All is not well with the tea party, which came out of last week’s primaries looking less cohesive than once hoped. In two Virginia congressional races, too many tea party candidates meant the win went to the establishment Republicans. The unconventional ideas of tea partier Sharron Angle, who is challenging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are causing more internal strife. A new Washington Post-ABC News Poll finds the tea party’s unfavorability at 50 percent, compared with 39 percent in March. “It’s supposed to be something other than politics as usual, but some of these folks are only looking out for themselves and not for the country,” Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, told the Washington Post.
Our editorial today anticipates Monday’s unveiling of Wichita’s hotly anticipated downtown plan from Boston’s Goody Clancy firm. Among our talking points, inspired by last week’s “Imagine Downtown” articles on the revivals of downtown Oklahoma City; Boise, Idaho; Baton Rouge, La.; and Milwaukee:
— “The business community must be unified and mobilized. Without the heft and imprimatur of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce, a new downtown plan will go nowhere but onto a shelf.”
— “Public investment need not be greater than private investment.”
— “The process also could benefit from an acknowledgment that the hands-off conservative ideology that serves Wichita so well in other ways has left downtown for dead.”
As they used their bully pulpits to try to stand against the Big 12’s crack-up, Sens. Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback and Gov. Mark Parkinson were among the pols “looking like a pretty helpless lot,” wrote Kansas City Star columnist Steve Kraske. At least the senators stopped short of calling for congressional probes and action. “Congress has never had much success when it comes to sports. Lawmakers tried to regulate boxing and ban steroids in baseball and solve the conundrum of the college football national championship. All those efforts fell flat. The same thing probably would have happened with the Big 12 fiasco,” Kraske wrote.
