The dogs of war and
the underdogs of politics
Whether watching the World Cup or pee-wee baseball, we Americans are known for one thing: rooting for the underdog. But rarely have we seen an underdog so challenged as Republican gubernatorial candidate Vicki Schmidt.
The only moderate in the race — and therefore the only one likely to be able to win in November — she’s been targeted by a relentless campaign from anonymous, big-money donors portraying her as the Wicked Witch of Wichita.
So deceptive is most of the mud being slung at her from secret backrooms of billionaires that we’re surprised they haven’t labeled her a drug dealer because she is by profession a pharmacist.
It’s almost as if some secret polling suggests she might actually be able to challenge front-runner Ty Masterson, who’s trying to out-do Senator Roger Marshall in sucking up to President Donald Trump, or fellow ultra-conservative Scott Schwab, who seems to think that poking fun at his baldness will somehow make him electable.
Pollsters apparently aren’t bothering to gin up any publicly available surveys about how the race is going. A quick search online finds plenty of polls suggesting which Democratic candidate is in the lead, but the only polling of any sort about the Republican race seems to come from one of those ought-to-be-illegal gambling sites that claims it isn’t and calls itself a prediction market instead.
Despite being endorsed by Trump and seemingly every other group afraid to challenge the president, Masterson is a Democrat’s delight as a Republican candidate.
He has a cushy, high-paying side gig at Wichita State that’s supported by the radical right. He’s one of the key supporters of the hugely deceptive proposed constitutional amendment to bring politics into state supreme court appointments. Even here in Marion County he admitted to the fringe Patriots for Liberty group that the top-secret motivation behind the amendment was to undo voter rejection of the misnamed Value Them Both proposition a few months back.
Schwab, meanwhile, has been as whimsical with his job as secretary of state as he has with his baldness. While some secretaries have used the position to investigate clear failures of governmental units to follow laws regarding documents they must file, whenever the secretary of state’s office is asked about such things nowadays the reply is always the same: We just file the stuff. We don’t read it. Basically, we’re just secretaries, not secretaries of state.
When the choice appears to be between a do-nothing secretary of state and a do-everything-like-Vladimir-Putin iron-fister like the current state senate president, someone like Schmidt becomes a lot more attractive than the grimly Photoshopped pictures of her that appear in anonymous attack ads.
It’s taken a war that’s cost us billions and left us worse off than when we started it for many to realize that President Trump really is no better than most of the global autocrats he seems to adore — and who seem to be failing in their bids for re-election unless they have taken such firm grasp on their democracies as to disenfranchise the voting public.
Republicans proud of historic heroes like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower cringe at the thought of so many others in their party going down with the sinking S.S. Trump ship of state.
It’s time the party gives someone like Schmidt an opportunity to become its standard-bearer — before that standard becomes so battered by authoritarian abuse as to fade into the irrelevancy of something like the Whig party of the 1850s.
Alas, Schmidt appears to be turning the other cheek to vicious attack ads — either by choice or out of necessity because she’s starved of the big-money support necessary to win in politics these days.
It’s an example well worth considering when deciding how to vote in both the gubernatorial race and on the constitutional amendment question that would give the legislature a blank check to turn our supreme court into yet another backroom dominated by big money.
Some of what President Trump originally stood for seemed quite promising. He appeared to embrace returning power to the people. But somehow that promise of commonsense populism has given way to authoritarian plutocracy, enriching the president and his family and cronies while impoverishing the principles on which this country was founded.
As we become more and more accustomed to being inundated with attack ads and less and less able to rely on courageous, independently owned news media to challenge them, our nation’s 250th year becomes a beacon shining into the past, not the future.
— ERIC MEYER