What Obama Values in Kansas

[DeepModem Mom]

WSJ: What Obama Values in Kansas
August 5, 2008
Gerald F. Seib

For a sparsely populated state that's often a political afterthought, Kansas has something close to a starring role in this year's presidential drama. Consider:

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback ran for the Republican presidential nomination. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential contender, Sen. Barack Obama, makes much of the fact that his mother and grandparents hailed from Kansas, and he lauds the Kansas "values" they gave him. Now Sen. Obama is weighing as his running mate the governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, as well as Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, who grew up in Kansas and whose mother happens to be from the same small town as Sen. Obama's mother.

What to make of this Kansas overdose? It's tempting, as a native son of Kansas myself, to say it's a product of the state's wisdom and character. In truth, of course, much of it is coincidence, fueled by a combination of Sen. Obama's unusual personal background and the fact that he has developed a strong liking for two fresh-faced governors who happen to share Kansas backgrounds.

Yet this prominence isn't all coincidence. Kansas has played out a fascinating political drama in recent years, and the rest of the U.S. can learn a few things from its experience. As it happens, Kansas has been through an extreme version of national political trends: a rise of social conservatives; a searing internal Republican debate; and a bit of a Democratic resurgence. It isn't mere happenstance that it has emerged as a state that is still reliably Republican yet with a highly popular Democratic governor....

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Thomas Frank, a Kansas native and liberal author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" argues that navigating the middle ground has left Kansas Democrats with some unique skills. "The state's particularly intense version of the culture wars, plus the savage infighting of the state's , has produced Democrats who know both how to speak to populist impulses and how to exploit the Republicans' own fragmentation," says Mr. Frank, who now writes a column for The Wall Street Journal.

The partisan minefields of Topeka, the state capital, aren't all that different from those of the nation's capital. The Sebelius experience in navigating them may be the example of Kansas values Sen. Obama finds most useful.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121787787575610759.html