Miller's crossing.

Conservative activists are attempting to wrest control of the Republican party establishment in Kansas.

OVERLAND PARK, KANSAS 

Kansas Republicans are fighting a civil war, with their party's top strategist and its top elected official leading opposing armies. Conservative David Miller announced on May 6 that he would step down as state party chairman in order to run against incumbent Gov. Bill Graves. The press, both national and local, is portraying the campaign as another intraparty ideological skirmish. It is partly that--the differences between Miller and Graves on guns, taxes, and abortion are real. But it is also a power struggle, as the activist wing of the state GOP fights back against the party establishment that has been trying to smash it.

Republicans have dominated Kansas politics for more than a hundred years. They currently outnumber Democrats among registered voters by 45.3 to 29.5 per cent. With Miller plotting strategy since 1994, they have held both the state's U.S. Senate seats, won all four House seats, and expanded their majorities in the state legislature. But Kansas Republicanism is not known for being particularly ideological. As Gov. Graves puts it: "A lot of Kansans wear political labels because they grew up with them. They were handed down from their parents or their grandparents."

Generations of Republicans have served the state's agricultural and petroleum interests in Congress. Ranging from Nancy Kassebaum on the party's left wing to Bob Dole on its right, these Republicans espoused a moderate liberalism derived from the prairie progressives of the early 1900s.

Bill Graves, heir to a Salina, Kansas, trucking fortune, fits the mold. Out of college, Graves worked in the 1980 Bush campaign, then as an aide to the Kansas secretary of state. He later won that post himself in a campaign devoid of ideology: here was another rich young man rising smoothly through Republican ranks. While serving as secretary of state, he married Linda Richey, whose father is CEO of Torchmark Corp., an insurance-based financial empire.

Republican moderates who retain power in the post-Reagan Republican Party do so by adhering to a simple rule: You can mess with conservatives on abortion, guns, or taxes, but not all three. Hence Ohio Gov. George Voinovich can raise taxes, and California Lt. Gov. Dan Lungren can advocate gun controls. Both received conservative support; both are solidly pro-life. But the Kansas Republican establishment has been slow learning this rule. Republican "moderate" Mike Hayden, who was governor in the late Eighties, consistently broke it. In 1990, abandoned by conservatives, he lost his governorship to a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat, and Republicans lost control of the state House of Representatives.

David Miller, then a five-term state representative from Eudora, led a conservative rebellion against the establishment. He toured the state recruiting conservatives to fill Republican precinct positions. By 1994, these foot soldiers had captured the state party. Miller became political director of Kansans for Life PAC and was himself elected to the to the party's state committee. Directing thousands of precinct workers to phone trees and ward walks, Miller and his colleagues prepared to recast the post-Hayden party. "That year, conservatives ceded the governor's race to avoid burning resources," recalled Christian Coalition organizer Michael Welton. Instead, they campaigned tirelessly for their candidates for the U.S. House and Senate.

On election day the conservative triumph was complete--with one exception. Bill Graves, an outsider in his own party, continued his smooth ascent. He told the Wichita Eagle, "I don't want to see those folks win who think we ought to slash and burn government"--like state House Speaker Tim Shallenburger and Tax Committee chairman Phill Kline. Graves soon locked horns with his party's leaders over taxes: in 1995 he fought to retain car levies; in 1996 he blocked a Republican bill to phase out state property taxes.

"Graves got off to a solid start," wrote Stephen Moore and Dean Stansel of the Cato Institute, "but he now seems to be a guardian of the status quo and an enemy of growth-oriented reform." They ranked him 14th among the 16 class-of-'94 Republicans in Cato's Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors in 1996. Since then, he has only gotten worse. State general fund spending has grown 22 per cent during his governorship.

Graves showed unrelenting hostility toward conservative social positions, too. In 1996, he vetoed a bill to permit concealed weapons. That same year, he vetoed a "right to know" law requiring abortionists to give each patient information regarding her child's fetal development, the nature of the procedure, the risks involved, and the other options available. "These provisions of the bill represent a powerful intimidation factor against doctors who perform abortions, and an unnecessary government intrusion into the relationship between patient and doctor," Graves wrote in his veto message.

The mutual antipathy between Graves and conservatives is rooted in policy disputes, but it found its bitterest expression in power politics. In May of 1996, when Bob Dole left the U.S. Senate to pursue the Presidency, Gov. Graves appointed Lieut. Gov. Sheila Frahm, a pro-abortion moderate, to replace him. Breaking tradition, Graves also campaigned actively for her in the primary that summer. But conservative Rep. Sam Brownback, with support from taxpayer and pro-family groups, handily beat Sen. Frahm (and then buried the Democratic candidate in November).

Graves took the defeat of Sheila Frahm hard. He denounced the state party's platform, modeled on Reaganera Republican national platforms, and threatened to boycott the Republican Convention in San Diego. When conservatives gained working control of the state board of education, he proposed to dismantle it. In a speech at Wichita State University, he denounced the "shrill, loud, and uneducated" voices which nurtured mistrust of government.

In 1997, he started actively attempting to silence those voices. "The unidentified distribution of campaign-related material and advertising by parties other than the candidate should not be allowed to continue," he declared. His closest ally in the state House of Representatives, Kent Glasscock, convened a meeting with, among others, officials of Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and United We Stand America. Their objective was to coordinate a legislative strategy for crushing "soft money" issue-advocacy groups such as Kansans for Life, the Christian Coalition, and Americans for Tax Reform.

During the next legislative session, the governor and his allies loosed a barrage of "reform" legislation aimed at prying contributor lists from conservative not-for-profit groups; one provision would have granted an administrative committee subpoena power for campaign-finance investigations. Commercials or voting guides which might "tend" to influence elections "directly or indirectly" were to be regulated, even if they included no endorsements. Labor unions and professional associations were to be exempted.

These proposed statutes managed to bring Christian groups and the ACLU together. "The effect of [these] bills," said Kansans for Life lobbyist Bruce Dimmitt, "would be to harass and intimidate participants in their grassroots-level participation in civic matters." Wendy McFarland, lobbyist for the ACLU's Kansas office, complained of campaign citations against "many that are hardly the sort of powerful, wealthy contributors that the public has in mind when it thinks of campaign reform," including anti-tax groups, anti-abortion groups, "and yes, even the ACLU."

Gov. Graves and his allies had crafted their campaign-finance bill as a tool for purging their political enemies within the party. But their political enemies were the party, and they struck back. "It was the long knives," says one senior party official, "drawn by the governor and his henchmen against the grass-roots organizations of the political Right." On March 21, 1998, Miller wrote a public letter to Rep. Kline savaging the governor's fiscal policy. "Kansans," he said, "have placed their trust in Republicans to deliver less government, less spending, and less tax. And that is not happening." Miller's demand that Republican legislators defy their governor signaled his impending candidacy.

The dynamics of the upcoming primary are simple. Bill Graves, buoyed by the prevailing prosperity, gets favorable ratings of 70 per cent in the polls. He has a war chest of roughly a million dollars. And in the state Senate he continues to command a slender majority, made up of Republican liberals and Democrats. "I think there are a lot of Democrats who are pretty well satisfied with the job Gov. Graves has done so far," Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley told the Lawrence Journal World. On June 2, the executive committee of the Kansas AFL-CIO endorsed Graves for governor.

But Miller can mobilize the enthusiasm of conservative activists. On June 6, Ambassador Alan Keyes and Focus on the Family's James Dobson endorsed him before a cheering crowd of five thousand in Wichita's Kansas Coliseum, while Gov. Graves hosted a formal dinner for a hundred people down the road. Only 40 per cent of Kansas' registered Republicans describe themselves as conservatives, but they comprise 70 per cent of likely voters. If they turn out in sufficient numbers on August 4, Miller wins.

One obvious believer is his foe. Within days of Miller's announcement, Bill Graves had accepted a tax cut twice the size of the one he had threatened to veto a year earlier. And the governor appalled his pro-choice constituents by signing a statute that abolished not only partial-birth abortion but also most other abortions past the 22nd week of pregnancy. Already Graves's fundraisers are touting the legislation he signed under duress. But the activists are not listening. "The genuine achievements of the Graves administration belong to David Miller," said Wyandotte County Republican Chairman John Altevogt. "Why not elect him in fact?"

Mr. Nadler is editor of K.C. Jones Monthly, a Midwestern journal of opinion.