by RICK DANLEY // June 18, 2018
PARSONS — Southeast Kansas’s GOP faithful poured into the Parsons Municipal Auditorium on Saturday for a forum featuring four of the top Republican candidates for governor.
Current front-runners, incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, appeared alongside former state Sen. Jim Barnett and Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer.
Johnson County-based minister-salesman, Patrick Kucera, who calls himself the “Entrepreneurial Evangelist” and who says he wants to “put God back into the equation of making money,” was slated to participate but never appeared.
In a two-hour event that touched on highways, taxes, school funding, abortion, unemployment, Medicaid expansion, gun laws, agriculture, and immigration, the primary differences among the four candidates had less to do with policy and were more about temper.
Barnett and Selzer went some way toward emphasizing old-fashioned values like “unity” (Barnett) and “inclusiveness” (Selzer).
Kobach, on the other hand, positioned himself as the only alpha candidate in the race, a “full-throttled” conservative who isn’t afraid to take on liberals, the media, snowflakes, the ACLU, the Kansas Supreme Court, illegal immigrants, and anyone else who would seek to challenge the rising tide of the new conservative movement. Channeling his inner Johnny Cochran, Kobach offered this third-person self-summary: “When the lefties attack, he hits right back.”
Colyer, rhetorically, seemed stranded somewhere in the middle, offering watery phrases in favor of cooperation while every once in a while extending a bloodless parry in Kobach’s direction.
As it was, the fiercest disagreement on the night came when these two front-runners got tangled up in an extremely parochial debate concerning an excise tax Kobach voted for nearly 20 years ago while he was a city councilman in Overland Park, a vote which resulted in a devastating minor upcharge for Colyer and the other residents in his plush suburban neighborhood.
Judged in terms of audience applause, however, Kobach was the clear crowd favorite on Saturday. And he appears to be the only candidate in the race who comprehends the importance of a trenchant phrase.
For instance, when asked about improving the unemployment figures in the state, the secretary said that — after cutting taxes so as not to discourage businesses from settling here — Kansas must put an immediate stop to illegal immigration. “If you want to create a job for a U.S. citizen tomorrow,” said Kobach, “then deport an illegal alien today.” This line received the night’s lustiest applause.
Kobach beat the same drum when the topic was healthcare. Late last year Gov. Colyer proposed implementing a work requirement rule for individuals enrolled in KanCare, the state’s privatized Medicaid program.
Kobach, on Saturday, did the governor one better. “We need to have not only work requirements,” said the secretary, “we need to have drug testing and we need to have a strict prohibition on illegal aliens receiving any benefits under the system.”
OF THE candidates on stage Saturday, only Barnett, a doctor from Emporia, favors expanding Medicaid.
Aside from the basic humanitarian principle at stake, said Barnett, expansion makes sound economic sense. Firstly, a healthier population creates a more productive workforce. Secondly, he continued, the failure to take advantage of Medicaid dollars threatens the viability of rural hospitals. Barnett cited the 2015 closure of Mercy Hospital in Independence as a local example, and pointed out that the financial books at more than 80 Kansas hospitals are currently in the red and that 30 rural hospitals are on the “critical list” of those as risk of closing.
“If you want to hurt rural Kansas,” said Barnett, “then continue on down this path where you’re not expanding Medicaid.”
Barnett remains the only avowed moderate Republican in the race, and the most consistent opponent of Gov. Brownback’s dramatic 2012 income tax cuts.
Last year, acknowledging the dismal economic effects of the cuts, the Republican-controlled legislature decided to reverse the years-long supply-side experiment.
On Saturday, however, Kobach said that if he was elected, he would restore Brownback’s tax plan. The problem wasn’t the radical across-the-board tax cut, said Kobach; it was the failure of the Brownback administration to sufficiently slash spending. If you “think there’s not fat to be trimmed off our budget,” said Kobach, “then I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
KOBACH WILL need to keep his executive cleaver sharp, then, because he sees in the problems surrounding school finance a similar chance to deduct some blubber. The secretary believes that the funds earmarked for education are more than enough. The dollars, he said, are simply being misspent.
“Actually,” said Kobach, contradicting decades of judicial opinion, “schools are awash in money.” The real problem? Firstly, districts employ more administrators than they need (he cited one Wichita school that apparently employs 12 assistant principals) and, secondly, they have unduly expensive tastes in school and administrative buildings (Kobach urged the crowd to just look at the “Taj Majals” they’re building in Johnson County). The money, in other words, said Kobach, is not getting into the classrooms.
Colyer said the bill he signed in April, which would boost school funding by more than $500 million, was designed precisely to get money into the classrooms by “stair-stepping” the funding into the schools slowly, over a period of five years, thus avoiding the sort of district spending sprees that Kobach imagines.
Kobach wasn’t impressed. He calls the bill a “spending hike” and a “disaster.”
THE CANDIDATES did manage to link arms, however, in their unanimous support for pro-life causes, and each candidate on stage stood more strongly in favor of the Second Amendment than the next.
Gov. Colyer and Sec. Kobach both propose lowering the age at which Kansans can carry a concealed weapon from 21 to 18. And both support arming school teachers. More than once Kobach vowed to make Kansas “the number one gun-friendly state in the country.”
Sec. Kobach did attempt to create some distance between himself and the governor on the question of allowing guns in hospitals and other medical facilities.
Last year, the Brownback-Colyer administration allowed a bill to become law that would prohibit concealed weapons at public hospitals. Kobach repeatedly pressed “Jeff” on the topic: “Do you agree with Gov. Brownback that conceal-carry should not be allowed at hospitals and other medical facilities?”
Kobach asked the question again and again without success, to the point where — even though the event program clearly stated that “outbursts and/or inappropriate behavior will not be tolerated” — a man at the back of the room shouted, “Answer the question!” Still, Colyer refused.
AS THE FORUM neared its end, candidates made their final claims on voters’ hearts. Barnett said he was the only “alternative” candidate in the race, the only candidate that won’t plunge Kansas back into the bad habits of its recent past.
Selzer said the state needs “a thoughtful governor who is inclusive.”
Kobach again asked voters to notice his virile appeal: “I won’t hide under my desk, I won’t back down.” He vowed to “shake up Topeka,” to disrupt the status quo. “I’m going to continue on my same path of aggressive, conservative leadership that…does not shrink and run for cover when some snowflake says we’re doing the wrong thing in the conservative movement.”
Plus, he said, “I’ve been blessed to have some great endorsements in this campaign, from Sean Hannity to Donald Trump Jr. to Ted Nugent.”
Colyer, who until this point in the debate had operated with tortoise-like energy, roused himself in the final minutes and delivered his best line of the night: “As my dad told us, there is a choice: You can either be a workhorse or a show horse. Kansans know the difference.”
THE EVENT was organized by the party chairs of Neosho, Crawford, Montgomery, and Labette counties, and sponsored by a handful of area companies, including Humboldt’s Monarch Cement.
A straw poll was taken at the end of the forum, the first of its kind in the 2018 race. The results were released on Sunday.
Kobach ran away with the thing. The firebrand conservative earned 51 percent of the vote; Commissioner Selzer received 19.5 percent; Gov. Colyer, 17 percent; Barnett, 8.5. Kucera, who did not even appear on stage, apparently wowed 3.5 percent of the crowd in his absence.
This article first appeared in The Iola Register on June 18, 2018. *
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