Tom Holland and Sam Brownback held their first debate in their campaigns to be governor of Kansas at the Kansas State Fair Saturday.
Brownback is giving up his seat in the U.S. Senate in his attempt to become governor. Holland is a state senator who also is owner/manager of a technology consulting firm.
Brownback has been in Congress since 1994. Before that, he worked as an attorney for four years and then was appointed secretary of agriculture in 1986 and stayed in that job until the office was abolished in 1993.
Predictably, Brownback attempted to paint Holland as “a dedicated liberal” who would do his best to turn Kansas into a high-tax, high-regulation state under the inspiration of President Barack Obama. He cited no facts to back up that partisan charge.
Sen. Holland countered by pointing out that Brownback had been in the federal government for the past 16 years and deserved part of the credit and the blame for what has been wrong there.
“You just heard Sam talking about the federal government — he IS the federal government,” Holland said. “Mr. Brownback needs to come home and get out of government.”
PERHAPS THE most revealing statements made were comments on the one-cent sales tax increase passed by the Legislature this spring. Holland supported the tax hike, saying it was needed to bolster the budgets of the state’s school districts and to help finance the extension of highway construction and maintenance for the next 10 years.
While Brownback didn’t flat-out say he would have vetoed the increase if he had been governor, he did criticize Holland’s decision to support it and said he would freeze state spending if elected and would oppose any tax increase. Brownback also refused to endorse the new highway program, saying only that he favored “a robust” program without giving any details that would put flesh on the word.
It is reasonable to assume from Brownback’s statement Saturday, and from everything he has said about government finances at the national or state level, that he would have vetoed any tax increase the 2010 Legislature passed if he had been governor.
It is equally reasonable to assume that he means what he says when he promises to “freeze” spending if he is elected, regardless of the circumstances that arise in the four years to follow. Regardless, for example, of the rate of inflation.
Every tea leaf in every Kansas forecaster’s cup shows Brownback a runaway winner in November. Not because a majority of Kansans really want to put state government on a starvation diet, weaken its public education, emasculate its universities and deny services to the disabled and impoverished — just to list three consequences of such an im-prisoning promise — but because Brownback’s name is known from border to border and Sen. Holland is a relative unknown.
If the conventional wisdom proves accurate, Kansas will elect the most conservative governor the state has had in modern times — which is to say, since the state assumed the responsibilities for a modern highway system, for the present system of justice and law enforcement, for water quality and environmental protection, for public education, for creating and maintaining state universities of high standing and for providing medical services for the state’s low-income children and families.
If he performs according to his own blueprint, Brownback’s governorship will stand in stark contrast to those of Mark Parkinson, Kathleen Sebelius, Bill Graves, Joan Finney, Mike Hayden and Robert Bennett — just to go back to 1975.
A zero-growth budget will produce a zero-growth state. The pros-pect is grim.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
