TOPEKA, Kan. — Pat Roberts doesn’t have a tricked-out campaign bus. There’s no couch, table, coffee station, bedroom in the back or neat graphic design on the outside. Instead, when the incumbent Republican senator started a four-day tour of Kansas on Thursday, his staff rented a plain old bus, stuck a PAT ROBERTS FOR SENATE banner on the side and hit the road.
The tour began in Wichita with a rally in which Roberts was joined by fellow Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Coburn. The turnout, probably close to 200 people, was encouraging for mid-morning on a weekday. More than that, there seemed to be a real enthusiasm in the room, a striking difference from Roberts events not too long ago. (One man who had been to both described the atmosphere at a Roberts gathering a few weeks ago as “like a wake.”)
Importantly for Roberts, there were a lot of people in the room who had voted against him in the August 5 Republican primary, in which Roberts defeated Dr. Milton Wolf but did not crack 50 percent of the vote. When I asked some in the audience, “Are you a Roberts supporter?” several responded, “I’m a conservative.” But they seem to have set aside their unhappiness with Roberts in light of the challenge presented by the wealthy businessman Greg Orman, who is running as an independent but is widely perceived to be a Democrat. The state Democratic Party angered many Kansas Republicans when it forced its own candidate to pull out of the race in hopes of giving Orman a better shot at defeating Roberts. A lot of Republicans thought that was a dirty trick, so no matter their differences with Roberts, they’re supporting him now.
After the rally, Roberts boarded the bus and took a seat across the aisle from Coburn. (Cruz had to take off after the event.) We had about 20 minutes to talk, so I began by asking him: How did it come to this? How is it that in such a deeply Republican state, Pat Roberts is in a seriously competitive race in October?
Roberts began, as he does on the stump, by going after Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, charging Reid has made the Senate a scorched-earth dictatorship in which it’s almost impossible for Republicans to amend or influence legislation. “It’s very frustrating,” Roberts said. “People say, ‘Why don’t you reach across the aisle and get things done?’ You can’t reach across the aisle and get things done when Harry has it bottled up.”
Roberts went on to suggest that the public’s frustration with Reid’s Senate is behind some Republican unhappiness with Roberts himself, as well as support for Orman. “If you’ve been there [the Senate] a while, the catchy phrase ‘throw everybody out’ has some particular meaning,” Roberts said. “But I think now people are realizing that my opponent is not who he says he is. He’s not coming clean. He’s not shooting straight.”
“Do you think there’s anything you did?” I asked Roberts. “Do you bear any responsibility for being in a tougher race?”
At that moment Coburn stepped in. “Let me answer that,” he said. “They’ve run a very sophisticated campaign, with the national liberal media helping them, saying that the Republicans are obstructionists. And if you look at the facts, all we wanted to do was have minority rights. … When you say Pat Roberts is part of the Republicans, and the whole national media story is Republicans are obstructionists, therefore Pat must be an obstructionist. … Things couldn’t be further from the truth.”
I asked if there was any answer to the question beyond conditions in the Senate. “What was in the back of my mind when I asked the question was not the obstructionist charge,” I said to Roberts, “but the ‘going Washington’ charge and forgetting the folks back home.”
It’s a sensitive subject for Roberts, a fifth-generation Kansan who has represented his state in Congress for decades and has for months been entangled in controversy over the fact that he does not keep a permanent home in his home state. “It’s probably not PC for me to say that I take personal umbrage at this,” Roberts began, “but I invented the listening tour out here, when I was in the Big First.” (That was a reference to Roberts’ 16 years in the House representing Kansas’ 1st Congressional District, a huge tract that covers more than half the state.) “I have been to all 105 counties I don’t know how many times. We conduct these listening tours. I’ve been corner to corner, border to border.”
“Greg Orman will never, if he just made a career out of doing it, catch up with me with regard to all of the tours that we’ve had in Kansas listening to folks,” Roberts said.
“For the last three years, we’ve had a drought,” Roberts continued. “My main priority was to save crop insurance and improve it. … That’s the thing that really saved a lot of Kansas farmers. And you wouldn’t have known that if you didn’t walk the dusty fields with farmers, seeing the effects of this terrible drought. I’ve done the same thing up in the northeastern part of this state when the Missouri flooded. Greensburg, it was just blown away. I’ve walked through the rubble of Greensburg. We helped rebuild that town.”
“I can go down a whole laundry list of achievements,” Roberts concluded. “But it’s all based on, when I’m in Kansas, I work hard for Kansas. And when I’m in Washington, I work hard for Kansas in Washington. And after all, that’s where they sent me to do the work. But I have not lost touch.”
Still, there were all those Kansas Republicans who voted for Wolf. Roberts was well aware there were several at his Wichita rally. “I have called a great many of them,” he said. “I know a great many of them.” When he talks to Wolf voters, Roberts said, he acknowledges that they may be dissatisfied with his performance. But he implores them not to stay home on election day. “If you stay home,” he tells them, “that’s probably two votes — the vote you would have cast and the vote that some Democrat will cast, and that’s for Harry Reid.”
“I think most of them get it,” Roberts said. “I think they’re coming on board.”
Roberts is 78 years old, currently the seventh-oldest U.S. senator. He’s asking Kansans to keep him to the Senate until he is 84. (The oldest member of the Senate today is Dianne Feinstein, who is 81 and in office until at least 2018.) Putting aside the obvious age issue — Roberts seems vigorous, and Kansas voters, who have watched him for years, can make their own judgments — Roberts has seen a lot happen in Washington. I asked him about colleagues who are no longer in the Senate. I mentioned Kansas’ Bob Dole, as well as Indiana’s Richard Lugar. Roberts added Utah’s Bob Bennett to the list, noting another Republican who lost to a GOP primary challenger, as well as “Uncle Ted” Stevens, the Alaskan who lost his seat amid a disastrous series of circumstances.
Is serving in the Senate less satisfying today than when those men were in Washington? Roberts said he had a picture in his office, from the dedication of the World War II monument in Washington, of Dole, the late Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye, former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and himself. “I have it framed,” Roberts, a Marine from 1958 to 1962, said. “Danny wrote a note on it. It said, ‘I have been so happy to have been in the company of such men like yourself, when friendship was the primary concern — and getting things done — as opposed to what we have today.’ Now, I’m paraphrasing; he wrote it in much better fashion than that. And I wish we could, but we cannot, with Harry Reid, the way he’s running the Senate. I hate to keep coming back to that, but that’s the way it is.”
Coburn began to expand on Roberts’ point, basically saying how much better the Senate was pre-Reid than it is today. I asked Coburn whether that was a factor in his decision to leave the Senate. “Yes, it’s the biggest factor,” he said.
I turned to Roberts. “But you want to stay?”
“I think with a Republican majority, we can make a difference,” Roberts said, “or I wouldn’t be running.”
Later, the bus arrived for Roberts’ next event, a dinner at a restaurant in a down-at-the-heels Topeka shopping mall. The room was filled, and a little more. The other senator from Kansas, Republican Jerry Moran, was there. Like Roberts, Moran’s talk devoted a lot of time to Harry Reid, arguing that a vote for Greg Orman is in effect a vote for Reid; Democrats know they can’t elect a senator in deep-red Kansas, so they’re trying the ruse of running an “independent” who will be a de facto vote for Reid.
Moran, who is also chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, noted that the GOP has a good chance to pick up six Senate seats in November, enough to take control. “Boy, what a shame it would be,” Moran said, “to wake up the day after the election and learn that we had six Republican senators elected in difficult states like Iowa, like Colorado, and to wake up and discover that Kansas had failed in its responsibility and opportunity to return Sen. Pat Roberts to the United States Senate.”
Roberts took the microphone after Moran finished. “Don’t worry about it!” he began. “We’re going to win this race.” Everyone cheered. Then Roberts paused a moment and added: “Worry about it a little bit.”
