Mediaboss Marketing

Topeka Sen. Pat Roberts has been a key player in Republican politics at the state and national level for nearly half a century, going back to 1967 when he first joined the staff of then-Sen. Frank Carlson, and later with former Rep. Keith Sebelius.

But now, at 78, Roberts faces the toughest re-election campaign of his career. His long years of experience in Washington have suddenly gone from being his biggest asset to perhaps his greatest liability.

It was an issue that his tea party challenger Milton Wolf hammered on relentlessly during the GOP primary, calling Roberts a Virginia Republican and claiming he spends more time at his home in suburban Washington than in Kansas.

And it's an issue that his main challenger in the general election, independent candidate Greg Orman, has occasionally alluded to without being so direct. After the national Republican Party sent consultants to Kansas to take over the Roberts campaign, for example, Orman commented wryly that he was glad some of Roberts' neighbors could come help him out.

Roberts has taken the criticism as a personal affront, as when he was asked about it during a debate at the Kansas State Fair.

I know more about Kansas than anybody else on this stage, Roberts said. I have walked with families in the rubble of Greensburg, I have stood with the farmers in the fields of dust during the recent drought, I've been in fields under water when the Missouri River flooded, I've been from corner to corner and border to border.

I am a fourth-generation Kansan, he added. I was born here, educated here, done my life's work here. Don't tell me I'm not from Kansas.

Early life and career

Roberts is indeed a fourth-generation Kansan. His great-grandfather, J.W. Roberts, founded the Oskaloosa Independent, which Roberts likes to point out was nearly destroyed during Quantrill's Raid in northeast Kansas in 1863.

Pat Roberts was born April 20, 1936, in Topeka. He grew up in Holton, where he attended high school and later attended Kansas State University, earning a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1958.

Read this article:
Roberts, a GOP institution, now battling for his political life