Will Kansas election be like Lucy and football?

We know the story by heart.

Lucy has once again cajoled Charlie Brown to kick the football that she will hold for him. Even though he is dubious, he remains, as ever, just optimistic enough. He approaches the ball, draws back his foot, and then, inevitably, Lucy whips the ball away. Charlie Brown screams “Aaugh!” and flies into the air, ending up, as always, flat on his back.

In all of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strips, no single recurring joke has more power than the football story. There’s the guarded yet ever-present optimism of Charlie Brown, and the snarky consistency of Lucy’s cruel but predictable betrayal.

The joke works so well because we’ve all been there, done that. We’ve known not to trust someone or something, only to be lured once more into making the mistake we’ve made in the past. Yet the joke also works because – at some point – Lucy did hold the football down, and Charlie Brown kicked it, just as his (and our) expectations dictated.

So what has this got to do with moderate Republicans in Kansas? Well, everything.

For 20 years or so, moderate Republicans have promised, time and again, that this will be the year that they really get serious about electoral politics, to do the hard work that conservatives and the far right have done since the early 1990s, when they took over the Republican Party apparatus, from precinct committee slots to the state party chair.

Yet for election cycle after election cycle, moderate Republicans across the state put the football down, only to pull it away, leaving gullible Kansans flat on their backs.

This election season, moderate Republican candidates and their political bedfellows, such as the education community and the MainStream Coalition, are once again claiming that this is the year, especially given the budgetary mess caused by far-right Republicans. Perhaps it is.

Indeed, moderate Republicans such as John Doll in Garden City, Ed Berger in Hutchinson and John Skubal in Johnson County, among others, stand out as strong Senate candidates. They are opposing ideological incumbents by working hard and taking little for granted before the crucial Aug. 2 primary.

No victories are guaranteed, of course, but this could be the year that moderate Republicans won’t pull the ball away, and Kansas GOP voters will have a fair chance to kick some of Gov. Sam Brownback’s far-right allies out of office.

Maybe. But there is a reason the joke works so well.

This story was originally published July 23, 2016 at 12:05 AM with the headline "Will Kansas election be like Lucy and football?."