Steve Kraske: As the election looms, personal vendettas play out

Bobby Kennedy knew something about revenge.

“Don’t get mad, get even,” said the man who performed his brother’s dirty work.

Around these parts, we’ve seen all manner of political payback lately.

Take mild-mannered former Kansas Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker. She got a taste of retribution the other day when, frustrated with Pat Roberts’ shift to the right, Kassebaum Baker responded with a firm “no” when asked to cut an ad for her fellow Republican.

Voters, she said, “feel they don’t know him now.”

Joe Wilson also got into the act. He’s the husband of Valerie Plame, the onetime CIA operative outed in the media. In a Huffington Post op-ed, Wilson accused Roberts of trying to “sabotage” the investigation into the leak of his wife’s identity.

Wilson didn’t stop there. He ripped Roberts’ performance as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee in the run-up to the Iraq War. Roberts worked to “cover up the administration’s egregious lies and misdeeds that took us to a disastrous war” with conduct that “borders on a dereliction of duty.”

That Wilson said all this 37 days before a close election could hardly be viewed as coincidence.

Roberts’ office declined to comment.

In Missouri, Democrats complained for years that their governor, Jay Nixon, ignored them during legislative sessions and at election time. So when Nixon got jammed up with Ferguson and a flurry of veto overrides last month, did you see his fellow party members racing to his rescue?

To my ears, it was mostly crickets.

And how’s this for a classic eye for an eye: On Thursday, former Wichita-area state Sen. Dick Kelsey, a Republican, called a news conference to say the FBI a few months ago interviewed him for two hours. The topic? David Kensinger, the former chief of staff to Gov. Sam Brownback.

News outlets reported several months ago that the FBI was investigating Kensinger over influence-peddling. But Kelsey became the first on-record source to confirm an interview.

“The investigation is very real,” he said.

The FBI probe had been out of the news for several months. Kelsey made sure it got back in just before voters start casting ballots. It was lost on no one that Kensinger, and Brownback by extension, had succeeded in targeting Kelsey for defeat in 2012 even though Kelsey is a conservative.

Kelsey, once a two-term veteran, had questioned the governor on tax and Medicaid policy.

What’s the old saying about revenge? Serve it cold, very cold.

This story was originally published October 3, 2014 at 8:51 PM with the headline "Steve Kraske: As the election looms, personal vendettas play out."