December 24, 2006

The Big First

The 2006 election was one Kansas Republicans would like to forget. At the statewide level, Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius easily won reelection, former state GOP chairman Mark Parkinson switched parties and ran on her ticket as lieutenant governor, and GOP Attorney General Phill Kline was defeated. In Congress, Republican Jim Ryun lost his bid for a sixth term while perennially endangered Democrat Dennis Moore scored a career-high 65 percent victory.

In Western Kansas, however, Republican Congressman Jerry Moran won a 79 percent landslide. How did he manage to do so well while his party colleagues floundered? Maybe it’s the annual “Big First Listening Tour”. Every year since his election to Congress in 1996, Moran has made it his mission to schedule events in each of the 69 counties in his very big 1st Congressional District. This is no simple task: At 57,576 square miles in size, his district is roughly the size of Illinois. It runs 350 miles east from the Colorado border, about the distance from New York City to Richmond, Virginia.

Moran is already well into his eleventh annual tour – in response to the uncertainty of a new congressional voting schedule, Moran began his 2007 listening tour in early December. After a brief Christmas break, he’s scheduled to visit three counties on December 27th (including the Hungry Hunter restaurant in Lincoln County), four counties on the 28th (including the Swedish-American State Bank in Republic County), and four more counties before the end of the year. No events are scheduled for New Year’s Day, but Moran’s got six more counties squeezed in before the 110th Congress convenes on January 4. [CHARLES MAHTESIAN]

Posted at 03:01 PM

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