By BECKY KISER
Hays Post
It’s the “kitchen table” issues, not national politics, Barry Grissom is most interested in as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated in Kansas. Republican Pat Roberts is retiring after nearly 40 years in Washington.
Grissom, 65, is the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Kansas, a position he was appointed to by President Barack Obama. The Leawood resident served in that office from 2010 to 2016.
Grissom was in Hays Saturday afternoon to meet privately with the Ellis County Democratic Party after kicking off his senate campaign July 1.
“Most of us got jobs, we got kids, we got responsibilities. We can’t be in the finger-pointing game that exists in Washington, D.C. or in different media circles,” Grissom said in an interview prior to joining the local Democratic get-together.
The Kansans he’s talked with are more concerned about issues directly impacting their daily lives, Grissom says.
“Things like is my kid going to get a good education, am I safe in my community, I want to exercise my religion as I see fit, I want to vote.
“Issues that people have, whether Republicans, Democrats or independents, the vast majority of them are the same. I think the differences that separate us are not that great and we can disagree about those. But we agree on so much. I think what has happened is we’ve gotten away from the larger group agreeing on the agreeable items and just focused on the divisive items. And I think that only harms us as a community and certainly as a state and as a country.”
Those agreed-upon “kitchen table” issues include three major areas, according to Grissom.
“Not surprisingly, number one is health care. Access to rural health care in Kansas is a real challenge, and even in some larger communities.”
He pointed to Fort Scott, the county seat of Bourbon County, which does not have a hospital. Mercy Hospital closed its doors Feb. 1. “We have one institution in Crawford County servicing the needs of 50,000 residents in southeast Kansas. Even if you’re fortunate enough to have the best health insurance in the world, if you have no place to utilize it, health insurance really doesn’t make any difference.”
Grissom is a little surprised by another “kitchen table” issue – student loans – but it’s come up more and more as he’s talked with Kansans during his campaign.
“If you have a young person in your family and they have a lot of student loan debt and you live in a rural area, they’re probably not going to return to the rural area because there aren’t jobs there that provide sufficient income to service your debt.
“So they’re forced to leave the farm. They’re forced to leave a community they might otherwise want to come back to.”
Community safety concerns are something Grissom is well-acquainted from his years as a U.S. Attorney.
He recalled his office’s investigation and prosecution of bombing plots targeting Wichita Mid-Continent airport in 2013 and Fort Riley in 2016.
“So I’ve had some real, on-the-ground meaningful experience working with law enforcement.
“We all came together. Nobody was a Republican. Nobody was a Democrat. We came together as a team to keep Kansans safe.”
Grissom has also worked with smaller law enforcement agencies, particularly in human trafficking and drug transportation along Interstates 70 and 35. While in office, Grissom spoke to classes at Fort Hays State University about human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
In 2014, he worked with Ellis County law enforcement and the Kansas Highway Patrol in a drug stop that netted 80 pounds of methamphetamine and 11 pounds of cocaine. Grissom was also involved in the prosecution and conviction of a former temporary employee of HaysMed who infected a number of patients with Hepatitis-C, including one woman who died.
As the state’s former top federal law enforcement official, Grissom has name recognition in Kansas as a senate candidate.
So does second-term First District Congressman Roger Marshall of Great Bend, who announced his candidacy for the senate seat Saturday morning at the state fair in Hutchinson.
“I’m going to leave it to my Republican friends to sort out who they want to be their standard-bearer after the primary,” Grissom said with a smile.
Grissom went back into private law practice for a short time after his appointment ended. “It was satisfying in its own way but didn’t give me the satisfaction I got from doing public service.”
He and his wife talked about whether they wanted to “throw ourselves into the meat grinder that is otherwise known as politics.” They decided to do it and once Sen. Roberts announced he would not run again, Grissom says “it became that more attractive.”
An open federal seat in Kansas is rare.
“It provides our citizens in Kansas a real opportunity on both sides of the aisle,” Grissom believes, “to have a primary process and pick somebody that they think might do their very best to share their interests and their desires of what a public servant might do, from all the major things you might think about in national politics to the more important things, which are ‘kitchen table’ issues.”
Kansas, a die-hard “red state,” has not had a Democratic U.S. Senator since 1932.
The federal election is Nov. 3, 2020.
