To the stars with absurdity: Kelly backs down in Plategate scandal | Opinion

It’s a headline on a press release guaranteed to grab attention: “Governor Kelly Announces New Path Forward. . .”

Expanded Medicaid? Marijuana reform? Guns and crime?

It’s bigger than that.

We’re talking about what the new Kansas license plates will look like.

The controversy over new tags has captured the attention of the entire state since Wednesday, when officials revealed a plate with black letters flanked by two stars on a gold background with the slogan “To the Stars.” That’s the first half of the state slogan, “Ad Astra Per Aspera (which also used to appear on packs of Pall Mall cigarettes).

The phrase in Latin translates to “to the stars, but with lots of bickering back and forth between Republican legislators and Democratic governors,” or something like that.

But in this case, Kelly’s administration brought the whole state together with the new plate design. The near-universal reaction echoed the old Wayans Brothers’ television show “In Living Color” — “Hated it.”

On Tuesday, in a self-deprecating announcement, Kelly acknowledged the error and scrapped the design.

“I promised to be a bipartisan governor, and I think we can all admit — I succeeded at bringing Kansans across the political aisle together in disliking this new license plate,” Kelly said. “I’ve heard you loud and clear. Elected officials should be responsive to their constituents, which is why we are adjusting the process so Kansans can provide direct input on our state’s next license plate.”

The primary criticisms of the new plate design was the color — almost an exact match for the University of Missouri’s school colors. Missouri is of course a longtime rival of the University of Kansas.

The college rivalry is nicknamed the “Border War,” a nod to the historical clashes between pro-slavery Missourians and abolitionist Kansans in the lead-up to the Civil War. It stayed that way from the late 1800s to 2004, when the school administrations jointly decided to rename it the “Border Showdown,” saying the “war” imagery the old name invoked was inappropriate in light of the ongoing war on terrorism.

That makes about as much sense as getting worked up over, say, the color of license plates. And like the new license plates, “Border Showdown” died in the face of bipartisan opposition. It may be the only time the student senates at KU and Mizzou ever worked together on anything.

The other knock on the plate design was that it bore a vague resemblance to the plates issued by the state of New York, where Kelly was born. That touched off a conspiracy theory that she was trying to make Kansas into another New York, having been here for only the past 36 years. You gotta watch these new people, always trying to change stuff.

My first reaction to Plategate was “Darn, just when I got mine broken in.”

My Smart ForTwo shares aerodynamic characteristics with a flying brick, which creates a vacuum in the car’s wake that tends to pull along dirt, sand, road salt and slush as it motors down the highway. Over the years, it’s sandblasted my plate to where it’s more-or-less aluminum-colored letters on an aluminum background.

I kind of like it that way. The only reason the proposed plate design was so stark in the first place was to make the plates easier to read for the “Flock” system, a network of automated plate-reading cameras that’s been deployed in Wichita and elsewhere, to allow police to track your movements around town. In its current state, my license plate pretty much says “Flock that.”

So now, we’ll have a public competition to select the new plates. Proposed designs will be issued and there will be some kind of to-be-determined procedure for the public to weigh in.

I’m relatively sure the choice will come down to sunflowers or waving wheat. It almost always does. To the stars, yawning.

If it were up to me, I’d have the numbers superimposed over an image of a Tesla battery. Giving Panasonic a billion dollars to build a battery factory was the last significant thing Kelly and the Republicans agreed on.

To the stars in electric cars.