Prior to the publication of Kansas Politics and Government, there was no essential book on Kansas politics, policy-making, and institutions. Now there is. It\u27s as simple as that. Anyone who wants to understand the Sunflower State\u27s politics should start here. Most prosaically, this is one more in the Nebraska Press\u27s ambitious series of single-state studies. But Ed Flentje and Joe Aistrup (disclaimer: I write a column for Kansas papers in rotation with them and two other political scientists) have done more than cover the breadth of the state\u27s politics. In their emphasis on political cultures, they provide an effective way to think about Kansas politics and government over almost 150 years of statehood

Loomis, Burdett A.

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Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and
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Spring 2011
Review of Kansas Politics and Government: The Clash
of Political Cultures. By H. Edward Flentje and
Joseph A. Aistrup.
Burdett A. Loomis
University of Kansas, bloomis@ku.edu
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Aistrup." (2011). Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences. 1152.
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116 
well, sharing the credit, and showing your human side. 
Contrary to prevailing notions of what went wrong for 
Bush in the 1992 election, Popadiuk blames the campaign 
staff for the loss, noting that Bush's anxiety during the 
campaign "pointed to the general lack of coordination and 
planning that seemed to grip the campaign." 
The chapter on Bush's early adult life focuses primar-
ily on the Great Plains. As a teenager attending Phillips 
Academy in Massachusetts, he was deeply impressed by 
Tolstoy's War and Peace. Instead of going straight to Yale 
after prep school, he joined the U.S. Navy and became 
their youngest pilot. Bush was shot down over the Pacific, 
earning him three Air Medals and the Distinguished Fly-
ing Cross. "After the war, Bush was determined, despite 
the privilege from which he came, to build his own life and 
shape his own future." So he moved from New England to 
West Texas. The young Bush couple initially toyed with the 
idea of becoming farmers after reading Louis Bromfield's 
novel, The Farm, but instead pursued oil exploration. Bar-
bara Bush recalls their move to Texas as "an adventure," 
and Bush 41 considers himself a Texan to this day. 
The Leadership of George Bush is infused with a sen-
timentality exemplified by the book's opening statement 
describing the Bushes' emotional response to Bush 43's 
election to the presidency: "George Bush sat straight up, 
his back rigid but his chest heaving slightly as he sought 
to hold back tears. Barbara Bush sat quietly, unmovable, 
a glint of satisfaction and pride sparkling in her eyes." 
Despite the author's proximity and long-time affiliation, 
the book provides scant new information about Bush 41 's 
presidency, mostly because the author fails to connect it 
with larger literatures on presidential leadership and ex-
ecutive management. Instead, it is a rosy peek at Bush 41 
from a loyal subject still enamored with his former boss. 
Caroline Heldman, Politics Department, Occidental 
College. 
Kansas Politics and Government: The Clash of Political 
Cultures. By H. Edward Flentje and Joseph A. Aistrup. 
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. xxiv + 263 
pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendices, notes, index. 
$70.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. 
Prior to the publication of Kansas Politics and Gov-
ernment, there was no essential book on Kansas politics, 
policy-making, and institutions. Now there is. It's as 
simple as that. Anyone who wants to understand the Sun-
flower State's politics should start here. 
Most prosaically, this is one more in the Nebraska 
Press's ambitious series of single-state studies. But Ed 
© 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 
Great Plains Research Vol. 21 No.1, 2011 
Flentje and Joe Aistrup (disclaimer: I write a column for 
Kansas papers in rotation with them and two other politi-
cal scientists) have done more than cover the breadth of 
the state's politics. In their emphasis on political cultures, 
they provide an effective way to think about Kansas poli-
tics and government over almost 150 years of statehood. 
The initial chapter lays out a theoretical approach that 
emphasizes the competing threads of liberty, order, and 
equality as central to the Kansas experience. Flentje and 
Aistrup note the various facets of these elements, which 
often pop up in unexpected, but complementary, ways. 
Thus, populists and progressives desire certain kinds of 
order, including governmental reform and prohibition, 
while the members of the business community seek 
predictability for investment and entrepreneurial activi-
ties. The authors make a real contribution in their con-
sideration of contemporary conservatives, mostly within 
the Republican Party, as "bipolar" in their simultaneous 
embrace of economic liberty and of order on social issues 
such as abortion. 
Books in this series face the difficult task of covering 
the whole of state government, while placing it within a 
fifty-state context. The authors do a good job here, all the 
while providing a real sense of what's singular about the 
state. For example, Republicans have always dominated 
Kansas politics; given that dominance, however, parsing 
the nature of the party's strength over time is crucial. 
Indeed, Democrats have occupied the governor's office 
for more years than Republicans since 1957, while never 
capturing a U.S. Senate seat in that period. 
The authors bring to their enterprise more than 
enough academic literature for the book to be useful for 
all students of state politics; for history buffs, it offers a 
start and a host of suggestions for further reading. 
There are some curious omissions, which are hard to 
avoid in such a work. No mention is made of the 2005 
creation of a new ind~pendent agency, the Kansas Health 
Policy Administration, which was a partisan political 
response to Governor Kathleen Sebelius's executive 
reorganization proposal for Medicare/Medicaid. More 
surprisingly, Flentje and Aistrup do not address the issues 
raised by Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kan-
sas? (2005), the most famous recent book dealing with 
the state. They clearly diverge from Frank's economic 
determinism, but Frank does generate some useful data 
and well-done interviews, which might have informed the 
arguments here. 
In the end, this is an impressive performance, and 
Kansas Politics and Government ranks as one of the best 
in the Nebraska series. For understanding Kansas and the 
Book Reviews 
politics ofthe Plains more generally, it should be required 
reading. Burdett A. Loomis, Department of Political 
Science, University of Kansas. 
Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-
Making in Canada. By J.R. Miller. Toronto: University 
of Toronto Press, 2009. xiv + 379 pp. Maps, illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $85.00 cloth, $35.00 paper. 
Indian treaties are still being negotiated in Canada, 
giving the treaty-making process. there an immediacy 
far removed from the much more narrowly historical and 
legal significance these documents have in the United 
States. Indeed, Congress, in 1874, simply enacted a law 
ending treaty making, a highly political act, intended both 
to limit the power of the Senate, but also to deny implicitly 
that Indian nations were, in fact, nations. 
Canada, for the most part, also stopped making trea-
ties after the "numbered treaties" of the prairies in the late 
19th century, but because British Columbia, the Yukon, 
and most ofthe Northwest Territories had no treaties, var-
ious First Nations land claims tied the use of much land 
there for decades, resulting in a renewed treaty process 
toward the end of the 20th century that still continues. 
In addition, because the Canadian north is so vast, many 
of the Indian peoples there were not represented at treaty 
meetings and claim to live on unsurrendered Aboriginal 
land. Even the Plains peoples, represented in the num-
bered treaties, are demanding a renegotiation of those 
treaties based on claims of fraud, corruption, or duress. 
In Canada, the term First Nations explicitly recogniz-
es a nation-to-nation relationship between the Crown and 
the original inhabitants of North America that requires 
treaty making as the primary political and legal process 
for the taking of Indian lands and the incorporation of 
Indian nations into the multinational Canadian state. 
There are great political difficulties embodied in this 
process, including the continued impoverishment and 
marginalization of the First Nations, and the repeated 
failure of successive Canadian governments to carry out 
their responsibilities under these treaties, but the treaty 
process remains the required process. 
J.R. Miller, perhaps Canada's leading scholar of Ab-
original history, takes on an ambitious project, a sweep-
ing history of treaty making in Canada with the express 
goal of making this process understandable to all Cana-
dians in order to promote interracial reconciliation. This 
is an ambitious book, the first history of treaty making 
in Canada intended for the general reader as well as for 
academic historians. 
117 
The complexity of the undertaking is obvious. Not 
only is each treaty-making situation unique to the time, 
place, and peoples involved, but over almost 400 years 
of history the social, political, cultural, and legal mean-
ing of the process evolved. Perhaps more importantly, 
each treaty-making process involved at least two dis-
tinct peoples, one of European origin and the other an 
Indigenous people, with distinct languages, cultures, 
and understandings of the process. Any scholar who 
works with Indigenous peoples has heard many differ-
ent "treaty stories" that describe a particular people's 
understanding of one treaty. Miller does the best he can 
with this, but any history of a Euro-Canadian legal pro-
cess, essentially English in law and politics, overrelies 
on these Euro-Canadian sources. All the standard ques-
tions are dealt with in the book: "How did Indigenous 
peoples understand the complex language of these trea-
ties?" "Did the Crown induce the First Nations to sign by 
outside promises?" "How were the treaties translated?" 
"Were the Indians present representative of the people 
whose lands were surrendered?" But in the end, the an-
swers are still incomplete. 
Much of this "gap" between the language of the trea-
ties and the reality of Canadian politics and law resulted 
from 100 years of various government efforts to force 
assimilation ofindigenous peoples across Canada. In this 
process, the Canadian government violated all ofthe trea-
ties in both language and spirit. The result can be seen on 
any Indian reserve in Canada. The various First Nations 
stories of the dishonesty, incompetence, and corruption 
of the treaty process will not end with this book. Still, 
as Miller reminds his readers in the concluding chapter, 
"we are all treaty people" and Euro-Canadian property 
rights derive from the legality of the treaty process. It is 
the treaty process that incorporated the First Nations into 
Canada, and neither the Indigenous peoples nor the Euro-
Canadian are going anywhere else. Sidney L. Harring, 
School of Law, City University of New York. 
Canada's Indigenous Constitution. By John Borrows. 
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. x + 427 pp. 
Notes, index. $80.00 cloth, $35.00 paper. 
Thanks to the driving force of Canada's Indigenous 
Constitution, John Borrows's studies of Indigenous peo-
ples' laws will now be more publicly known. While we 
might have thought his earlier books reached the limits of 
creativity regarding Indigenous issues in North America 
(and Canada in particular), his new work demonstrates 
that such an assumption would have been wrong. 
© 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 


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Review of \u3ci\u3eKansas Politics and Government: The Clash of Political Cultures\u3c/i\u3e. By H. Edward Flentje and Joseph A. Aistrup.

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