LATHE, Kan. - Johnson County has more doctors, dentists, hospitals, businesses, and banks than any other county in Kansas. It has the highest assessed property valuation in the state. It has an average income 50 percent higher than the rest of Kansas. It has a slate of officials in municipal and state positions that's almost 100 percent Republican.
So why does this classic Republican swath of the nation have a Democratic House member?
The Republicans asking that question actually know the answer. All over the country, George W. Bush has persuaded moderates and conservatives to put aside their differences. Most places they've done it. But not here.
That's the reason a decisive Bush victory in Kansas - no other outcome is even remotely plausible - may not be enough to persuade Republicans to come together and elect one of their own to Congress. In truth, the split between the moderates and the conservatives in the GOP is far deeper than the split between Republicans and Democrats.
The beneficiary of this internecine warfare - just the sort of battle the Democrats used to conduct with such aplomb - is a moderate Democrat named Dennis Moore, a popular, onetime district attorney who two years ago captured the seat Republicans monopolized for nearly four decades.
This autumn Moore faces a new challenge, this time from an energetic member of the Kansas House and a stalwart of the social and economic right. He's Phill Kline, who uses the distinctive spelling of his first name to differentiate himself from an unusually large local concentration of Phil Klines. And though he's won the Republican nomination, he hasn't won all the Republican support.
GOP battlefield
This district looks like peaceful country. Johnson County, one of the nation's richest, is the quintessential suburban enclave. Two other counties in the district are agricultural. But the Republicans who occupy this fertile corner of the nation are involved in some of the bloodiest internal struggles in GOP circles.
Just two years ago, the sitting Republican governor was challenged in a GOP primary by the chairman of his own party. Just this summer, the state was roiled by a GOP school board primary conducted in large measure over whether evolution should be taught in Kansas schools. Just this month, at least in private conversations, the rancor was palpable - and the divisions seemed irreparable.
The Republican Party's problem isn't its size. Its problem is its schisms.
''If the Democrats want to do something in this state, they only have to wait for the Republicans to start squabbling,'' says James W. McKinney, a Wichita State University political scientist once prominent in GOP affairs. ''We never let them down.''
The Kansas GOP fight illuminates the power - and the limits of the power - of the brand of muscular conservatism that was made popular by former House speaker Newt Gingrich. These new conservatives swarmed to the polls during the GOP primary, held in August when hardly anyone thinks about politics; less than one Republican in four bothered to turn up at the polls. The conservatives had enough power to defeat a moderate contender and to propel Kline to the general election. They probably do not have enough power to elect him to office.
Hollow praise
So the Republicans have a House candidate who is classified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as an ''extremist'' and is described in even worse language by moderate Republicans. Kline has a slew of endorsements from mainstream Republicans, but they are ritualistic and, ultimately, hollow.
''Republicans have been nominating candidates in primaries with very low turnout, and these Republican candidates are much more conservative than a majority of Republicans - and far more conservative than the district,'' says state Senate President Dick Bond, a moderate from suburban Overland Park.
Even Kline, who relished his time as chairman of the House Taxation Committee in Topeka and would like to cut taxes even more than Bush proposes, agrees that the fighting can't go on forever. ''We need to be at the table with one another more,'' he says, ''and we need to stress our commonality more.''
One common Republican trait is that all party members began the year with the conviction that the Democratic incumbent could be knocked off. Now many of them agree that Moore, who has a huge campaign treasury and the secret support of many prominent Republicans, probably will win.
Moore has campaigned shrewdly, portraying himself as a crime fighter and a fiscal conservative. He won his seat two years ago when the Republican civil war broke into the open. He'll probably retain it this year, when the GOP warriors, though bloodied and bowed, refuse to sign a truce.
