Brownback in Election Denial
Our editorial last Sunday asked whether Gov. Sam Brownback would listen to voters and be willing to change course. An interview he did recently made clear the answer is “no.”
Brownback told KCPT, the public television station in Kansas City, that the primaries were not a repudiation of his policies. Instead, he blamed the defeat of many conservative incumbents on uninformed voters and the media.
Brownback said that the core issue of the election was school funding, and he speculated that most Kansans likely think K-12 funding went down 5 to 15 percent.
“The fact of the matter is that it’s gone up by 8 percent,” he said.
Brownback faulted the media for the public’s misplaced concerns about education funding.
“The media has participated a lot in this misinformation,” he said.
Asked whether school districts are just imagining their funding problems, Brownback acknowledged districts are facing cost increases and that about a third of the funding increase went to the state pension system – money that districts can’t use to pay their bills.