What about that ‘vision thing’? Candidates for Kansas governor are stuck in the past

The Kansas governor’s race is stuck in the past. The two major candidates — Democratic incumbent Laura Kelly and her challenger, Republican Derek Schmidt — debated this past weekend at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson, and set about clubbing each other over stuff that happened years ago.

If you’re just now tuning into the race, Kelly has been attacking Schmidt for his association with former Gov. Sam Brownback, the Republican whose tax-cutting “experiment” was a disaster that strangled public school funding. Schmidt, in turn, has been going after Kelly for ordering the state’s schools and businesses to be closed during the early days of the pandemic in March 2020.

Saturday’s debate was more of the same.

Kelly once again linked Schmidt to Brownback. “Derek Schmidt stood by Brownback’s cuts to the schools and he even went to courts to keep those cuts in place,” she said.

And Schmidt returned the favor. “Fully funding schools can only work if you don’t lock the kids out of them after they’re fully funded,” he said.

Now, all of this is fair. Kelly has been governor for nearly four years, and Schmidt has been the state’s attorney general for nearly 12. Both have been active in Kansas politics even longer than that. One way for Kansans to figure out who will do the best job as governor over the next few years is to look at their records and make judgments accordingly.

There are distinctions to be made, however.

Fights over the past help voters only if they illuminate how a candidate might govern in the future. We should ask: Is school funding going to be a big issue over the next four years? Or are we more likely to have another pandemic that forces fraught decisions with life-and-death consequences for thousands of Kansans?

This is just a guess, but the school funding issue is more likely to be consequential. Pandemics don’t come along that often (knock on wood) but Kansans and their leaders have been wrestling for decades — both in the Statehouse and in the courts — over how to fairly and sufficiently fund the state’s schools.

So the question really becomes: Whom do you trust more with the future of Kansas schools?

Or maybe: Whom do you trust more with the future of Kansas itself?

At the moment, the answer to that question is based mostly on speculation and vibes. Because Kelly’s and Schmidt’s campaigns are so focused on the unpopular things the other candidate did in the past, the state’s voters aren’t getting all that much information about what either of them plan to do going forward.

Oh, there is some stuff. Kelly has made clear she will keep pursuing a long-overdue Medicaid expansion for the state. And Schmidt has talked about expanding and building a four-lane highway across southern Kansas, through Wichita, to bring more economic development to the region.

Overall, though, a reasonable observer could be forgiven for thinking that the Kansas gubernatorial campaign is woefully short on what President George H.W. Bush once called “the vision thing.”

There are certainly plenty of opportunities and challenges awaiting the winner in November.

Just to name a few: It is great that Panasonic is building a new battery plant in Johnson County, for example, but the state will have its hands full dealing with the environmental and cultural impact of the factory and all its new employees. Out in western Kansas, the precarious future of the Ogallala Aquifer may well disrupt generations of farming in the region. Most Kansas counties are losing population, and the state is growing very slowly overall — a trend that will affect our public schools and universities.

Those developments can be scary or wonderful or some mix of the two, but they demand some kind of vision for the state’s future. Maybe Kelly and Schmidt possess vision. They’re so busy fighting about the past, though, that it’s tough to tell.