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At the Jim Slattery Senate Kickoff

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I went to see Jim Slattery launch his bid to become a U.S. Senator for Kansas yesterday at the KU Edwards campus in Overland Park. He was doing a whirlwind announcement beginning the day in Topeka, then Wyandotte County, and later in the day in Wichita. I asked him if he planned on breaking speed limits to race from one place to another and he laughed and said, “that’s what planes are for.” Of course.

I had never been to an event like this before. When I arrived, the cameras were still setting up and the TV camera people unapologetically placed themselves in front of everyone who had come to see him speak. I guess there’s some logic to it, seeing as how more people would see this on TV than in person, but I wondered if fewer people come to live speeches because the experience is so overwhelmingly one of standing behind a mountain of A.V. equipment.

By the time the event started there were maybe 50-60 people there including his family and a couple of staff members. He was introduced by Lt. Governor Mark Parkinson who talked, unsurprisingly, about the need for change. Then, flanked on his sides by his family, Jim Slattery spoke convincingly about how since he’s been out of politics things have gone to hell in a handbasket (my words, not his) and we needed to tackle the national debt and handle national security better.

Later in the day, I heard that Senator Pat Roberts, who is seeking his third Senate term, issued an ad criticizing Slattery for his work as a lobbyist in Washington. “He stopped working for Kansas 14 years ago and made millions for himself,” the ad says.

But I can tell you first-hand that’s not true.

The company I work for, based in Overland Park, contacted Jim Slattery three years ago to help us. We designed a radical new technology called Air2Air that helps power plants conserve large amounts of water. But the technology we designed is really big and no customer wants to spend a few million dollars on something that’s never been built before no matter how promising the science is.

We asked Jim Slattery to help us because we’d heard that he helps out Kansas companies.

Jim’s work in Washington helped raise the issue of water conservation and the importance of sustainable water supplies, resulting in stronger incentives for water conservation in the Energy Act of 2005.  Subsequently, we successfully received a grant from the DOE to perform a test of this technology in a full-sized power plant.

It was a fantastic success and now we have inquiries and requests from all over the world. So, as a lobbyist, he helped a Kansas company thrive and helped the U.S. energy infrastructure, which is what our politicians should be doing. Maybe Senator Roberts needs to take a lesson from Jim Slattery.

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