Sam Brownback is not impressed with much of his treatment from national media.
“The New York Times has written more about Kansas in the past three months than it has since the Civil War,” the Republican Kansas governor told a group of conservative leaders and activists at the Americans for Tax Reform Wednesday meeting in downtown D.C.
The governor, who faces a tough re-election bid, told the Washington Examiner afterward in a brief interview that he’s surprised with the criticism his conservative, tax-slashing agenda has drawn. And he said he thinks some of his critics want his reforms to fail for political reasons.
“Look, this is working!” he said. “They don’t want it to work politically. They want to say it’s a failure politically so that others wouldn’t pursue a similar path of cutting income taxes. That’s really what the Left is looking at.”
“The national liberal Left really is coming after me,” he added, “and has been for some time.”
But it’s not all bad. After being shown an illustration that accompanied a recent Mother Jones piece on his re-election bid — the illustration showed him sprinting away from a tractor full of torch-wielding constituents — the governor laughed.
“That’s pretty funny,” he said. “But I’m the guy that drives those things. They got it backward. I grew up driving those.”
“Tractors don’t scare me,” he added. “Tractors are a very useful tool in the state of Kansas.”
And he said he thinks characterizations of the atmosphere in the Statehouse in the lead-up to the 2012 primary elections (where he endorsed the primary challengers of a handful of moderate Republican state senators) are unfair. Jean Schodorf, one of the senators who lost her primary that cycle, is now the Democratic secretary of state nominee and has said that the Statehouse felt hostile and tense during that time.
“I don’t know that I would characterize it that way,” Brownback said. “Any time you have primaries — you look at the Roberts/Wolf race — there’s a certain amount of tension, and that happens in a lot of places.”
Brownback will face Democratic House Minority Leader Paul Davis this fall, and he’s one of the most vulnerable incumbent Republican governors in the country. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released a few hours after his Washington Examiner interview showed Brownback trailing Davis by four percentage points, just within its margin of error.
Brownback’s popularity has dipped in part because of lower-than-expected tax revenues. Standard and Poor’s lowered Kansas’ bond rating from AA+ to AA in August, citing its “structurally unbalanced budget.”
