Thread: Obama's cousin on the ballot as a Tea Party Candidate

Could Obama's Conservative Cousin Actually Win? 10 Questions for Milton Wolf

Aug 5, 2014, 11:13 AM ET
By BENJAMIN SIEGEL via WORLD NEWS

Milton Wolf is pictured on Jan. 27, 2014.
Bill Clark/Getty Images

Dr. Milton Wolf wants to be the tea party’s next success story.

Wolf, who is President Obama’s second cousin, is challenging Sen. Pat Roberts in the Kansas GOP Senate primary, the latest intraparty Republican skirmish of the election cycle.

To take down Roberts, Wolf, 43, hopes to capitalize on the same vein of anti-incumbent sentiment that led to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s primary loss. Both candidates have faced controversy.

For Roberts, 78, the three-term senator who has worked in Washington for more than 40 years, it was the revelation, first reported by The New York Times, that he doesn’t keep a house in his home state, and instead stays with donors and lists their home as his voting address.

Wolf, a radiologist, is under investigation by a state medical board after the Topeka Capital-Journal reported that he had posted a number of anonymous X-ray images of traumatic injuries to Facebook, and joked about them with friends. (The Capital-Journal also broke the story of the investigation.)

Doctor-Turned-Politician Posted Gruesome Images to Facebook

ABC News recently spoke to Wolf about the race, his family and why there should be more doctors in Congress. The following is a Q&A, edited for brevity.

You're related to the president.
I didn’t know that Barack Obama and I were related until 2008. Then-Senator Obama had described in some news account his great uncle Charlie Payne, who had served in World War II. My mother was reading the article in shock, because he was describing her Uncle Charlie!

She and Stanley Ann [Dunham, Obama’s mother] grew up together in Wichita as young girls, but they had lost touch. My mom knew that she had a son, and she kind of put two-and-two together. So they met on a few occasions.

He invited me and my family to meet in 2010 [in Kansas City, Missouri].

There was both family and political talk, but I’ll keep that in confidence. By this point he’s already the president and I’m already his fiercest critic. They call me the arch-nemesis of Obamacare!

You needed training and experience to serve as a doctor. Why is experience a problem when it comes to politics?

I’ve heard the argument that Pat Roberts’s seniority is desired but, in reality, he’s been in Washington for 47 years. He’s had seniority for a quarter of a century! What do we have to show for it? When will this investment in Roberts start paying off?

I agree with what Dr. Ben Carson said: We need more doctors and engineers in Congress than lawyers and politicians. Doctors and engineers are problem solvers by trade, and politicians and lawyers win arguments for a living.

Look at the difference between Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Pat Roberts. Ted Cruz understands something that Pat Roberts never quite figured out: A senator should have something far more powerful than a vote. He should have a voice, and he should use it fearlessly.

Isn’t Sen. Cruz a lawyer?
He is, but he understands communication. And he’s reaching out to people, and he’s enlisting them in a movement. Politicians tend to be scared of voters just as soon as they see the whites of their eyes, especially when they see the pitchforks in their hands. But we need to reach out to people and communicate conservatism and explain why it’s not just effective but compassionate.

Sen. Roberts has attacked you for uploading grisly X-ray images to Facebook of injuries and joking about them with friends. Should voters judge you over the episode?

The reality is that Pat Roberts is not being honest in his allegations. He accuses me of releasing private patient information, but quite frankly he’s lying. We’re talking about anonymous X-rays. If there was an X-ray of you, you would not be able to recognize that it’s you, and there’s a good chance you probably wouldn’t know what body part it is.

Does that make them acceptable?
If any of the commentary I had offended anyone, then I apologize. We’re talking about something years ago that was actually removed years ago, I apologize to anyone I’ve offended. If you have never said anything that you wish you could take back, you may not understand how I feel.

One of the realities of this is that on the campaign trail, I’ve had so many people come up to me -- other healthcare providers, first responders, police officers, folks in the military. People get that we have to joke about some of these things or it will drive us crazy.

Is that an appropriate way to relieve stress?
Those of us who deal with tragedy have to find ways to cope with it, and I’ve seen people cope with it in destructive ways. I’ve seen people led to vice, I’ve seen it tear apart marriages, I’ve seen people get burned out and walk away from the profession. If the humor I used to try and cope with it offended anyone, I apologize. My mistakes are my own. I’ll own my mistakes. If I said anything that offended anyone, I beg them for their forgiveness.

But people who don’t have those roles in society are coming up to us from the very first time the story broke. We could count at every event we’d have somebody come up, there’d always be at least these two: a younger person that would come up and say, ‘I’ve never heard of you before until the advertisements, and I want to see you for myself.’ The other is typically an older person that would say, ‘I cannot believe he is running those advertisements against you.’

So this has helped you?
I think it has. It’s hard to show how it has hurt me, other than people from afar who think it has been a bigger issue from Kansas voters than it has.

You recently ambushed Sen. Roberts on the campaign trail and challenged him to a debate. How did you know where he was?

Tea-Party Challenger Confronts Roberts in Kansas

We were on our bus tour, and he’d show up in a few towns where we had stopped. He kept claiming he didn’t have time to debate because he was so busy, yet there he was. He had put out an invitation to meet at a local business.

He particularly wanted to talk with business owners about health care and tax policy, and guess what? I’m a small business owner, and I wanted to talk with him about health care and tax policy, and why he put [former Health and Human Services Secretary] Kathleen Sebelius in charge of Obamacare. But most importantly, I wanted him to be a man of his word, because he promised he would debate me. But if he can’t stand up to me, how can he stand up to Barack Obama and Harry Reid?

Should Mississippi Republican Senate Candidate Chris McDaniel, a fellow tea partier, concede defeat to Sen. Thad Cochran? [McDaniel recently filed a legal challenge to the results of the primary, claiming that many votes for Cochran were invalid.]

Let’s be clear on what happened in Mississippi. It was an outright betrayal by the Republican establishment. If there’s fraud in an election, it ought to be uncovered and remedied. And if we have an election that is invalid based on illegal voters, I believe they ought to hold that election again, and throw out the results of the fraudulent election.

We know where you’ll be if you win your race. But what if you lose? Will you consider running for office again?
I believe I’m going to run for office one more time, and that is for re-election in six years. I’d rather practice medicine than politics. I’m not running this race for any other reason than to win it. My mission is to save the Republican Party and save the republic. And I believe I’m going to win. We need to reclaim our Congress for the citizens.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-conservative-cousin-win-10-questions-milton-wolf/story?id=24847711

Republican

87.8% Reporting

Winner P. Roberts (i)	48.2%	114,800
M. Wolf	40.7%	97,071
D. Smith	5.8%	13,862
A. Zahnter	5.3%	12,616

(i) Incumbent, * Runoff

Pat Roberts defeats tea party-backed Milton Wolf



Roberts’ margin was narrower than recent polls that had showed him crushing Wolf. | AP Photo
CloseBy KYLE CHENEY and JAMES HOHMANN | 8/5/14 8:01 PM EDT Updated: 8/6/14 12:31 AM EDT

Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, aided by national Republican forces, beat back a tea party challenger Tuesday — effectively thwarting conservatives’ last, best hope to topple an incumbent GOP senator this year.

With 95 percent of precincts reporting, according to The Associated Press, Roberts led Milton Wolf, 48 percent to 41 percent.

Roberts’ margin was narrower than recent polls that had showed him crushing Wolf, a radiologist who has attacked the incumbent from the right. But assuming Lamar Alexander prevails on Thursday in Tennessee, this will be the first cycle since 2008 when no incumbent Republican senator lost renomination.

(Full primary election results)

In a post-election speech, Roberts alluded to the bruising campaign and urged Republicans to refrain from “fratricide” in future elections.

“The truth is, Republicans in Kansas and nationally cannot afford the kind of intra-party fratricide we have seen recently,” he said, according to prepared remarks. “Friends, we cannot afford to waste scarce resources and energy tearing ourselves apart. We cannot afford a fractured party. The stakes are too high.”

Wolf spent the campaign portraying Roberts, 78, as a creature of Washington, frequently questioning whether he truly resided in the state or merely parachuted in to fight for reelection. Roberts, the son of an Eisenhower-era Republican National Committee chair, was longtime Hill aide before winning election to Congress in 1980.

Wolf, a second cousin (once removed) of President Barack Obama, presented himself as a hardline conservative and built his bid around an effort to undo Obamacare. His challenge to Roberts was his first run for office, and he won the backing of some conservative groups that have tried, but so far failed, to oust Senate incumbents.

(Also on POLITICO: Who's up and who's down in the latest polls?)

“Sometimes … the best candidate doesn’t win,” said Jenny Beth Martin, chairman of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, which funded a late-campaign TV ad attacking Roberts.

Roberts parried the attacks and trained the spotlight on an embarrassing professional scandal that stunted Wolf’s momentum earlier this year. Wolf was discovered to have posted patient X-rays on Facebook, sometimes accompanied by morbid jokes. The controversy was featured in Roberts’ advertising and press releases in the final months of the campaign.

Still, top Republicans in Washington were nervous as public and private polls showed the race tightening, and they feared a paltry turnout that would hurt their incumbent. The Senate Conservatives Fund’s super PAC arm was putting hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV and trumpeting a poll that showed a single-digit race. Residency attacks on Roberts showed potency, and there was some nervousness in establishment quarters that the X-ray story might have dropped too soon.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is chaired by Roberts’ Kansas colleague, Sen. Jerry Moran, who some far-right activists have threatened with a 2016 primary challenge — which made it even more personal.

(Also on POLITICO: The latest race rating projections)

“Senator Roberts has served as a diligent check on Democrats’ push for ever expansive government and is a true conservative voice for our state,” Moran said in a statement celebrating Roberts’ win.

The NRSC sent its regional political director into Kansas for the final three weeks before the primary; she focused on the early vote and worked with the campaign to stay on message for the final weeks.

The party made a strategic decision to focus on turning out supporters in Wolf’s home base. Wolf lives and works in Johnson County, the suburbs of Kansas City. He needed a healthy margin there to offset Roberts’ strength in the sprawling First District on the western side of the state, which he represented in the House for 16 years.

The NRSC sent six workers to the Kansas City area for the final 10 days, and they knocked on more than 10,000 in Johnson County alone, a party official said. A Washington phone bank set up by the NRSC also made more than 40,000 phone calls in the final three weeks.

Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, aided by national Republican forces, beat back a tea party challenger Tuesday — effectively thwarting conservatives’ last, best hope to topple an incumbent GOP senator this year.

With 95 percent of precincts reporting, according to The Associated Press, Roberts led Milton Wolf, 48 percent to 41 percent.

Roberts’ margin was narrower than recent polls that had showed him crushing Wolf, a radiologist who has attacked the incumbent from the right. But assuming Lamar Alexander prevails on Thursday in Tennessee, this will be the first cycle since 2008 when no incumbent Republican senator lost renomination.

(Full primary election results)

In a post-election speech, Roberts alluded to the bruising campaign and urged Republicans to refrain from “fratricide” in future elections.

“The truth is, Republicans in Kansas and nationally cannot afford the kind of intra-party fratricide we have seen recently,” he said, according to prepared remarks. “Friends, we cannot afford to waste scarce resources and energy tearing ourselves apart. We cannot afford a fractured party. The stakes are too high.”

Wolf spent the campaign portraying Roberts, 78, as a creature of Washington, frequently questioning whether he truly resided in the state or merely parachuted in to fight for reelection. Roberts, the son of an Eisenhower-era Republican National Committee chair, was longtime Hill aide before winning election to Congress in 1980.

Wolf, a second cousin (once removed) of President Barack Obama, presented himself as a hardline conservative and built his bid around an effort to undo Obamacare. His challenge to Roberts was his first run for office, and he won the backing of some conservative groups that have tried, but so far failed, to oust Senate incumbents.

(Also on POLITICO: Who's up and who's down in the latest polls?)

“Sometimes … the best candidate doesn’t win,” said Jenny Beth Martin, chairman of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, which funded a late-campaign TV ad attacking Roberts.

Roberts parried the attacks and trained the spotlight on an embarrassing professional scandal that stunted Wolf’s momentum earlier this year. Wolf was discovered to have posted patient X-rays on Facebook, sometimes accompanied by morbid jokes. The controversy was featured in Roberts’ advertising and press releases in the final months of the campaign.

Still, top Republicans in Washington were nervous as public and private polls showed the race tightening, and they feared a paltry turnout that would hurt their incumbent. The Senate Conservatives Fund’s super PAC arm was putting hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV and trumpeting a poll that showed a single-digit race. Residency attacks on Roberts showed potency, and there was some nervousness in establishment quarters that the X-ray story might have dropped too soon.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is chaired by Roberts’ Kansas colleague, Sen. Jerry Moran, who some far-right activists have threatened with a 2016 primary challenge — which made it even more personal.

(Also on POLITICO: The latest race rating projections)

“Senator Roberts has served as a diligent check on Democrats’ push for ever expansive government and is a true conservative voice for our state,” Moran said in a statement celebrating Roberts’ win.

The NRSC sent its regional political director into Kansas for the final three weeks before the primary; she focused on the early vote and worked with the campaign to stay on message for the final weeks.

The party made a strategic decision to focus on turning out supporters in Wolf’s home base. Wolf lives and works in Johnson County, the suburbs of Kansas City. He needed a healthy margin there to offset Roberts’ strength in the sprawling First District on the western side of the state, which he represented in the House for 16 years.

The NRSC sent six workers to the Kansas City area for the final 10 days, and they knocked on more than 10,000 in Johnson County alone, a party official said. A Washington phone bank set up by the NRSC also made more than 40,000 phone calls in the final three weeks.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/0...#ixzz39aHTul3Q