Today’s “Popular Front”, Kansas edition
This looks to be a red-letter day, of sorts, for the Democratic Party for the state of Kansas. The signs are thus:
A conservative-editorial page for the newspaper the Johnson County Sun, this all over the blogosphere at the moment says:
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. […]
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.
It is the split in the state party, described in Thomas Franks’s What’s the Matter with Kansas as largely a class-struggle with the most conservative religious and poor rural dwellers and the moderate educated class. The split lead to the election of the current Democratic governor, Kathleen Saebilius.
Which is the split reason for this:
Nor is Morrison alone. In a state that voted nearly 2 to 1 for President Bush in 2004, nine former Republicans will be on the November ballot as Democrats. Among them is Mark Parkinson, a former chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, who changed parties to run for lieutenant governor with the popular Democratic governor, Kathleen Sebelius.
This is decidedly mixed. For an organization with the letter “D”, it is a good thing. For the politics that stand behind the organization with the letter “D”, the best that can be said is that all electoral politics — the proverbial “Big Tent” — boils down to what is called a Popular Front. If you take the term to traditionally mean a bunch of left wing forces fighting Fascism and put a moderate American tome to it — well, lead that where you may.