Hotline has it confirmed that Evan Bayh, a frequenter of our fine state this past year, will release a statement tomorrow quitting the presidential race.
This comes even after he made some pretty aggressive staffing moves over the past few weeks. He had staffers working field in Iowa during the 2006 campaign, and he has been snatching people up since then to fill key roles. From what we know, he had quite a few positions filled.
I certainly didn’t expect a candidate with $10 million in the bank to drop out just like that. Think it was Obama, as some have speculated? Or Vilsack? Or what?
Well, this is sort of on a lighter note, because I happened to be browsing other articles at the Register’s site and saw this listed in today’s headlines: “Toilet explodes at East High School this afternoon.” Slow news day?
Frankly, although I’m disappointed that we haven’t been talking more about this in the Iowa blogosphere, I also really don’t know what to say. Illegal immigration is on some level bad for pretty much everyone involved (including the immigrants, who are often exploited), but this raid is going to have a really negative effect on Marshalltown according to many. For instance:
Marshalltown Associate Superintendent Patrick Kremer said school staff have been trying to find out the status of students who haven’t showed up to school after the arrests. He said he is concerned some students will drop out after what happened.
That really isn’t good for anybody in the long run. Education isn’t foolproof, but it’s the best way we know of to lift people out of poverty and reduce crime when it works. Emotionally, it seems to have taken a huge toll, too. When you have teenage girls comparing the raid to 9/11, you know things are bad:
“When 9/11 came along, everyone remembered it,” said Isis Diaz, 14, and a freshman. “I think everyone will remember this.”
That report also notes that the day after the raid, there was an increased police presence on campus, and students feared that they could be arrested for going to school if their immigration status was in question. Again, not good for anyone.
Until about two years ago, Marshalltown was the closest city with a real movie theater for Grinnell students to go to. I know we will do our best to follow this story and its long-term impacts on the community, because it could be a pretty big deal. For instance, will this raid actually reduce unemployment in Marshalltown (as anti-immigration groups assert that it will)? Or will such a large-scale crackdown
be too big a blow to a community like Marshalltown for anyone to see much benefit?
UPDATE: One thing I didn’t know before now is that noneed4thneed of the Century of the Common Iowan blog writes from Marshalltown and is a second grade teacher there. If his latest post is any indication, his blog will be a useful place to look for a local perspective on all this.
This story was a little too hard to resist. Tom Vilsack was in my hometown of West Palm Beach, FL, today, at what I know to be a depressingly suburban steakhouse, courting Palm Beach County Democrats:
If Tom Vilsack were president today, troops would begin leaving south and central Iraq, Congress would have to find a way to dig the country out of growing debt, and the nation would embrace the call to make itself less dependent on imported fuel.
So goes Vilsack’s pitch for the 2008 presidency - one he served up Monday after the Caesar salad at Mark’s CityPlace.
Maybe I’m behind in realizing this only now, but picturing Vilsack in a place like Mark’s Steakhouse in the suburban, faux-Parisian strip-mall nightmare that is CityPlace West Palm Beach is really strange to me. I can picture him at a union hall, an outdoor steak fry, a VFW hall, a small-town cafe, and all the places Iowa politicians generally make appearances, but not in an overpriced bistro/steak house adjacent to designer shoe boutiques and tacky art galleries. I’ll be interested to see what the actual newspaper article will look like in tomorrow’s paper — if there even is one. If the local reaction seems positive, I’ll be impressed.
Election day was over a month ago, but we haven’t posted, because it’s hard to write a summary of something that speaks so well for itself. Across the country, people reacted well to the progressive agenda put forward by Democratic candidates on all levels. Here in Iowa, we won both legislative chambers and Terrace Hill. We held onto Boswell’s Congressional seat and picked up two more (one quite unexpectedly).
All of us here worked very hard, whether it looked that way on this web site or not. I had to stop blogging because of my job with the party, but I wouldn’t have had the time to write even if I had wanted to, and I think the rest of the Grinnell College Campus Democrats felt the same way.
Personally, I want to thank all of the volunteers I dealt with on our campus and in Poweshiek County. The amount of work people were willing to do was at once staggering and inspiring. Locally, we helped Eric Palmer defeat Danny Carroll for State Representative and helped elect an all-Democratic County Board of Supervisors. Even though it was stressful and trying and kind of sucky at times for all of us, winning the way we did makes everything worth it.
I remember in the weeks after election day, cable news heads and columnists talked about whether the election was more an acceptance of the Democratic agenda or a rejection of the Republican one. For some reason, conventional wisdom seems to claim that it was more the latter than the former, but I’m skeptical.
When I went door-to-door as a canvasser or dealt with folks in our office, I sensed a renewed interest in Democratic positions. Maybe we did a better job of communicating our agenda this election, but I think a lot of it was just that people were more interested in hearing what we had to say. People finally decided that they’d had enough, and they changed their minds.
And, I cannot emphasize this enough, WE WON. Look for more blogging from us here, as more of us finish recouperating and gloating and decide to start writing again.
