Kansas Republicans evolve -- into Democrats

Sept. 5, 2006 | KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- On the last Sunday night in May, Mark Parkinson and his wife, Stacy, asked two of their best friends out to dinner at a country club in Cedar Creek, an exclusive planned community in the upscale Kansas suburbs southwest of Kansas City. They met Paul and Joyce Morrison in a private windowless room at the Shadow Glen golf course clubhouse because Mark had a secret he wanted to share with the other couple, something he needed the Morrisons to keep to themselves for 72 hours.

Parkinson, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party from 1999 to 2003, was planning to come out of the closet that Wednesday -- as a Democrat. At the request of incumbent Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, Parkinson would be switching his party registration and running as the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor.

As Parkinson remembers it, the Morrisons weren't shocked. The couples had been close for 20 years, close enough that Morrison was godfather to Parkinson's oldest child, and in recent years their private conversations had often turned to their growing disenchantment with the conservative direction of the state GOP.

"There's been a long series of Republican infighting over issues that do not affect people's daily lives," Parkinson explains. "I'm 49. I got tired of fighting about whether Charles Darwin was right when I was 14 or 15. I'm not spending the rest of my life on that issue."

Besides, just a few months before, Parkinson had been part of Sebelius' successful push to get Paul Morrison, a fellow moderate and the four-term district attorney of Johnson County, to ditch the GOP and run for state attorney general as a Democrat.

Moderates and social conservatives have been battling for the soul of the Kansas GOP since 1994, when the conservatives first won control of the party machinery. Although registered Republicans outnumber Democrats 2 to 1, Kathleen Sebelius is about to exploit that ideological schism to win a second term by a comfortable margin. In 2002, she beat a conservative Republican nominee by appealing to voters who care more about schools and taxes than abortion and evolution -- and by recruiting a centrist Republican to run as her lieutenant governor. Four years later, Sebelius has again tapped a moderate Republican as her running mate, and this time eight other party-switchers will join her on the Democratic ticket. Depending on whom you believe, in her cross-the-aisle raids Sebelius has either found an effective strategy for turning Kansas a little less red, or she has used her personal popularity to mask the slow decline of her party.

Via e-mail, because she says her cellphone isn't working while she's on the road in rural Kansas, Sebelius explains her recruitment drive with a well-worn laugh line about her mate of 30 years: "I'm converting Republicans one at a time. First my husband, Gary..."

Sebelius, who rarely misses a chance to stress cooperation and compromise, doesn't like to sound aggressive. "I joke that it's my strategy, but quite frankly it's nothing I set out to do. It's just worked out that way in some cases. I'm happy to work with anyone who has a good idea to move Kansas forward, regardless of party labels."

Clearly, however, it is a strategy. Every Republican who switched parties did so after talking by phone or in person with Sebelius.

The roots of the strategy that dares not say its name lie in the huge numeric disadvantage Democrats have long faced in Kansas. It's a matter of practical necessity, says outgoing lieutenant governor (and former Republican) John Moore. "When we took office, we had ten of 40 Senate seats that were Democratic," he says, "and 42 or 43 of 125 seats in the House of Representatives." Democrats can't pass bills -- or win elections -- without Republican votes.

In 2002, only John Moore switched affiliation. As GOP state chairman in 2002, Parkinson called Sebelius' decision to pick Moore as her running mate a gimmick and proclaimed, "Any Republican who supports Kathleen Sebelius for governor is either insincere or uninformed." Four years later, when Parkinson announced that he would be the governor's new running mate, Republicans printed up fliers that featured his "gimmick" sound bite and papered the windshields of cars outside the building where he made the announcement.

Parkinson shrugs off his embarrassing quote. "I thought she was doing it as a stunt," he says. "What she has done over the last four years is run the government in an open and independent way ... She has appointed Republicans, Democrats, independents, to posts all over the state. It was not a one-shot deal to get elected, but it was her demonstrating a new way of leadership. As so often is the case, I was wrong."

This year, the number of switchers has become an honest-to-God trickle. Besides Parkinson and Morrison and secretary of state candidate David Haley, a Republican who became a Democrat in 1992, six former Republicans are seeking House seats as Democrats. A seventh former Republican running for the House lost in the Democratic primary.

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