Topeka ? Sen. Pat Roberts has been a key player in Republican politics at the state and national level for nearly half a century, going back to 1967 when he first joined the staff of then-Sen. Frank Carlson, and later with former Rep. Keith Sebelius.

But now, at 78, Roberts faces the toughest re-election campaign of his career. His long years of experience in Washington have suddenly gone from being his biggest asset to perhaps his greatest liability.

It was an issue that his tea party challenger Milton Wolf hammered on relentlessly during the GOP primary, calling Roberts a Virginia Republican and claiming he spends more time at his home in suburban Washington than in Kansas.

And it’s an issue that his main challenger in the general election, independent candidate Greg Orman, has occasionally alluded to without being so direct. After the national Republican Party sent consultants to Kansas to take over the Roberts campaign, for example, Orman commented wryly that he was glad some of Roberts’ neighbors could come help him out.

Roberts has taken the criticism as a personal affront, as when he was asked about it during a debate at the Kansas State Fair.

“I know more about Kansas than anybody else on this stage,” Roberts said. “I have walked with families in the rubble of Greensburg, I have stood with the farmers in the fields of dust during the recent drought, I’ve been in fields under water when the Missouri River flooded, I’ve been from corner to corner and border to border.”

“I am a fourth-generation Kansan,” he added. “I was born here, educated here, done my life’s work here. Don’t tell me I’m not from Kansas.”

Early life and career

Roberts is indeed a fourth-generation Kansan. His great-grandfather, J.W. Roberts, founded the Oskaloosa Independent, which Roberts likes to point out was nearly destroyed during Quantrill’s Raid in northeast Kansas in 1863.

Pat Roberts was born April 20, 1936, in Topeka. He grew up in Holton, where he attended high school and later attended Kansas State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1958.

After college, he joined the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of captain. To this day, he likes to quote his favorite adage from the Corps: “To err is human; to forgive divine. Neither is Marine Corps policy.”

He was discharged in 1962 and worked in Arizona for a time as a reporter and editor for various newspapers there. But in 1967, Roberts changed his career path by joining the staff of Sen. Carlson in Washington. Carlson retired two years later and was succeeded by Sen. Bob Dole.

And so Roberts went to work for Dole’s successor in the 1st District of western Kansas, Rep. Keith Sebelius. When Sebelius retired after the 1979-80 term, Roberts established residency in Dodge City so he could run for that seat.

During eight terms in the House, Roberts seldom faced a serious challenge and never received less than 62 percent of the vote. In 1996, he ran for and won the U.S. Senate to succeed the retiring Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum.

Roberts got 62 percent of the vote in that first senate election against Democratic State Treasurer Sally Thompson. In 2002, he faced no major-party opponent and took 82 percent of the vote against a Libertarian and a Reform Party candidate.

In his last race, against former Congressman Jim Slattery in 2008, Roberts won by a 60 percent to 36 percent margin.

Over those years, as Roberts spent more and more time in Washington, he and his wife rented out the home they had purchased in Dodge City to tenants, although he continued to declare that as his home for voting purposes. It went largely unnoticed for most of his career, but it would later come back to haunt him.

Freedom to Farm

For much of his career in Congress, Roberts was seen as a moderate-to-conservative Republican in the mold of Bob Dole. In the House, he rose to become chairman of the Agriculture Committee and helped author the landmark 1996 Farm Bill known as “Freedom to Farm.”

That law was intended to phase out direct payments and crop subsidies to farmers — subsidies that gave farmers little choice about what to plant — and replace them with long-term “flexibility” contracts that guaranteed them a fixed payment but allowed farmers the freedom to plant what they wanted, with some exceptions.

The intent was to help cut the federal budget and wean farmers off of direct subsidies. But when commodity prices collapsed over the next few years and the nation’s agriculture economy went into its own recession, Freedom to Farm soon collapsed as well and Congress was pressured to pass yearly bailouts to help struggling farmers.

When the Farm Bill came up for renewal again in 2002, Congress scrapped Freedom to Farm and returned to the old model of crop-based subsidies.

In a 2002 interview with PBS, Roberts defended his Freedom to Farm bill and lamented its demise.

“I had hoped that as we wrote this bill and looked in the rearview mirror of the past, we would resist the temptation to return to those policies. Sadly we seem to have done a u- turn,” Roberts told The NewsHour.

And in interviews with Kansas newspapers, he insisted that it would have worked but for the farm recession and collapse of commodity prices in the late 1990s.

Meanwhile, critics of the bill, including the left-leaning Environmental Working Group, said it never would have cut farm subsidies and in fact would have increased them, with the biggest volume of subsidies going to the largest farm corporations.

War in Iraq

In the Senate, Roberts continued to work on agriculture issues. But his most high-profile position came in 2003, when he was named chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

That came just as the United States launched an invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, based largely on the basis of intelligence reports purportedly showing that Hussein was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction, reports which later proved to be false.

There, Roberts was responsible for the investigation into those intelligence failures. A report from the first phase of the investigation, detailing the flawed intelligence, was released in July 2004.

But Roberts was frequently accused of dragging his feet on the second phase of the probe looking into how the George W. Bush administration used that intelligence to advocate for the war in Iraq and whether administration officials knew at the time that the intelligence was unreliable. Roberts steadfastly denied that criticism.

The final report, which was highly critical of the Bush administration, wasn’t released until June 2008, after Democrats had regained control of the Senate in the 2006 elections and Roberts had stepped down from the Intelligence Committee.

Still, Roberts’ role in that investigation became only a minor issue in his 2008 re-election bid, when he easily defeated Slattery.

Tea party movement

In this year’s election, Roberts faced his first serious challenge in a GOP primary when tea party candidate Milton Wolf ran against him.

The tea party movement began around 2010 as President Barack Obama was trying to push through a federal health reform law that came to be known as the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.”

Tea party candidates such as Wolf carried a message of ideological purity, opposing all forms of deficit spending, tax increases, congressional earmarks and, above all, compromising with liberals and moderates of either party.

Anticipating a tea party challenge, many observers say Roberts made a hard shift to the right in 2013, voting against bills he normally would have voted for.

The Heritage Foundation, for example, gives Roberts a 93 percent conservative rating for the 2013-2014 congressional session, up from only a 65 percent rating the previous session.

In January, Roberts voted against a spending bill that contained funding for the National Bio and Agro Defense Facility in Manhattan, a project he helped initiate. And in February, he voted against the final version of the latest Farm Bill, even though he had helped craft many of its provisions as ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Roberts barely survived the primary challenge, emerging with less than half of the Kansas Republican vote. Recent polls now show him locked in a tough general election campaign against Orman.