Kansas Republicans moved the state into the nation’s backwaters Tuesday. Mitt Romney won 60 percent of the Kansas vote. The nation re-elected President Barack Obama decisively, giving him more than 300 electoral votes with 270 needed to win. The popular vote was closer, but it may be days before final numbers appear. IT WASN’T ALWAYS this way. Kansas used to send compassionate moderates to Congress and often put Democrats in the governor’s chair. Sen. Bob Dole was author of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum was an early advocate for health care insurance reform. In more recent years, Kansans first elected Democrat Kathleen Sebelius to be a reform-minded insurance commissioner and then elected her governor for two terms.
Here in Kansas, however, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting, 674,598 rock-hard Republicans voted for Romney while the president found only 426,352 supporters.
The four Kansas members of Congress were re-elected by equally lopsided margins.
It is instructive that the Republican margin in the Sunflower State was almost exactly the same as the margin by which Mitt Romney won the white vote nationally.
Obama was re-elected by a coalition of the young, the Jewish, Catholics, African-Americans, many of the college-educated and Hispanics. Romney came in second because his base was narrower.
The election should also remind Kansans that Thomas Frank was right when he wrote “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” in which he observed the state’s voters vote against their own best interests.
Item: Kansas gets more federal dollars than it sends to Washington. The money sent to Kansas through farm subsidies, including crop insurance, grain price support and conservation services and highway construction and repair is an important part of our state’s economy. The Paul Ryan budget that Mitt Romney called marvelous would have slashed those programs. Kansans voted against receiving those dollars Tuesday.
Item: The Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) Romney promised to repeal provides for a very substantial expansion of the Medicaid program with federal dollars to expand the program to cover millions of Americans who now lack health care coverage — including tens of thousands of Kansans. A vote against Obamacare without providing an alternative to cover the uncovered is a vote against the best interests of Kansas.
Item: The Kansas population is gray and getting grayer. Southeast Kansas in particular has a high percentage of those over 65 who depend on Medicare and Social Security. Mitt Romney and the conservative Republicans who control the House of Representatives campaigned on promises to reduce those programs, which determine the quality of life for a large percentage of Kansas seniors.
Item: The percentage of the federal budget devoted to making life better for the people has been shrinking and would shrink even faster under a conservative Republican administration. Because of its demographics, Kansas has a large percentage of its population that would benefit from a stronger, broader safety net. Despite this fact, Kansans vote, election after election, to let the old, the infirm and the disadvantaged make do on their own; to weaken the safety net rather than strengthen it.
What will it take to move Kansas back toward center?
Let us hope and pray the state will not have to wait for crises to develop in the state’s public schools and universities and for Kansas to get a national reputation for failing to care for its disabled and poor before the voters wake up and disavow the destructive policies of the radical right.
Our recent history tells us Kansas can produce outstanding leaders who have hearts as well as minds. Our state now has a desperate need for a new crop of men and women in the mold of Sebelius, of Jim Pearson, of Kassebaum, of Dole, of Bill Roy and Frank Carlson — just to name those that many readers will remember with fondness.
It will take the brand of leadership those stalwarts provided to shepherd Kansas out of its self-imposed exile back into the nation’s mainstream.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
