Tuesday’s debate be-tween Reps. Todd Tiahrt and Jerry Moran, who are battling over the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Sam Brownback, who is running for governor, comes as a disappointment to those who doubt that immigration policy is a major issue for most Kansans.
The debate was broadcast from Topeka over an NBC affiliate not available in Iola. The two spent their time demonstrating that each was the toughest, meanest, far-rightist opponent of illegal immigration who ever walked the earth.
According to the report filed by AP writer John Hanna, no other subject was discussed at length. Nothing about the deficit. Nothing about jobs. Nothing about farm policy, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or health care, or Cuba, the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, or trade policies.
Nothing, in short, about any of the national issues that matter most to that 95 percent of the Kansas population which is not affected in any personal, direct way with the evolution of U.S. immigration policy.
Both appeared to be talking only to voters on the far right edge of the Republican Party who are obsessed for the mo-ment with illegals.
It may be true that voters on the radical right and the radical left are most likely to vote in the Republican and Democratic primaries, respectively. But it is also true in Kansas that those in the middle often cast a majority of the votes in November.
And those in the middle deserve more respect than they have been getting from Misters Moran and Tiahrt.
They deserve thoughtful discussions about the economy, about the wars which are killing our young men and women and draining our treasury, about the spiraling national debt, about the continuing increase in the cost of medical care, about ways to put people back to work and lessen U.S. dependence on im-ported oil — about the very broad range of matters which the Congress of the United States must deal with in every session.
Tiarht and Moran are treating the people of Kansas as though they were monomaniacal know-nothings. Shame on them.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
