C.J. Janovy: This Kansas Senate Candidate Learned Important Life Lessons From Farm Girls And Farm Bills

By C.J. Janovy, The Kansas Reflector

Oct. 26, 2020

I’d been wanting to have a word with Larry Dreiling, the Democrat who’s running to represent the northwest corner of the state in the Kansas Senate, for a few weeks.

Back in September, he made an extraordinary comment about abortion politics and public health in Kansas:

Dear lady friends: I am your Kansas Senate 40th district candidate who’ll not tell you what you can and can’t do with you with your vagina. Fellas: Vote for me, and you can keep on wearing condoms and reduce your chances of STDs. A vote for me=a vote for public health.
— Larry Dreiling (@ldreiling) September 21, 2020

It was such an entertaining statement, and I agree with its sentiments so completely, that I forewent a rare social media opportunity to womansplain with, “Actually, while vaginas are usually involved, the real issue is uteri.”

“I enjoy the female companionship, but when it comes to your personal choices I’ll aim to stay out of that,” Dreiling told me last week when I called to ask him about more recent news we’ll get to in a moment.

“As I tell everybody, I’m a 62-year-old bachelor farm boy,” he said, “and I learned a long time ago from farm girls that, ‘Buster, if you think for one minute you’re going to tell me what to do with my body you’re out of your mind.’ ”

This kind of talk would be a welcome change in the Kansas Legislature. But first he’d have to get there, which is why I finally called him.

As Kansas Reflector reported last week, Dreiling’s race against incumbent Republican Rick Billinger was the subject of 3,800 misprinted ballots (listing theirs as a race for the U.S. Senate rather than the Kansas Senate) mailed out in Ellis County.

Billinger said it was “an honest mistake” and he didn’t think voters would be confused, which is probably true. And Secretary of State Scott Schwab worked with county election officers to get ballots corrected before any more were mailed out.

“I feel Scott Schwab is a fair man,” Dreiling told me. “I think he’s going to lead Ellis County officials into making certain that we have a fair count.”

But with an actual — and close — U.S. Senate race at stake, and the certainty of foreign election interference and a president actively sowing doubts, all questions are valid. And Ellis County is no stranger to contested results.

Besides, Dreiling is used to examining public documents. He worked as a journalist for 40 years, including 30 at the agriculture-focused High Plains Journal.

“You fling a program budget at me and I’m in dogs heaven. I’m playin’ and yappin’. that’s a field I just love,” he said. “I’m one of those kinds of nerds.”

I can relate.

“They sent me to Washington to cover farm bills, and there’s so much minutia to farm bills,” Dreiling said. “They cover production, marketing, trade and also feeding and nutrition and anti-poverty programs — there’s something new every day. The wonkiness in me exploded there.”

He also has a skill that the whole state could use right now.

“You have to have people who can explain the rural side to urban side and the urban side to the rural side,” he said.

Get Dreiling on the phone and he’ll tell stories about the days when Kansas values meant ham-and-bean feeds in the winter and hot dog feeds in the summer.

“We’d work together and have fun in politics,” he said. “We didn’t beat up on the Democrat, didn’t beat up on the Republican a whole lot, and we won because our ideas were good enough to win people over.”

He said he’s proud that his grandfather and great grandfather helped build St. Fidelis Church in Victoria, and he talked about how his grandfather was the Trego County clerk and worked part-time in real estate and took chickens and sides of beef for payment during the Depression.

He said he wants Medicaid expansion because he doesn’t want to lose rural hospitals like the one in WaKeeney where his grandmother died.

He said he wants to make sure there are still grocery stores and restaurants and viable schools and churches in the increasingly fragile small towns of western Kansas.

“That kind of stuff just sits on my mind and says, ‘I gotta do something,’ ” Dreiling said. “I’m going to win this thing because I believe in the people of this district. Enough of this — we’re going to work together to find solutions and save everybody. Because we’re dying out here and we want to shrink smart. Now I’m getting weepy. This is important stuff, and I don’t think a lot of people fully understand it.”

I wasn’t trying to make Dreiling cry; all I’d done was ask him about northwest Kansas.

I didn’t feel the need to call his opponent, because Billinger was on record saying he’d been working the harvest for the last few weeks and hadn’t “done a whole lot” to campaign.

“I’ve got some ads running, and that’s about it,” Billinger told the Reflector last week.

He sounded like someone who didn’t want to be bothered. But an admitted weeper who isn’t afraid to tweet about vaginas? That deserved a call.

“Uterus. Uterus,” Dreiling said when I brought up that tweet. It sounded like he’d already heard from plenty of other women.

The Kansas Reflector seeks to increase people's awareness of how decisions made by elected representatives and other public servants affect our day-to-day lives. We hope to empower and inspire greater participation in democracy throughout Kansas.