The most pivotal moment of his career is about to unfold on prime time TV, and Kris Kobach has no way to watch. “There’s really no TV in here?” he says, and a waitress at a downtown diner in tiny Tonganoxie shakes her head. “How about a phone? Anyone have enough cell service to stream live radio?” Kobach asks, and a few of the Republicans assembled here for a county meeting rush up to help. …
President Obama is minutes from announcing his executive action on immigration, and among those most desperate for the details is Kobach, a 48-year-old lawyer and the person many conservatives have anointed to defeat it. For a decade, he has led the legal effort to strengthen the country’s immigration laws and toughen their enforcement.
But he is also Kansas’s secretary of state, which is why, on a night he describes as “my absolute, worst-case, Armageddon scenario,” he has come to Tonganoxie to speak to 46 members of the Leavenworth County Republican Party about local voter turnout. “Sorry, I’m a little distracted tonight,” he tells them. Governors have been texting his cellphone and Senate staffers have been sending e-mails, and everyone is asking Kobach a version of the same question:
Can he beat this?
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