I think Kansas is ready to elect a Republican governor who is going to use common sense to solve problems,” said Barnett. And though the polls suggest a shrinking number of centrists nationwide, Barnett insists they’re there. “Traveling all over the state, most Kansans, I believe, are right in the middle.”
The same is not true of the majority of his fellow 2018 candidates, however.
Barnett, a gracious, upbeat doctor, who still practices medicine in Topeka, is vastly outflanked on his right by the race’s two high-profile front-runners, Gov. Jeff Colyer and Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and by the race’s fourth serious candidate, Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer, who currently trails Barnett in the polls.
WHETHER IT WAS part of the calculation or not, the unique move to name Hansen to the ticket may have done the work of increasing Barnett’s name-recognition. And while it’s not exactly a team of rivals, the gambit has surely succeeded in projecting a cozier picture of the campaign trail than we’re used to.
Although it sounds unseemly, Kansans have decided that there’s nothing wrong with a little love on the stump. On the day of the Barnett-Hansen announcement, the Topeka Capital-Journal ran with a picture of the couple sharing an ample smooch in front of a bookcase, a charming photo opportunity that the other Republican contenders won’t likely restage with their own running mates any time before the Aug. 7 primary.
“It’s been amazing to see how warmly Rosie has been received as a candidate,” Barnett said. “I think the state is ready for something fresh.”
NO ONE SEEMS to be able to find a precedent for the spousal appointment, in Kansas or in any other state. “I’ve never heard of it,” Washburn University political science professor Bob Beatty told reporters after the announcement, “and it’s really stunning in Kansas for a major party candidate.”
Selecting your spouse as a running mate or co-leader, however, isn’t completely unheard of, even in recent political history.
In 2016, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega named his wife — another Rosie; Rosario Murillo — as his vice-presidential running mate. In February the following year, the president of Azerbaijan appointed his wife as that country’s first vice president.
Of course, neither of these countries could be judged very successful by even the most minimal standards of political liberalism. But there are winning examples of marital co-rule, too. You just have to go back a ways.
The co-regency of lovebirds (and first cousins!) William of Orange and Mary II led to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which in turn led to the English Bill of Rights, which, in its turn, would go on to provide the intellectual underpinning of the American Revolution.
In a similar vein, but on the Catholic end of the stick, the husband-and-wife team of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella greatly enlarged their European monarchy plus found time to hand the Spanish credit card to a guy named Christopher Columbus and shout go! The couple’s motto? Tanto monta, Isabel como Fernando (“They amount to the same, Isabel and Ferdinand”).
More numerous, however, are those nonpolitical couples who worked together and lived together, and did their best work because of their close association and not in spite of it.
The marital pair of Charles and Ray Eames created an iconic lounge chair, and, along the way, managed to reshape the course of American modernist design. Pierre and Marie Curie, day in and day out, passed phosphorescent test tubes back and forth in the lab and eventually discovered two new elements, radium and polonium. They co-signed all of their published reports, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, and left behind notebooks in which their handwriting intermingles even on the same line.
“If you’re really trying to build and create something,” said Hansen, “you have to have a good relationship. We look at our parents and how they worked together on the farm. If both of them were not working toward that single goal, it wouldn’t have happened. It just wouldn’t have. And we see examples like that all over the state.”
Returning to political power couples, however, here’s another, perhaps more historically analogous, example.
The place: Constantinople. The time: Early in the sixth century. After a period of misrule and violent riots which destroyed much of the ancient capital — a period in which a rogue senator called Hypatius curried the favor of the rioting mob, a mob who desperately wanted Hypatius to ascend to the Imperial Throne — the Emperor Justinian I and his wife and co-ruler, the humbly born Empress Theodora, suppressed the riots (granted, not without violence) and set about, through an influx of infrastructure spending and a series of legal and political reforms, to restore the decimated city of Constantinople to its full Byzantine splendor.
This article appeared originally in The Iola Register on June 16, 2018. *
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