Salon.com > Nadia Pflaum

There’s nothing the matter with Kansas

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:14:00 +0000

It's 10 a.m. and the snow is blowing sideways. A fast-moving cold front has knocked the temperature in El Dorado, Kan., down from 50 degrees to 30 degrees in a matter of hours. So many cars are trying to park at Butler County Community College, where Sen. Barack Obama is hosting a town hall meeting this morning, that the overflow has started to use the lot at the Star Vu Drive-In movie theater across the street.

Obama isn't scheduled to appear for another two hours, but a line stretches from the doors of the college gym 100 yards across the campus lawn. The residents of a rural white town in a bright red state have come in droves to hear a black Democrat from a big city give a speech, albeit a black Democrat with ancient ties to El Dorado.

Obama is a son of El Dorado, 30 miles east of Wichita on the Kansas prairie, despite never having set foot in the town before Tuesday. Obama was born in Hawaii, but his maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, grew up in here, and his grandmother Madelyn was born in nearby Augusta. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, was born on the Army base at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., two hours to the east.

Kansas Republicans evolve — into Democrats

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 11:05:00 +0000

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.