Democrats are really off track with this "What's the Matter With Kansas" game. Andrei Cherny's new iteration of it just proves how much. Road tripping through the state, he stopped off in a small city, heard a story of a desperate women, and caromed off into ruminations about how we've failed the natives there. Why?
First off, what is the matter with Kansas? Particularly as opposed to, say, Arkansas, or Tennessee, or Oregon. Kansas has middling unemployment (that's better than the presumably right-thinking California), a per capita income firmly in the nation's middle (Arkansas, incidentally, has the lowest), a female Democratic governor, and a poverty level 2.1% below the national average. So tell me again, what's the matter with Kansas? Because though we keep making the state sound like it's crammed with abortion-hating hicks too stupid to mark the ballot that'd help pull them out of poverty, none of that's actually going on. Instead, the real problem seems to be that the state just doesn't vote Democratic very often. But on a national level, they never have, so unless there's something surprising about the state that rejected FDR rejecting John Kerry, I wouldn't get my knickers in a bunch over it.
Worse, if you were a Kansan, already predisposed against Democrats, exactly how pleased would you be by a national progressive conversation entitled "What's the Matter With You and Everyone You Know?" You'd shake your head, curse those condescending Democratic elitists, feel six times better about never voting for them, and wonder how such a nice girl as Kathleen Sebelius came out of such a nasty party as that.
