Former Gov. Bill Graves will come back home to Kansas next week to campaign for moderate Republicans who are being opposed by ultra-conservative Gov. Sam Brownback and the candidates he is backing.
Graves, who served Kansas as its chief executive from 1995 to 2003, now lives in Virginia but maintains a keen interest in Kansas government.
The news story reporting that he will make stops in Johnson County, Wichita and Salina didn’t quote the native Kansas leader on his reasons for joining the campaigns of the moderates that Gov. Brownback wants to replace with radicals he can depend upon to vote as he directs.
One must assume that Graves, who deserves credit for taking the state forward on many fronts during his administrations, believes that Gov. Brownback represents a threat to the public schools and the state’s universities, to the integrity of Kansas courts, to the state’s transportation system and to the ability of state government to serve Kansans well.
If Graves, who is essentially a modest man who resisted temptations to stay at the apex of Kansas politics, were not deeply concerned at the dire prospects for his beloved state, he would not be enlisting in the campaigns of the few moderate Republicans who remain in office and are now threatened.
Those who share his alarm can only hope that the Kansans who elected and re-elected him will place their confidence in him once again and vote for the legislators he came from Virginia to help.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
N.B. The Koch brothers’ mouthpiece, Americans for Prosperity, disparaged Graves as one who doesn’t believe in limited government. Graves and most Kansans believe in limited government. The argument is over the role government should play. In Kansas, government is responsible for education, from K through graduate school, for non-partisan courts, for the nation’s best state highway system and for many other public goods which individual Kansans can’t secure for themselves acting alone. Graves’ Republicans believe Kansans want a government which meets these responsibilities and pursues excellence in the striving.
They are opposed by those who put cutting taxes first — and for whom nothing comes in second. E.L.
