Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2010
Elections and love
John Beaudoin, Journal Publisher
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The two things money cannot buy, I suppose.
While many of us pour lots and lots of cash into the latter, few would ever dare to run for public office, much less spend an inordinate amount of money – and accept donations from groups that clearly want something – in the name of public office.
After the final results had come into the Jackson County Election Board for the Eighth District Senate race and Will Kraus had survived with the win, I decided to walk down to the Firefighter’s Union Hall and see how the young state representative was taking all of this.
Amid the bustle of energy and people rushing around in a post-campaign party flurry was Kraus – calm, smiling.
“Money can’t buy the race,” he said proudly.
Indeed, Senator.
True, Kraus did have a windfall in the waning hours of this particular primary election, netting a cool $125,000 from the Citizens for Lager group.
But when all the receipts are tallied, the total will show that opponent Bryan Pratt, a leader in Jefferson City and financial front-runner in this race, outspent Kraus nearly two-to-one.
Is it an upset? I’m not sure that even matters any more.
“It’s an upset in the fact that he had $435,000 and we had $225,000 and that’s not including all the special interest mailing and the other things that were done for his campaign,” Kraus said. “Money can’t buy the race. The voters in the Eighth were smart enough to look at the facts in the race. They looked in the newspaper and they looked on the Internet and knew that the deception of my record were not really the facts.”
If we were truly going old-school throwback, Gary Dusenberg – who raised far less in contributions than either Kraus or Pratt and didn’t take a single donation over $1,000 – would have been the winner.
But Dusenberg just didn’t have the mustard to win. I would imagine the $64,000 question for Pratt (while we are on the money topic) would have to be this: would enough of Dusenberg’s 5,373 votes have gone to him, or at least enough to overcome a 600-plus vote loss?
We will never know.
I think Dusenberg (ethics) and Kraus (his vote against the Missouri budget) had unwavering messages during the campaign.
Pratt, who had flyers and messages coming from so many special interest groups that he didn’t even know who was publishing what, couldn’t say the same thing.
Kraus noted as much after his victory.
“When you run a campaign, you have to focus on making sure your message is consistent,” he said. “If you do that, your message will resound with the voters.”
Although the campaign was, financially, mounting against Kraus in the final weeks, he said he never felt defeated. And in the final days, the feeling was quite the opposite.
“Going into this weekend, I knocked on doors in Rep. Pratt’s district and I heard, ‘We don’t need another politician in Jefferson City.’ When I realized our message was getting through in his district, I felt like this race had turned the corner.”
Sure, Kraus played the political flyer game and he participated in those awful robo-phone calls, but he and Dusenberg both showed us that votes can be earned, not purchased.
The key now is holding Kraus accountable for what he promised during the campaign. And that goes for all of us in the Eighth District.
John Beaudoin is the publisher of the Blue Springs Journal. To respond to today’s commentary, call 816-282-7001 or e-mail jbeaudoin@bluespringsjournal.com.
