The Stakes Just Went Up in Kansas
Posted on April 16, 2014
The stakes just went up in Kansas.
Kathleen Sebelius will not beat Pat Roberts if she decides that she wants to be a United States Senator.
Roberts is far too popular with far too many Kansans to lose a general election fight to her.
But should Republican primary voters in the Sunflower State decide to go with Milton Wolf, President Obama’s cousin and a doctor, Sebelius would probably win.
It would be a rerun of Joe Donnelly’s fairly easy victory over Richard Mourdock in Indiana, and Chris Coons romp over Christine O’Donnell in Delaware.
Now, some Republican strategists might say that because Wolf is a doctor and Sebelius is most famous for the implementation of Obamacare, that Republicans would have a shot in winning.
That’s not going to happen.
Wolf became famous for putting x-rays of some of his dead patients on his Facebook page. And then he made jokes about those dead patients. On his Facebook page.
My friends, that is not what Facebook was invented for. It was not invented so doctors could post pictures of their dead patients for all to see.
I knew this was a bad story when I was watching an episode of a television show, “The Doctors”, and they were talking about Milton Wolf and his Facebook photos. Ugly. It is pretty bad when your own colleagues try to disown you.
The Facebook Photos would be issue one in a general election matchup. Sebelius is not popular enough to beat Pat Roberts, but she is far better known than the doctor who posted x-rays of his dead patients on his Facebook page.
The Republican Party is heading in the right direction. It has some minor speed bumps. It has to make sure that Mike Simpson beats the debt collecting trial lawyer in Idaho. It has to make sure that Thad Cochran beats the guy who attended a white supremacist rally in Mississippi. And it has to make sure that its leader, Mitch McConnell -- the most conservative Senate Republican leader since Bob Taft -- wins his primary so he can beat a well-funded Democratic candidate in Kentucky.
If it does all of those things, if it avoids nominating a doctor who posts inappropriate Facebook photos, a debt collecting trial lawyer, a person who doesn’t have enough sense not to address a white supremacist rally, and somebody who will lose to Allison Grimes in a general election, if it does all of those things, it can restore its brand, and have a decent shot at winning back the Senate.
The stakes have gone up in Kansas. Let’s hope the folks there have enough sense to make the right decision in this primary season.