Denis Boyles’ NRO piece on Gov. Sebelius in May of 2007. An excerpt:

This complaint is a common one made by Democratic governors who want to put their oar into the rising anti-war tide. Sebelius is a star in that galaxy; she’s an Emily’s List liberal, and like almost all of Kansas’s governors, she’s a product of the state’s eastern precincts, where Democrats and “moderate” Republicans have long used their power to defeat conservatives who are often popular in the state’s rural areas. Moreover, she’s not from Kansas — she’s the daughter of former Ohio governor John Gilligan, a Democrat — and, according to Neufeld and others, she has aspirations to the vice-presidential slot on the Democrats’ national ticket. Her critics charge that she used the [tornado] in Greensburg as a chance to take center stage to help fuel her political ambitions. If so, it worked. By Monday morning, the Greensburg story had a new hook, one that played much more comfortably in the national media. It wasn’t about those resilient Kansans, after all. It was about Bush and Iraq. When the A.M. talk shows went on the air, Sebelius was ready. “[Having Guard equipment in Iraq] is a huge issue,” she told Fox’s Steve Doocy. “We’re missing Humvees, frontloaders, and dumptrucks.” And, she added, she couldn’t ask for help from neighboring states, because their stuff was in Iraq, too. Her closer: “We need those assets back in the United States.” Suddenly, Kansas was on the Huffington Post, and by what Kansans call “dinner time” — lunch to us — this was how Reuters was covering Greensburg: A shortage of trucks, helicopters and other equipment — all sent to the war in Iraq — has hampered recovery in a U.S. town obliterated by a tornado, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said on Monday. “There is no doubt at all that this will slow down and hamper the recovery,” Sebelius, a Democrat, told Reuters in Kansas, where officials said the statewide death toll had risen to 12 on Monday. “Not having this equipment in place all over the state is a huge handicap,” Sebelius said.The press has run with this story, of course. The Katrina effect — exploiting a natural disaster for political gain — is irresistible, and for Harry Reid and anyone else who needs a good attack bite, Greensburg will do. By Tuesday, according to the AP, Barack Obama was blaming Bush and Iraq for the death of 10,000 people in Greensburg. Today, it’s on the front page of the New York Times, right where Sebelius apparently wanted it to be: “The emergency response was too slow,” the Times reports her saying, “and there was only one reason.”But, say Kansans like Neufeld, there are troubling questions that should be asked. First, if the governor thought there was going to be a delay, or if she felt she needed more equipment, why didn’t she ask for it Saturday?
“All she had to do was ask,” the Defense Department’s Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke told me. “We can’t make that decision on our own and start imposing people and equipment on our own. The state has to ask.”