Reply #31: Thank you

[Mabus]

and you are quite correct. We've had some high profile defections (like Mark Parkinson, former KS GOP chair) around here. We've had two former Republican AGs come out and endorse our Democratic AG candidate (also a former Republican) over the incumbent GOP AG.

What is making them change, as you so astutely point out, is because their party no longer represents them. And rather than give up on politics they have come to realize that we want basically the same things they do. We want good schools & educational programs, fiscal responsibility, fair taxation, etc., and so do they. We haven't changed, their party changed and they don't want to be a part of it any more.

As for how hard it is to change parties, there was an editorial from a Republican-oriented paper recently that explains why things are changing here.

As we prepare ourselves to make political endorsements in subsequent issues, I can tell you unequivocally that this newspaper has never endorsed so many Democrats. Not even close.

In the 56 years we have been publishing in Johnson County, this basically has been a Republican newspaper. In the old days, before the Republican civil war that fractured the party, we were traditional Republicans....

The point is, I can name on two hands over a half century the number of Democrats we have endorsed for public office.

This year, we will do something different. You will read why we are endorsing Kathleen Sebelius for governor and Mark Parkinson for lieutenant governor; Dennis Moore to be re-elected to the U.S. Congress; Paul Morrison for Kansas attorney general; and a slew of local Democratic state legislative candidates. These are not liberal Democrats. They are what fairly can be described as conservative Democrats, and we can prove that in our forthcoming endorsements.

But I could not help but put in perspective a more global phenomenon that has led us to re-evaluate our traditional support for Republicans....

The Republican Party has changed, and it has changed monumentally.

You almost cannot be a victorious traditional Republican candidate with mainstream values in Johnson County or in Kansas anymore, because these candidates never get on the ballot in the general election. They lose in low turnout primaries, where the far right shows up to vote in disproportionate numbers.

To win a Republican primary, the candidate must move to the right.

What does to-the-right mean?

It means anti-public education, though claiming to support it.

It means weak support of our universities, while praising them.

It means anti-stem cell research.

It means ridiculing global warming.

It means gay bashing. Not so much gay marriage, but just bashing gays.

It means immigrant bashing. I'm talking about the viciousness.

It means putting religion in public schools. Not just prayer.

It means mocking evolution and claiming it is not science.

It means denigrating even abstinence-based sex education....

But everything else adds up to priorities that have nothing to do with the Republican Party I once knew.

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