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Senator Roberts Holds Off Tea Party In Kansas GOP Primary

Senator Roberts Holds Off Tea Party In Kansas GOP Primary

By Kurtis Lee and Lisa Mascaro, Tribune Washington Bureau

One of the last chances for a Tea Party challenger to oust an establishment Republican came to an end in Kansas on Tuesday night when U.S. Senator Pat Roberts defeated Milton Wolf.

The three-term senator had 48 percent to Wolf’s 41 percent of the votes with 70 percent of precincts reporting. Two other candidates split the rest of the votes. The Associated Press called the election for Roberts.

Both campaigns have stumbled in a state that has veered to the right in recent years.

Roberts, 78, came under fire earlier this year when it was revealed that he no longer has a home in Kansas, but rents a room at a friend’s Dodge City house. Wolf, 43, has used that against him.

Wolf, a second cousin to President Barack Obama, has been assailed for posting patient X-rays and insensitive commentary about them on his Facebook page. He has since apologized and removed the posts, but that hasn’t stopped Roberts from questioning his judgment and fitness for office.

In recent months, the pair have sparred over who would be the strongest advocate for veterans in the wake of the national furor over delayed treatment at Veterans Affairs medical centers and coverups of waiting times.

Both candidates have attacked the Affordable Care Act, with Wolf calling for it to be replaced by “free-market alternatives for health care reform.” Roberts has noted that he voted against Obamacare.

Despite the high hopes of Tea Party groups, most of their efforts to oust establishment Republican lawmakers this year have fizzled — with the exception of the standoff in Mississippi, where Tea Party favorite Chris McDaniel is challenging his loss during the runoff against Senator Thad Cochran. And in Michigan on Tuesday night, Tea Party-leaning incumbent Kerry Bentivolio lost the primary to mainstream Republican Dave Trott.

In fact, the most notable upset of the primary calendar drew scant attention from national Tea Party groups — the toppling of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor by a little-known economics professor in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia.

Another chance will come Thursday, when two-term Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee will try to fend off a Tea Party challenge from state lawmaker Joe Carr.

If Republicans can net six seats in November, they will wrest control of the Senate to match the control they are likely to retain in the House.

The splintering of the GOP at such a crucial time has caused hand-wringing among some party leaders.

But Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, shrugged off the internal debates as helpful exercises to produce the best candidate.

“I’m not one of these people that buy into the theory that primaries are bad,” Priebus said in a recent interview on Capitol Hill. “I think primaries can actually make candidates stronger.”

Photo: J. Stephen Conn via Flickr

Kansas Senator’s Years In Washington Are Both Advantage, Vulnerability

Kansas Senator’s Years In Washington Are Both Advantage, Vulnerability

By Dave Helling, The Kansas City Star

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Sen. Pat Roberts sits in a Lenexa, Kan., fast-food restaurant, spooning ice cream from a cup.

It’s already been a long day. That morning, the 78-year-old Republican braved the heat of the Lenexa July Fourth parade; after lunch, he would be shaking hands at the VFW hall down the street.
Then on to Wamego, Kan., for another parade. Then Hays, Kan. Then another town, another campaign appearance, another search for votes.

It’s tough and familiar political terrain — Roberts has spent the better part of three decades running for office. If Kansas returns him to the Senate this year, he’ll rank among the longest-tenured public servants in the state’s history.

Does he ever think about stepping aside to give someone else a chance?

Roberts’ face grows red below his Marine Corps ball cap. The ice cream softens.

“Why on earth would I not run, if I feel good (and) the people are for me?” he asks.

“The years have got nothing to do with it.”

The years, of course, are the biggest issue in the campaign.

Roberts was first elected to the U.S. House in 1980, from the sprawling 1st District, after then-boss U.S. Rep. Keith Sebelius walked away from the seat.

Roberts quickly carved out space as a sometimes prickly GOP moderate, focused largely on agriculture. He worked to persuade Ronald Reagan to lift an embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union, while striving to protect generous farm subsidies and agri-business autonomy.

On most other issues, Roberts was a reliable Republican vote. After the GOP won control of the House in 1994, he claimed his reward: chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee, the pinnacle of his time in the House.

But it didn’t last long. In 1996 Roberts sought Nancy Kassebaum’s empty Senate seat, winning easily. He’s been re-elected twice, rising to the chairmanship of both the Agriculture and Intelligence committees.

Both assignments caused him headaches.

In the House, Roberts had engineered an overhaul of farm policy with a bill called Freedom to Farm, a measure designed to slowly withdraw taxpayer support for agriculture. Just a few years later, it was widely seen as a failure — and Roberts, then a senator, had to watch as it was largely dismantled.

And he was fiercely criticized for his work on the Intelligence Committee. Democrats accused Roberts of covering up the mistakes of the George W. Bush White House, an accusation he just as fiercely rejected.

For all the successes and failures, though, Roberts’ resume ordinarily would entitle him to a victory lap this year: an easy primary, perhaps token Democratic opposition.

That was pre-tea party. GOP primary challenger Milton Wolf has mounted a serious insurgency, based almost entirely on criticism of Roberts’ years in the nation’s capital.

In contemporary government, national experience can be a decidedly mixed blessing.

“Pat Roberts does things the Washington way,” Wolf says. Exhibit A? Roberts’ residence.

In February, the senior senator told The New York Times he had no permanent home in the state — his Dodge City house was rented out, Roberts said, while he claimed a Kansas voting address at the home of a longtime supporter. Wolf pounced, and hasn’t let up since.

Roberts bristles at the suggestion he isn’t really a Kansan. At the same time, he admits he’s spent most of his political career raising his family in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

“I would never have seen my kids,” he explained. “It was hard enough (in) Virginia. But had I been in Dodge City, I would have gotten there Friday evening, and … (then) Saturday morning: ‘Bye kids, I’ve got to go all around the district.’ I didn’t want to do that.

“Back in that era, people expected you to be in Washington to do your job.”

In May, a three-person board in Topeka rejected a challenge to Roberts’ claim of Kansas residency and certified him for the ballot.

He clearly owns property in other places — Roberts’ wife, Franki, sells real estate in Virginia, and property ownership is the foundation of the couple’s wealth.

Roberts’ personal financial disclosure statement for 2012 shows ownership of a condominium in Alexandria, Va., worth between $500,000 and $1 million. It also shows a condominium in National Harbor, Md., valued between $250,000 and $500,000, and the Dodge City home, valued between $100,000 and $250,000.

Roberts claims rental income from all three properties.

His 2012 net worth, the Center for Responsive Politics says, was between $850,029 and $2,540,999, not including the Virginia house in which he lives.

By contrast, Roberts’ financial disclosure for 1982 — his second year in Congress — claimed holdings valued between $20,002 and $65,000. The listing included half-interest in a vacant lot in Dodge City.

Roberts’ home and his Washington tenure have dominated the 2014 primary largely because few political issues separate the two major GOP competitors.

Milton Wolf admits this. “Do you know how many issues Pat Roberts will claim I’m wrong on?” he said in March. “Not a single one.”

Indeed, on issue after issue, Roberts has cast votes and made statements designed to please the strongly conservative voters who often dominate GOP primaries.

He was among the first politicians to call on Kathleen Sebelius to resign as health and human services secretary after the disastrous Obamacare rollout — even though Sebelius, daughter-in-law of Keith Sebelius, was a decades-old family friend. Roberts had supported her during the confirmation process.

Roberts opposed the last farm bill. He opposed a spending bill that included significant funds for the National Bio- and Agro-Defense lab in Manhattan, Kan. In 2012, he voted against a vague resolution on a U.N. disability treaty — while mentor and resolution supporter Bob Dole watched from a wheelchair.

He’s aligned himself with conservative Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas during battles over the debt ceiling and the budget, although Roberts has supported extensions of the debt ceiling in the past.

Roberts has worked hard on the politics of his re-election as the issues.

He’s cornered endorsements from all of the state’s prominent Republicans: Gov. Sam Brownback, Secretary of State Kris Kobach, all four House members from Kansas.

Roberts has easily outraised and outspent Wolf. For this election cycle, Federal Election Commission filings show, Roberts has raised $4.4 million to Wolf’s $897,000.

For all the endorsements and cash advantage, though, Roberts appears to think his strongest re-election argument is the very thing Wolf calls his Achilles’ heel — experience.

“I’m not intending to be in the Congress forever,” Roberts said.

But “if you have the experience, and you have the people of Kansas behind you, and you know specifically what you want to accomplish, and you have the seniority to make it happen — no other candidate can do that, except me.”

Photo via WikiCommons

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Next Installment In Tea Party Reality Show Is In Kansas

Next Installment In Tea Party Reality Show Is In Kansas

By Scott Canon, McClatchy Washington Bureau

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — No place offers a perfect harbor for Tea Party politics.

Outgoing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s Virginia congressional district hatched a minor revolution to bump the conservative congressman for someone more adamantly conservative. Yet a perception of inattentiveness to hometown needs was at least among the factors that took Cantor down.

Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran got a scare by finishing second in his Republican primary amid a Tea Party uprising against the incumbent. But he received a runoff reprieve last week.

Later this summer, Tea Party passion will get a test in the Kansas primary.

Here, in a red state that’s turning ever more crimson in recent elections, establishment conservative Pat Roberts seeks re-election to the U.S. Senate against a distant cousin of the president’s, painting the three-term incumbent as typical of what’s wrong with Washington.

Their August 5 Republican primary might test not only how angry Kansas Republicans have grown with the feds, but also whether Tea Party activism holds any more surprises. Milton Wolf, whose family tree crosses with that of President Barack Obama, carries the Tea Party flag along with money from national groups in an upstart challenge to politics as usual.

“We’ll probably have a better idea in a week,” said Clay Barker, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party. “You’ll see how people react to the Cochran race, whether that discourages the tea party people or makes them angry and active.”

He and others say the outcome in Mississippi might douse the embers stoked in Cantor’s Virginia upset. Or the opposite. Politics is, after all, as much tea leaves as trigonometry. The expectation of a low turnout, and consequently less predictable primary, also throws uncertainty into any prognostication.

Yet Wolf’s odds remain long. A mid-June poll by SurveyUSA showed Roberts leading by 56-23 percent. Roberts’ campaign had raised $2.4 million through March, compared with the $556,000 Wolf collected. Independent expenditures, either from Tea Party forces for Wolf or mainstream Republican groups for Roberts, might still play a role.

On the ideological front, Roberts always approached politics from the right. He’s only veered further starboard lately. He’s locked up endorsements from virtually every other Republican politician in the state.

Wolf’s campaign got knocked off balance before the race began in earnest. In February, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that Wolf, a wealthy radiologist, had posted unsettling images of dead patients in 2010 with seemingly callous commentary to Facebook: “What kind of gun blows somebody’s head completely off? I’ve got to get one of those.”

Shortly after that story broke, word circulated that a radiology firm in which Wolf is a partner faces charges of illegal price fixing in a civil suit. Wolf and his partners vehemently deny the charge.

Wolf has said he regrets the Facebook posts and long ago removed them, and he argues that the Roberts campaign incorrectly claims patients’ privacy was violated. There was nothing, Wolf’s campaign notes, in the posts that would violate federal privacy laws by revealing the identity of the people in the images.

But saying your Facebook posts weren’t criminal, merely tasteless, reflects a campaign knocked off message.

Wolf would rather talk about how his insights as a physician would make him a powerful voice against the Affordable Care Act, known by critics as Obamacare. He also prefers to discuss how he sees Roberts as having become a creature of Washington.

On that last point, analysts say, Wolf may be most likely to gain traction. The son of a Republican national committeeman, Roberts dates his days in Washington to the late 1960s, when he was a congressional aide. He was elected from the most western and most rural Kansas congressional district in 1980 and has been a fixture on Capitol Hill ever since. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996.

Wolf sees Roberts as a Virginia resident — and unsuccessfully attempted to challenge his legal residency. The incumbent owns a home in Alexandria, Virginia, leases out his western Kansas home and uses a house in Dodge City in which he rents space from a donor for his voter registration.

“He’s been in Washington for 47 years,” Wolf is fond of saying. “He wants you to forget about the first 46.”

While Roberts can boast hard-right bona fides that play well in a Kansas Republican primary, he’s taken a subtle shift further in that direction in recent years.

His record fighting for agriculture subsidies might cut two ways. It engenders loyalty to farmers in the western part of the state, but much of the primary electorate comes from the Kansas City suburbs and Wichita. Their voters are often less enamored with federal agriculture spending.

In 1998, Roberts criticized “fringe” politicians and said his party didn’t win elections by “limiting our membership and our appeal to a narrow agenda.”

Two years ago, he was among those who voted against ratifying a United Nations treaty on rights for people with disabilities. Former Senator Bob Dole, once the most powerful Kansan in modern times and a mentor to Roberts, was in the chamber for the vote. Roberts sided against Dole, a disabled veteran, in favor of the conservative cause of the moment: the perception that the treaty would surrender a measure of American sovereignty.

It’s that positioning that makes Wolf’s task tough.

“Roberts doesn’t look like the most vulnerable incumbent,” said Neal Allen, a political science assistant professor at Wichita State University. “He’s not … as oblivious to the threat as other Republican incumbents.”

In fact, Roberts’ campaign manager issued a memo to reporters last week bullet-pointed with reasons that Wolf can’t win.

“All that (Wolf) has done has made no difference in this race,” Leroy Towns, Roberts’ campaign manager, said in an interview.

To the Wolf camp, the memo reeked of electoral self-doubt.

“We do believe there’s a national trend and that we’ll feel the effect of it here in Kansas,” Wolf campaign manager Ben Hartman said.

Canon reports for The Kansas City Star.

Photo: J. Stephen Conn via Flickr

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