Time Magazine Names
Trinity Graduate and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius ’70
One of America’s 5 Best Governors
November 14, 2005: In the November 21, 2005, issue
of TIME magazine, on newsstands today, Trinity graduate and Kansas
Governor Kathleen Gilligan Sebelius was named one of “America’s
Five Best Governors.”
 TIME
magazine chronicles Governor Sebelius’ strong leadership and
fiscal management of the state of Kansas, noting that “with
an approval rating near 60%, she is now popular in her own right—so
popular that a number of high-profile Kansas Republicans have decided
against challenging her when she runs for re-election next year.”
From the November 21 issue of TIME:
For Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, the problem was simple.
"There were too many cars in the parking lot," she says.
Right after the Democrat surprised political experts in 2002 by
winning the Governor's race in a state where Republicans outnumber
Democrats almost 2 to 1, she needed to erase a budget deficit estimated
at $1.1 billion. A commission that Sebelius appointed to find government
waste discovered that the state owned hundreds of cars it didn't
use. So she sold 700 of them and forbade state agencies to buy more.
The money earned from the car sale was small, but it showed that
the new Governor was determined to find savings anywhere she could,
from having all state agencies join together to bid for computers
to asking state housekeeping workers to wear their own pants instead
of government-issued ones. Through spending cuts, fee increases
and some borrowing, Sebelius was able to balance Kansas' budget
in her first year in office without raising taxes or cutting funding
for education.
Republicans dominate both houses of the Kansas legislature, but
the divide between the party's conservatives and its moderates is
so stark that Kansas effectively has three political parties. Sebelius,
57, has deftly exploited that. After a court ordered the state to
increase its spending on education by about $150 million this year,
she persuaded moderates to join her in a compromise plan to comply
with the decision. That deal left conservatives without the votes
to push through a constitutional amendment they sought to effectively
overrule the court's edict. To get g.o.p. backing for her proposals,
she has appointed several Republicans to her cabinet, including
former Governor Mike Hayden, who serves as secretary of wildlife
and parks.
Her bipartisan credentials have long been burnished by her relationship
with Keith Sebelius, a veteran Kansas Republican Congressman; she
is married to his son Gary, a federal magistrate judge. Her father
John Gilligan was Governor of Ohio in the 1970s, making the pair
the first ever father-daughter combination of Governors. But it
was her married name that helped Sebelius rise from state legislator
to insurance commissioner and then Governor. With an approval rating
near 60%, she is now popular in her own right—so popular that
a number of high-profile Kansas Republicans have decided against
challenging her when she runs for re-election next year.
—By Perry Bacon Jr. With reporting by Karen Tumulty
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