TOPEKA — Gov. Laura Kelly began a Landon Lecture by sharing dismay Friday at the mass shooting that killed a Johnson County resident and injured two dozen people at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade and celebration in Kansas City, Missouri.
“This senseless violence took a Kansan’s life, upwards of a dozen children were injured and countless thousands more scarred and horrified,” she said on the Kansas State University campus in Manhattan. “Prevalence of gun violence has invaded our schools, our campuses, our entertainment venues, our workplaces and our homes. I look forward to the day when we can have open, honest discussions about the cause and work towards a safer society for all of us.”
Kelly, the only Democratic governor to win during 2022 in a state won by President Donald Trump in the previous election, turned to her assignment of sharing ideas for development of a healthier political environment capable of better meeting needs of the state. She said willingness of politicians to engage in the type of bipartisanship demonstrated by U.S. Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum, the daughter of the lecture series’ namesake Republican Alf Landon, had eroded.
The governor said the quest of political parties to corner voters — imagine partisans huddled on their respective 10-yard lines of a football field — blocked development of partnerships essential to good government and reasonable policy. The problem was accentuated by voters who sought comfort in an echo chamber of news sources that affirmed their beliefs and avoided challenging questions, she said.
“The longer I’m in this job, the more I’ve come to believe that if we truly want to build a healthier future for Kansas, we need to start making our political discourse healthier — or, at the very least, less toxic,” Kelly said.
‘Sanders in a wig’
Kelly said the caustic version of politics was tearing apart friendships, families, communities and the nation. It wasn’t supposed to be that way in the United States, she said. In this democratic republic, she said, there was to be room for robust disagreement and debate, but people with different viewpoints would eventually come together, find common ground and step toward the greater good.
When Kelly first ran for public office in 2004, the political landscape was different. The social network known as Facebook was still only available on college campuses. Platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and TikTok didn’t exist. In addition, she said, candidates for local or legislative office concentrated on issues that were within reach of the elective office they were pursuing. That changed, she said, with nationalization of local politics.
She said it was apparent in 2022 during Kansas school board races in which candidates relied on national talking points to attack teachers, librarians and administrators rather than dig into complexities of a district’s approach to academics, school safety, mental health and special education.
She said avoidance of substantive issues was a feature of back-to-back campaigns run against her by Republican gubernatorial nominee Kris Kobach and GOP nominee Derek Schmidt.
“Both of my opponents in 2018 and again in 2022 didn’t attack me based on my record or really anything happening in Kansas,” The Democratic governor said. “Instead, they ran ad after ad trying to convince Kansas that I’m actually Bernie Sanders in a wig or Joe Biden in heels.”
Kelly said her opponents — she defeated Kobach 48% to 43% and Schmidt by 49% to 47% — looked past voters’ interests in balancing the budget, tax cuts, public education, health care, transportation infrastructure, foster care and abortion rights.
“It was as if my opponents and I were running for two very different offices,” Kelly said. “It’s a strategy we’re seeing more and more now.”
Ideological closets
Kelly said lack of campaign debates and avoidance of open interaction with voters left Kansans without information required to measure the candidates. That served to direct voters into partisan or ideological camps and prompted more of them to look primarily at party labels, she said.
The system undercut moderate candidates and rewarded extremists on the right and left, the governor said.
Kelly said polarization impeded the state’s ability to move forward on mental health, child care and education initiatives. For example, the partisan gap was at the core of failure by the Republican-led Legislature to join 40 states and expand eligibility for Medicaid health benefits. Kelly has proposed expansion numerous times. The federal government would pay 90% of the added costs, and the program could serve an estimated 150,000 lower-income adults and children in Kansas.
“It remains an ideological battle, in part, because legislative leadership doesn’t want to see a Democratic governor get a win. I want to say to the leadership, ‘Look guys, I’m not running again. You can pass Medicaid expansion. You can do all the press conferences. You can take all of the credit.’”
Republicans and Democrats did step out of the clutch of partisanship in 2022 to pass a bill reforming state economic development incentives to help land the $4 billion, 4,000-job Panasonic production plant being built at De Soto. It represented the largest capital investment in state history, she said.
“For those moments,” Kelly said, “we weren’t a Democratic governor and Republican leaders. We were Kansas elected officials doing right by the people we were elected to serve.”
Social media warp
During the question-and-answer portion of her appearance at Kansas State, Kelly allowed a couple people on stage for quick selfies. She also rebuked folks content to wrap themselves in their own views and to discount alternative perspectives. Social media bubbles were comforting, friendly and personalized spaces, Kelly said, but they weren’t healthy for the state’s political system or the mental health of Kansans.
“How do we break out of them? I’ve got a plan,” she said. “First, admitting you have a problem. Two, be proactive about engaging people in your life who you know live outside your bubble. My last step is a call to action of sorts. Ask those people in your life with whom you disagree about politics to join you in say a service project. Anything you want to do. Volunteer together at a food bank. Do a church activity. Visit a senior Center.”
“We need to get back to a place where people can disagree about politics, but still form a bond, still engage in community service and civic life together. My three-step bubble brick won’t fix the world’s problems, but it would be a start.”
In terms of future of campaigns in Kansas, Kelly said she would use her Middle of the Road political action committee to lift up candidates on both sides of the political aisle. She said the test of a candidate should be a person’s degree of common sense and the placement of solutions ahead of party label. And, the governor had a final message to Kansas State students still ironing out their beliefs and values.
“Stay open to new ideas, open to new perspectives, open to people who grew up differently than you did,” she said. “Changing your mind when presented with new information and new facts doesn’t make you inconsistent. It makes you thoughtful and reasonable.
