Brownback blames one person for Kansas’ problems: Obama

Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration has repeatedly pointed to one man as the cause of some of the state’s most pressing problems, from revenue shortfalls to uncertainty surrounding KanCare.

Until last week, that man resided in the White House. Now the White House has a new resident, a man whom Brownback supported and advised during the general election.

The idea that Kansas was in conflict with then-President Obama has been a recurring theme in public statements from Brownback and other administration officials for much of the last six years.

When Brownback campaigned for governor in 2010, he told voters he believed “in the Kansas way, not the Obama way.” He repeated the line on the campaign trail in 2014 and traveled around in a bus that bore the slogan.

When the state missed revenue projections by $90 million in April 2014 – setting off what became a trend for most of the next two years – Revenue Secretary Nick Jordan called the shortfall the “undeniable result of President Obama’s failed economic policies of increasing taxes and over-regulation.”

When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rejected the state’s request to extend authorization for KanCare, its privatized Medicaid program, Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer called the move “simply an ugly parting shot from the Obama administration at Governor Brownback on their way out the door.”

Brownback on Tuesday hinted that the state expects more leniency under the Trump administration’s oversight of Medicaid. “We’ve had difficulty of recent times with CMS, and it seems to be pretty significant that they focus in and target us. I’m looking forward to a new CMS director, and I think things will be substantially different,” Brownback said.

Brownback’s spokeswoman, Melika Willoughby, responded to a question about the administration’s focus on Obama as a cause for the state’s problems by saying in an e-mail that the former president “attempted to bring terrorists to Kansas, burdened our farmers and ranchers with onerous regulations … American voters rejected that legacy, choosing instead Donald Trump on the promise of securing and protecting America.”

Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, said Brownback administration officials “have used Obama as a scapegoat to try to distract Kansans from their failures in a number of different areas, be it the budget, be it the tax experiment and now be it KanCare.”

Since 1990, every governor elected in Kansas has been from the party opposite that of the sitting president. Democrat Joan Finney was elected during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. Republican Bill Graves took office four years later during the middle of Bill Clinton’s first term as president. Graves was re-elected during Clinton’s second term, while Democrat Kathleen Sebelius won two gubernatorial campaigns with George W. Bush in the White House.

“I think Republicans really benefit in Kansas politics when there’s a Democratic president,” said Bob Beatty, a political scientist at Washburn University. “When there’s a Democratic president, they (Republicans) really push the nationalization of local issues … but that really is gone when you get a Republican president.”

Beatty said President Donald Trump’s election puts more pressure on Brownback and other state-level Republicans “to produce, because it’s just not as legitimate to blame Washington.”

Clay Barker, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, said in an e-mail that “Obama was very unpopular in Kansas, so linking Democrats to him was a winning tactic” in state races.

He acknowledged that state-level Republicans can no longer point to Washington when things go wrong.

“It is, however, obvious that by holding the presidency, both houses of Congress, and all power centers in Kansas except the state supreme court (which the liberals still hold) — it would be difficult for Republicans to pass blame for bad results, even if their acts were not the cause of the bad results — you own what occurs during your tenure, good or bad,” Barker said.

Policy differences

Brownback’s conflict with the Obama administration has ranged from his staunch opposition to expanding Medicaid to battles over wildlife conservation.

For example, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added the lesser prairie chicken to its list of threatened species in 2014, Brownback called it “another example of the Obama administration aggressively and unnecessarily intruding into our daily lives.”

He made it an issue during his re-election campaign, producing an ad that criticized the Obama administration as overreaching. The state sued the federal agency, and the prairie chicken was taken off the threatened species list in 2016.

Opposition to Obama was a central theme of Brownback’s 2016 State of the State address. Beatty counted at least 15 references to Obama in that speech.

Brownback pointed to policy differences on health care and a host of other issues. And he warned against the possible transfer of Guantanamo detainees to Fort Leavenworth, saying that he stood “ready to thwart every action the President takes to transfer terrorists to Kansas.”

Revenue, jobs

The Brownback administration often has attributed missed revenue projections to Obama, contending the governor’s tax policies are succeeding in stimulating economic growth but that missteps at the federal level have muted the effect.

Many economists have pointed to Brownback’s tax cuts as a primary cause of the state’s revenue woes.

“This is a pattern of the Brownback administration failing to be accountable for their actions,” said House Minority Leader Jim Ward, D-Wichita. “When my kids were little, all conversations when they got in trouble started with ‘Dad, it’s not my fault’ … and that’s kind of what the Brownbacks do.”

House Speaker Ron Ryckman, R-Olathe, said the numbers speak for themselves on the economy.

“There are certain national headwinds, the stagnation in our GDP and other things … Kansas does not control the national economy,” Ryckman said Friday.

Kansas had been expected to experience 2 percent growth in its gross state product at the start of 2016, but it ended up experiencing zero growth, according to the Kansas Legislative Research Department. The U.S. experienced a 1.6 percent growth in its gross domestic product during the same time period, below the initial forecast of 2.1 percent.

The state’s historical growth rate for the past two decades had been 3.4 percent, Ryckman said.

“Obviously, Obama does not control commodity prices, nor everything else, but there are national implications that we deal with. If we’d had historical growth of 3.4 percent (over the last three years) we’d have almost $900 million more in the bank today,” Ryckman said.

Obama oversaw 75 months of consecutive job growth as president, and the nation gained 2 million jobs during his final year as president, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Kansas lost 9,300 total nonfarm jobs between December 2015 and December 2016, according to the Kansas Department of Labor.

100 days

What will happen now that Obama has left office?

“It’s an interesting question,” said House Majority Leader Don Hineman, R-Dighton. “I guess we’ll find out what the response is going forward. Obviously, Obama won’t be there. Maybe some of his policies will still be there to blame, though.”

Michael Smith, a political scientist at Emporia State University, said the technique of blaming the president of the opposite party is common for governors and that during the Obama administration “a lot of Republican governors have brought this blaming of Obama to an art form.”

Smith said it’s likely that Brownback will continue to point to Obama for the next few months as Trump settles into office.

“Conventional wisdom used to be the president has a honeymoon period of about 100 days … when you can continue to say, yes, I know Trump is in office now, but he hasn’t had time to reverse all of Obama’s decisions, so it’s still Obama’s fault,” Smith said. “I’d say once you hit your 100-day mark, that gets old.”

This story was originally published January 24, 2017 at 6:32 PM with the headline "Brownback blames one person for Kansas’ problems: Obama."