We’re Not In Kansas Anymore
I worry about Kansas. My friend David bought the rights to a recent book about the life of Carry Nation, the hatchet-wielding leader of the temperance movement who was also a Suffragette. He asked me to write a treatment of the book for a possible movie. I did that and ended up learning more about Ms. Nation than I had intended. The project hasn’t gone anywhere just yet, but we’ll see. I do not consider it time wasted since I don’t think I’ve ever had a reason to get involved with Kansas before and I found the Carry Nation story more multi-dimensional and interesting than I realized. It also made me wonder how many things I could say I knew about Kansas. I do know it is the breadbasket of the country, producing more wheat on its vast flat plains than any other state. This is the state that puts the great into the expression The Great Plains. Of course, it was also the epicenter of The Great Dustbowl when in the 1930’s the combination of drought and unwise farming practices rendered the western third of Kansas almost uninhabitable until almost 1940.
There are perhaps two other things I think of when I think about Kansas. There is The Wizard of Oz and the farm where Dorothy, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry lived. There’s Dodge City, where the drama or the Wild West played itself out. Despite Dodge City being the home of Boot Hill, Bat Masterson and even Wyatt Earp, kids don’t grow up thinking of Kansas as the frontier that epitomized the Cowboy legend. Unless, of course, those kids grew up when I did with Matt Dillon and Gunsmoke on every Saturday night, chronicling the shenanigans at the Long Branch Saloon with Miss Kitty. CBS even put on an opening western act with Paladin. As the song explained, “Have Gun Will Travel reads the card of a man, a knight without armor in a savage land.” But did anyone really think of Kansas as a savage land?
One guy who thought Kansas was a happening place was Mike Pompeo, who, after graduating first in his class at West Point (1986) and Editor of the Harvard Law Review (1994), decided that Kansas was where he would launch his business and political career. Kansas has been one of the redder states out there and with evangelically-inclined Pompeo, now being the 70th Secretary of State, one would think it was a lock for Trump/Pence. But with the Kansas Governor position going Democrat in 2016 and Trump’s lead for 2020 now at razor-thin levels. And there’s the continuing surge in COVID cases which is running rampant through the Midwest and Mountain states and not sparing Kansas in its relentless march. COVID is chipping away at whatever is left of Trump’s strongholds as more and more people are realizing from personal experience and/or a growing wave of evidence to prove that everything Trump has said about the pandemic has been deeply flawed and dangerous to everyone, no one more than the very people who have steadfastly supported him and followed his lead off the COVID cliff.
One thing Kansas doesn’t have is a professional baseball team. I know we all understand that Kansas City (and its Royals) is in Missouri and not Kansas, even though half of the geography of the greater metropolitan area sits in Kansas. COVID only allowed a 60-game season in pro baseball, a season only 37% of the regular 162-game season. But that didn’t stop the Boys of October from doing their thing, even though fans had to watch from drive-in social distancing distances. The Dodgers took the title of world champs in six games this week. It takes me back to my youth watching the Los Angeles Dodgers win the 1963 World Series against the New York Yankees in a four game sweep led by Sandy Koufax. I went to game four in 1963 at Dodger Stadium since my father was a Dodgers fan and I happen to be living with him from late that summer through mid-autumn. In those days the series was played in early October and that last game was on October 6th. It was pretty special, but not so special that I didn’t want to return home to Madison, Wisconsin to rejoin my mother and sisters for fourth grade. I’m not sure that would have been as easy a decision if I would have had to go back to Kansas rather than Wisconsin.
What I remember about Wisconsin, where we lived for four years while my mother got her Ph.D. and I worked my way through grade school, was that it was an Uber-liberal place. That may have just been the college town effect of being in Madison, but overall Wisconsin was like Minnesota and leaned heavily towards the left. This a played itself out through the the sixties with many of the most radical college protests emanating from my mother’s graduate Alma Mater. Three years ago when Kim and I were visiting Iceland for the first time we met an older couple from Wisconsin on a Baltic Cruise we were taking. They struck as pleasant people (he a retired physician and she a retired teacher), but given the state’s drift to the right and its 2016 vote for Donald Trump, we were wary of getting to close to them since they lived in rural northern Wisconsin and we suspected that they were quite red based on their geography. When we went to the Blue Lagoon natural hot springs in Reykjavik we noticed them among the throng or people heading into the warm waters ahead of us and when I notice the large tattoo in the middle of the woman’s back I turned to Kim and nodded that perhaps we were mistaken about their politics. Sure enough, they confirmed to us at dinner that night that they had lived their life as blue as we had and they too were shocked by the turn of political events in their lifelong home state. They said they were even considering moving because of it.
I am going to declare what most blue supporters are afraid to give voice to and that is that I see next week’s election as being a bigger clue wave than we saw in 2018. I believe it will be a landslide victory for Biden/Harris and a humiliating defeat for Trump/Pence. I believe that despite his stalwart base of supporters, the fraying of his coalition is such that he will lose far more states that he did in 2016 and that many of those will be surprising reversals, not just a return to their Democrat roots in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere. I think there is a better then even chance that states like Texas and Kansas will fall and Biden will have an embarrassment of electoral vote riches to rocket him past the required 270 delegates. I will not bore you with all the whys and wherefore but will just state for the record that everything has changed since 2016 and we are simply not in Kansas anymore…at least not the Kansas that bred a political snake like Mike Pompeo.
If only!