How we got here - Part 1

Before we get to the "where do we go from here" part, we have to take a moment to look at the "how did we get here" part. Let's start by looking at the Kansas piece.

Look, this was a national wave, there's no question about it. If you look at the people who lost their races in other parts of the region this election - the Ike Skeltons and the Russ Feingolds and the Blanche Lincolns -- there's no question that most of these folks would have won in almost any other electoral atmosphere. So it's certainly not untrue to say that what happened in Kansas was part and parcel of what happened everywhere else in the country that isn't on the east or west coasts.   

But is that all there is to it? What I'm hearing from the county committee meetings taking place now is that they are pretty much in agreement with Party Chair Larry Gates' comments right after the election:

“We start out every (election) cycle with a head wind against us, and we know that going in,” Gates said. “And there was a huge gale coming in from Washington. You try to think of what you could have done better … there was not a darn thing I could have done.”

To which I say - bullshit. Rationalizing, self-pitying, pathetic bullshit. This whole two-year cycle that began with the 2008 election has been a nightmare from the point of view of anyone who cares about the Democratic Party in Kansas - a train wreck in slow motion, easily foreseeable, and clearly foreseen, by anyone who has any sense.

Let's start with candidate recruitment, shall we?  Remember: we knew all along that Brownback was going to be the GOP candidate, and we needed a strong candidate to stand against him. Governor Parkinson said from the beginning that he wasn't going to run. Yet throughout 2009 there was no gubernatorial candidate; Gates himself cleared the decks for a run before suddenly announcing in October of that year that he wasn't going to. Nice. Then he came up with Tom Wiggans, who had returned to Kansas after a career in California and promptly crashed and burned within a month of his announcement. Even nicer. So 2009 turned into 2010 and there was still no Democratic candidate for the most important position in the state.

How much of that is the national mood responsible for, Larry?  Like I say - pathetic.

Look, it's perfectly possible - I would even say probable - that Jesus Christ himself couldn't have won as a Democratic candidate for governor of Kansas in 2010. Tom Holland - the state senator who eventually took on the thankless task - did a decent enough job, for a guy who started out late and from nothing. But 15 lost assembly seats was not preordained. Losing all but one seat in Johnson County was not preordained. These were failures of organization, failures of hard work, failures of candidate recruitment, and failures of messaging. And these things are not preordained.

I guess the nicest way to put this is that we appreciate the efforts the current state party officials put in under difficult circumstances- not forgetting that some of those circumstances were of their own making. It's time to let someone else give it a shot.