Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts
New Orleans What a great birthday present – happy birthday to me! Kris Kobach was defeated in the Republican primary in Kansas in his latest bid for another elected job, this time vying for an open seat in the U.S. Senate. That wasn’t the only great news from the primary elections, but it makes my day even more special. The fact that Missouri voters joined the Medicaid expansion list of states under the Affordable Care Act is like an extra dab of icing on the cake. Oklahoma earlier this year, and now Missouri, hey, ACA haters, are you hearing the voters? Better listen up!
I don’t want to get distracted though from the Kobach story, because if we can start believing in Kansas voters, then there’s hope for America. Kobach didn’t just lose in the primary, he was beat down like a mangy dog. Notice I didn’t say redheaded stepchild, having been a redhead forever, even if it doesn’t look that way on this birthday. The winner, some more moderate, mainstream conservative polled 158,208 with 40.3% of the vote and Kobach tallied a measly 26.3% of the vote, barely breaking 100,000 by only 3197 votes. I worried for a minute that there might be a breath of political life for Kobach, if there were a runoff since no candidate had more than 50% of the vote, but thanks to Ballotpedia, I can assure right thinking people everywhere that Mr. Hater-Baiter Kobach is toast, since they clearly state that by Kansas statues:
The winner of a primary election is the candidate who receives the greatest number of votes cast for that office, even if he or she does not win an outright majority of votes.
Hip, hip, hooray!
This makes Kobach a two-time loser. There’s a Democrat now sitting in the governor’s chair in Kansas, thanks to the fact that Kobach was the Republican nominee for governor in that election. Yes, if we wanted to live dangerously, we might have hoped that Kobach was the Republican nominee for Senate, giving a Democrat the best chance to take the seat in that state since 1932, but I’m sorry, I’m grabbing this bird in the hand. To do otherwise would be the equivalent of helping the next Joe McCarthy get elected, just substitute Kansas for Wisconsin.
Kobach, to remind everyone, has been the primary architect of one anti-immigrant law and referendum after another. Remember him please as the enabler of Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio. His second infamous claim has been as a leader in voter suppression. In Kansas he became a laughing stock trying to prove voter fraud, where there was none. Trump made him a principle in his committee to try to establish voter fraud in the 2016 election, and with Kobach in the lead and fake data, fake purges, and fake press releases, the whole committee crashed and burned. I could go on and on about his outrages and destruction of any pretense of democracy, but now, why bother?
Kobach first came to my attention when he ran for Kansas Secretary of State on a platform more than a decade ago to keep ACORN from stealing the election, even though ACORN had no staff, office, or operations in Kansas at the time. He is just a two-bit demagogue, who has been in my sights since then, but you know the old saying, “what goes around, comes around.”
His career in political office is done. How sweet it is!