By ROY WENZL
For the Kansas Press Association
Greg Orman is running for Kansas governor as an independent and unconventional candidate this year because he thinks he has something profound to offer citizens.
So when people ask him how polls this year repeatedly show (so far) that only 9 percent of voters want him this time, a steep drop from when he won 42.5 percent of the vote when he ran for the U.S. Senate against Pat Roberts, he makes the following case for why his independent candidacy is noble:
“Median income for Americans hasn’t risen in 17 years,” he said. “Health care, public and higher education costs, child care have so far outstripped the rate of inflation that the average American family – well — it doesn’t feel like you’re treading water. It feels like you’re drowning.”
This is why 45 percent of the 2016 voters chose the unconventional candidate Donald Trump (and why 40 percent of Democratic primary voters voted for the unconventional candidate Bernie Sanders), he said.
Voters have told him they are scared, getting poorer and priced out of their homes by property taxes – they despise conventional politics. So while he wants to win, this election is not only about him, he said.
“The thing that has driven me for the last 10 years is my belief that if we don’t do something dramatically different, our standard of living, our status in the world and the very existence of the middle class are at risk,” Orman said. “It’s largely because our politics gets in the way of solving problems. We have the Hatfields and the McCoys running our government right now.”
Those polls also show Laura Kelly and Kris Kobach, his Democrat and Republican opponents, in nearly a dead heat, but with percentages only in the high 30s and with roughly 15 percent of other voters undecided. What his own polls show is that his favorability ratings are much higher than theirs. Why?
Kobach, he said, “Is taking a strategy that I would describe as starving the government. Sen. Kelly on the other hand has talked about a whole litany of new spending programs … (but) will have to raise taxes to fund her priorities.”
Voters don’t like either option, he said. But his background, as an entrepreneur who has created or bought and turned around companies makes him the ideal person to take over a government and fix what ails the state.
The Brownback cuts, which Kobach wants to bring back, damaged the state, he said, because Brownback “used across the board cuts — cut the good with the bad. Those cuts are lazy, inefficient, they don’t work –and yet it’s the only toolkit available to someone like Sam Brownback, or Laura Kelly, or Kris Kobach.”
“I am the only candidate who has any experience that even approaches the job of managing an enterprise with a $17 billion budget and 40,000 employees,” he said.
First, he’d stop spending tens of millions while recruiting Kansas City (Missouri) companies to move across the state line to Kansas. These incentives cost Kansans hundreds of millions with no true payoff.
Second, he’d de-criminalize small-time marijuana possession, which he says needlessly puts young people in prison and grossly inflates tax dollars spent on prisons. “It’s a stupid public policy for a largely victimless crime, which destroys the capacities of our kids. If you get caught with recreational drugs, you get a ticket instead.”
And third, he’d use his considerable business acumen “to look at how we negotiate drug prices through the Medicaid program.”
That’s a big one, he said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on drugs through Medicaid, but we do a terrible job of negotiating prices. I know how to negotiate prices because I’ve had to do it in my businesses.”
Those three policy changes alone would save hundreds of millions of dollars, he said.
“And that’s just the start. We will go through every agency of government, making smart decisions: Can we redesign the process? Can we redesign how we deliver these services?
“I spent my life in the private sector doing that, in many cases with very efficient companies, making them more efficient.”
The Brownback tax cuts were disastrous for public schools and institutions, he said. “We’ve still got quite a hole to fill.” But cutting as he suggests would mean we could support schools and other programs adequately, and look at how to lower property, sales and other taxes in a way the state can afford. Cutting some taxes is vital, he said.
“In Kingman County a woman came up to me on the street and said ‘Greg, my husband and I saved to pay off our house and paid off our mortgage. But he passed away, and now I can’t afford my property taxes — I may have to leave my home.’ ”
Scenes like that tell him our two-party system no longer works.
“We have the highest sales tax on food in the nation. I’d love to be able to get to a point where we can address some of those things. But I also want to be fiscally responsible and make sure that in doing that, we’re not just passing our problems on to future generations.
Putting him at the head of state government would create an intriguing thing, he said. With the two-party system broken, he could be an arbiter. “The way things are now — whenever we pick a course of action, we tend to look for things that reinforce our point of view. We never look for evidence that we are wrong.
“But I want to hear from all sides. I think intellectual conflict is a good thing. It’s the only way we get to the best answer.”
Orman graduated with high honors from Princeton University and soon started companies that created jobs and millions in wealth. He lives in Fairway with his wife and two daughters.
His running mate is John Doll.
– Roy Wenzl is an award-winning journalist who formerly reported for the Wichita Eagle.