A few days ago, The Register wrote an article documenting State Representative Dawn Pettengill’s dissatisfaction with the Democratic leadership in the State House. Here’s a snippet:
“I’m just trying to get through this term as a Democrat,” said Pettengill, the former mayor of her hometown of Mount Auburn who is now in her third year in the Iowa House. “People elected me as a Democrat, and I would not change during a term, that’s for sure.”
Her indecision leaves Democratic leaders questioning whether they should recruit a replacement candidate for the 2008 primary, and Republican leaders wondering if she might be on their team by the general election.
Will she defect? Well, she says she won’t during this term. In general, though, I’m not too worried about it. Pettengill has always seemed concerned with her ability to get elected in a district that she perceives as leaning more Republican than Democrat. She has developed a reputation (partly, but not wholly, deserved) for being emotionally volatile. Although she has condemned other legislators’ pet projects and voted against them, she is somewhat famous for her own pet projects: last year, she sponsored legislation to ban stores from selling sex toys to minors, and this year, she was the main proponent of the bill that recently passed preventing Iowa from having any business dealings with businesses supporting the genocide in Darfur. (I don’t mean to claim that either of these bills is bad policy, but neither is exactly in the front of most Iowans’ minds.)
The Register notes a few key places where Pettengill differs from the Democratic leadership in the House, but none of them are cut and dry reasons for a defection to the Republicans (or even to the Independent ticket):
But the strain of the last month has taken a serious toll as she struggled with her dislike of bills dear to many Democrats — raising the minimum wage (she voted yes after some reluctance), upping the cigarette tax (she voted no), campaign finance reform (she may vote no), and allowing public employee unions to charge nonunion members a “fair share” fee (she firmly intends to vote no).
On raising the minimum wage, she did end up voting yes, and the political realities in her district meant that “some reluctance” on the vote was smart. On voting against the cigarette tax, she justifies her decision for liberal (dare I say Democratic) reasons:
During a caucus meeting on the cigarette tax two weeks ago, Pettengill wept as she explained that when she was 19 years old, she found herself living on her own with a baby, balancing college classes and a job. She couldn’t afford cigarettes, but they were such a critical source of comfort that she sacrificed food to buy them.
She objects to a cigarette tax because it is increcibly regressive — it takes money disproportionately from the poor, and, because it is a flat fee, it takes a greater percentage of the disposable income of a poor person than it does a rich person. Yes, it internalizes an externality, yadda yadda yadda; but there is a principled, liberal argument to be made against it. Frankly, I was surprised more members didn’t express that opinion. Maybe only a small minority of the party holds this view, but it isn’t because they are the more conservative members of the party.
On campaign finance reform, it really isn’t clear that all of the Democratic leadership are fully supporting the VOICE bill. Good liberals generally like it (despite the short-term strategic disadvantages it may present to parties currently in the majority of the legislature), but this isn’t exactly an issue that everyone is closely aligned over.
And finally, on FairShare, it disappoints many labor activists that Pettengill does not support it, but again, there is a fair amount of diversity among Democrats on this subject. Some have more union shops in their districts than others, and some have different opinions of labor unions than others. Our Democratic State Senator, Tom Reilly, voted against FairShare, and he isn’t leaving the party anytime soon. Again, it’s an issue where some people within the labor movement are doubting policies like this, so it isn’t’ only conservatives who oppose it.
So is it really just the House leadership’s fault that Pettengill is disgruntled, as others have claimed? No. The House leadership is doing its job. Their job is to push a Democratic agenda in the legislature, and they have to keep their members in line whenever they can. They’re getting results, and, unless Pettengill does end up defecting, no one will even remember this story in six months.
In an article for the New Republic online, Jonathan Cohn points out that one possible unintended consequence of the frontloaded primary system is that it increases the likelihood of a protracted primary and would elevate the importance of late primaries like those in Oregon and West Virginia. While almost every four years, political pundits salivate at that thought of a fierce primary that would last months or even a floor fight at the convention to determine the nomination, Cohn hints at a more disturbing historic truth in his article: the primaries that he mentions as the late primaries, Oregon, West Virginia and Indiana were once the early primaries. West Virginia was where John Kennedy effectively clinched the nomination in 1960 and Indiana and Oregon were decisive battlegrounds in the 1968 primary contest between Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. (The first time a Kennedy ever lost an election was when Bobby Kennedy finished second to Eugene McCarthy in Oregon.) The drift of the primary schedule has turned what were once early primaries into laggards.
We’ve expressed our concern about the frontloading of the primary process before. But this drift towards earlier primaries has the potential to end the Iowa Caucuses as we know them. The “Super-Duper Tuesday” on February 5th and Florida’s move to hold its primary on January 29 may force the Iowa Caucuses to be held, at latest, on January 7. If this trend continues, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the caucuses are held in 2007 in order to preserve their primacy. If that happens, then the Caucuses are finished. Holding a Presidential Primary or Caucus in 2007 would be so absurd that it would make wholesale reform of the Presidential nominating process inevitable. If there is top to bottom reform of the process, Iowa will not be first in the nation anymore. The interests opposed to Iowa are dramatically stronger than those that support Iowa and once the caucuses lose the advantage of stasis and institutional conservativism, the Iowa Caucuses will be not be first in the nation before. The timeline for selecting a Presidential nominee has drifted earlier and earlier every election. But this drift cannot go on indefinitely and it seems increasingly likely that it will be ended after 2008 as the possibility for root and branch reform grows greater as another Presidential primary moves up in the calendar. And it seems more likely that one of the prime candidates for root and branch reform will be the Iowa Caucuses.
The timeline for selecting a Presidential nominee has drifted earlier and earlier every election. But this drift cannot go on indefinitely, and it seems increasingly likely that it will be ended after 2008, as the possibility for root and branch reform grows greater, and as another Presidential primary moves up in the calendar. And it seems more likely that one of the prime candidates for root and branch reform will be the Iowa Caucuses.
Frankly, none of us here at IowaProgress have any reason to believe that this rumor is true, but we wanted to report that, after Edwards cancelled an appearance in Indianola, Iowa on Tuesday night to fly home to North Carolina, rumors in campaign circles that Edwards may be dropping out began to make the rounds (we first heard rumblings yesterday morning). We want to stress that this is a wholly unverified rumor, but enough people have been repeating it that it seemed worthwhile to report that it’s out there among Iowa politicos.
The story from the Edwards campaign is that the Senator flew home to support his wife at a medical checkup appointment. This diary from Edwards’s online community reflects what Edwards’s supporters are thinking, and we will echo the good wishes written there. We sincerely hope that Elizabeth Edwards’s health is OK and that this rumor and the Senator’s unexpected event cancellation will turn out to be much ado about nothing.
That said, the Edwards campaign’s Events Page has only two upcoming events scheduled, both of which will take place in the next 10 days. Moreover, it is not clear that either of the two events listed will require the Senator’s attendance (one is a nation-wide day of house parties, and the other is a concert featuring a member of Dave Matthews Band other than Dave Matthews).
John and Elizabeth Edwards have scheduled a press conference in Chapel Hill at noon today, and it’s being characterized as “something major.” We hope it isn’t bad news.
I just want to stress that the decision to post a story about this unverified rumor was not made lightly. After hearing about it early Wednesday, we spent a full day deliberating before posting. Reporting on rumors has a tendency to perpetuate stories that are false and potentially damaging, and we didn’t want to do that. But the rumor is significant enough that we felt that the very fact that it was circulating, regardless of its truth or falsity, was worth reporting.
There is an issue in the news right now that is of greatest interest to Iowans. I’m not taking about frontloading the primary schedule, but rather the exponentially increasing role of the internet in campaigns. While it remains to be seen what impact it will have had when this process culminates on January 14, 2008, we have already seen the effect it can have for a candidate. Many have credited YouTube for handing Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) and the Democrats the senate majority, thanks to a video featuring now former Senator George Allen calling a Webb staffer a “macaca.” Facebook and MySpace have also thrown their names into the political arena. While this may get many more people involved in the caucuses, it is increasingly difficult for the rest of us to process such a large volume of information and take the time to make sense of it for ourselves.
A prime example of this is a video entitled “Vote Different.” Posted on YouTube two weeks ago, it has been viewed over 919,000 times. It is a testament to the power of such ad campaigns on the internet. If you haven’t seen it, watch it for yourself.
Upon first glance, you should notice a few things. First is that it is a clever mashup of the famous 1984 Super Bowl ad introducing Apple Macintosh to the computer world. Secondly, it appears to be obvious that it is from the Obama campaign. This is a view that many major sources of news media have advanced. It’s a fair statement. The woman with the hammer has the symbol of Obama’s campaign on her shirt, and at the end of the ad is Obama’s web address.
But something just doesn’t seem right. Why would that particular sound bite be chose? There must be something that gets their message across more efficiently. They show Hillary’s explicit attempt to come across as a regular person, having a “conversation” with each of us individually. Now watch the original. The Macintosh ad speaks of “one people, one will, one resolve, one cause,” and “a garden of pure ideology where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory thoughts,” all coming from a voice that is meant to sound evil. It completely contradicts with Hillary’s explicit statement that “we all need to be part of the discussion,” and “I don’t want people who agree with me.” Themes such as unity, and “one people” are actually coming from the Obama campaign. Also notice the change in contrast between the two, as Hillary is bright white, as opposed to the dark room. The image of the “big brother” is dark, and blends with the dark wall, with a lighter room.
Now consider that the video was posted by someone with the username “ParkRidge47.” It is significant in that Senator Clinton was born in Park Ridge in 1947. It was also posted with the text: “Make up your own mind. Decide for yourself who should be our next president,” very much in line with the Hillary sound bite. So let’s say this actually is from the Clinton campaign. Could the message be that she is trying to create an exchange of ideas to make everyone better off, thus distancing herself from the image of politics that she is associated (i.e. a war of the partisans or even a politics as a competitive sport in which the American people are spectators)?
In the original commercial, the power comes from the irony of the hammer hitting the screen just as the “big brother” says “we will prevail.” In the mashup, the hammer hits Hillary as she says “I want to keep this conversation going until November, 2008.” Also notice that the woman with the Obama symbol is now wearing an ipod, symbolizing that she refuses to take part in Hillary’s conversation, and is then actually stops it suggesting that Obama is the one who wants to end her conversation. As for the reason why 2008 won’t be like “1984,” that is the year that Walter Mondale, running as an unabashed liberal, lost forty-nine of the fifty states in the general election. This suggests that having Hillary on the Democratic ticket would result in a different outcome this time around. This message is made clearer by having Obama associated with the black screen, while Hillary is associated with white.
Both sides have denied responsibility for the mashup, and I personally don’t subscribe to either view. We just don’t know, and can’t say for sure where this ad came from. My point is that not everything will be as it appears this campaign season. We must all take a closer look at everything we see and form our own opinions. It’s not an easy job, but it is our responsibility to do so.
After the Edwards campaign released its list of “senior Iowa staff” the other day, I thought it might be prudent to discuss how each campaign’s staff is shaping up. Their differing approaches are interesting, at least, and they could make a difference by the time the caucuses come around next January.
First up, the Obama campaign has been doing quite a bit of hiring over the last month. All of their key positions (regional field director, state field director, state director, and deputy state director) are filled, and they are hiring on new field organizers every week. Some have compared Obama’s staff to Howard Dean’s from four years ago, because it seems to include an unusual number of ideologically motivated young people, many of whom have never worked a caucus before. Their typical field organizer offer, which is the lowest of the candidates reviewed here, is $2,000 per month. Because Senator Obama is so magnetic, they are having no trouble filling positions, but the low salary may not be enough to entice experienced operatives.
Next, the Edwards campaign has staffed all or most of its key positions as well, and has begun hiring field organizers. In contrast to Obama’s staff, most of Edwards’s staff so far have Iowa political experience, and many have also worked with state director Jennifer O’Malley or state field director Jackie Lee before. General impressions from folks seem to be that the Edwards staff has things together, that their hiring process is quicker and perhaps more organized than Obama’s, and that they already have a more specific plan in place. Their typical field organizer offer seems to be $2,500 per month.
And finally, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been a bit slower to announce their hiring decisions here, but those whom they have hired have impressive resumes. Staffers who may not have significant Iowa experience but who have significant experience elsewhere are taking positions on the Clinton campaign that are well below where the staffers might be in most campaign hierarchies. Clinton is paying field organizers about $2,750 per month — the most of any candidate — although from what we know here, many positions have not been filled.
Beyond these “big three” campaigns, none of the others have hired (or begun to hire) a full staff here. Dodd, Richardson, and Biden all have a few folks on the ground here, but not enough to get a general impression yet.
How the staffing differences will affect the caucuses, nobody knows, but past caucuses have proven that staff strength can be a major factor in the final delegate counts. Without a sound field strategy in place, a campaign cannot win Iowa, and that takes a good staff.
There has been quite a hullabaloo about Alberto Gonzalez and the US Justice Dept. of late. If you haven’t heard about it, check here for a good primer. Here in Iowa, we are dealing with a different scandal involving our US Attorney, but David Yepsen thinks it might be connected to the national scandal.
When (gay) Democratic State Senator Matt McCoy was indicted for allegedly using his elected position to “extort” a $2,000 consulting fee from a company he was working for, it made us look pretty bad. But Yepsen digs deeper and actually comes up with something interesting: it turns out that Matt Whitaker, the US Attorney prosecuting McCoy, is a homophobic Republican crony. Quoth Yepsen:
Whitaker is a Republican. And not just any Republican, but a socially conservative one who ran unsuccessfully for state treasurer in 2002 and could well be a candidate for office again.
He recently was in the news when he was scheduled to emcee an event for the Iowa Christian Alliance, a successor group to the Iowa Christian Coalition.
After first granting him permission to host the event, Whitaker said the Justice Department revoked it after objections from liberal groups. Instead, he just attended the meeting.
So he’s a Republican with ties to the Christian Coalition, which is basically the group that controls the Republican Party of Iowa. US Attorneys are, in a sense, political appointees, so that isn’t surprising. But Whittaker’s partisanship is unusual. Continuing:
Active involvement in ideological political action groups like that is rare for U.S. attorneys in Iowa — and even the Justice Department higher-ups seemed to think better of it. For good reason. McCoy is a Democrat. And not just any Democrat but an openly gay one.
So we now have the specter of a politically ambitious, evangelical Republican with ties to the religious right going after a gay Democrat.
Well, good. If anyone wants an example of the politically charged ‘duties’ of a US Attorney in the Bush administration, this should serve well.
Today John Edwards announced that his presidential campaign will aim to be carbon neutral. As the email the campaign sent out explains, “In February, Governor Tom Vilsack announced he would be the first presidential candidate to plan a carbon neutral campaign. Edwards shares his commitment to protecting our environment and reducing our carbon footprint.”
Edwards is angling to fill the “Vilsack Vacuum,” only weeks after Vilsack announced he would drop out of the campaign. He is trying to recruit as many former Vilsack supporters as possible at this point, and this was one of the Vilsack campaign’s more novel ideas — although the Vilsack folks seemed to want to use it more for fund raising than anything else.
Exactly one week ago, the Edwards campaign sent out another press release claiming “more than 100 Iowa Democrats who were formerly supporting Governor Tom Vilsack’s presidential bid are now supporting Senator John Edwards for President” (it provides the list of 100 names to prove it). 100 activists isn’t exactly a lot considering Vilsack released the names of over 1,100 of his supporters a while back, but Edwards’s list does contain a few big names.
At this point, although other candidates have certainly paid lip service to Vilsack’s service as our governor, etc., Edwards is the only candidate making explicit attempts at recruiting former Vilsack supporters — at least through the press. Whether this will make much of a difference, I don’t know; but frankly I’m surprised that we haven’t seen more attempts at the same sort of thing from other candidates. Maybe outside Iowa few appreciate the level of support Vilsack had here. He has been our governor for a while, and even those Democrats who weren’t supporting his presidential campaign like him.
Cedar Rapids businessman Steve Rathje (pronounced Rah-CHEE) filed papers to run for the Republican nomination for US Senate over a year ago, but yesterday he made it public. How serious a candidate is he? And how does he feel about higher-profile candidates getting into the race?
Still, he isn’t well-known to the broader public and there has been speculation that someone better known might mount a bid.
Much of that talk has centered on U.S. Rep. Steve King, a Republican from western Iowa. King is a favorite with conservatives but hasn’t shown any signs yet that he’s running.
Rathje dismissed the idea that another congressman could win. Three already have lost to Harkin.
“There is no doubt in my mind history will repeat itself if given the opportunity,” he said.
He added Republicans are taking his candidacy seriously, pointing to the attendance of Leon Mosley, co-chair of the Republican Party of Iowa, at his announcement.
I’m not sure if the fact that one person from the RPI appearing at an announcement event is a sign that the campaign is actually serious, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I wish I could tell you about his positions on issues, but that page on his web site is blank. But guessing from the information that we do have available, his campaign is going to be fun:
One member of his steering committee, Linda Smith of Cedar Rapids, is the former Linn County chair of Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign. Another member, Bonnie K. Bell, is an executive rent-a-cop at HyVee. Also on board are former chemical company executive Steve Weeber, who serves as Chair of the Simpson College Trustees, and J. David Nichols, whom BEEF Magazine selected as one of the 40 most important BEEF people over the past 40 years. In general, the list is pretty heavy on Johnson, Linn, and Hamilton Counties.
On Rathje’s contact page, he lists his campaign manager as Bill Wirth, and his committee address is Coralville. That leads me to deduce that Wirth is probably the same man who, in 1979, lost one of the closest city council elections in Coralville history (scroll to the bottom of this page for information). He is also a State Farm insurance salesman. This probably isn’t the mark of a serious campaign.
Unfortunately, that’s about all I have been able to find out about him. News reports don’t even mention him when they speculate on Harkin’s reelection campaign — and that may be for good reason.
I know, I live in Iowa, so a defense of the caucuses that comes from me is just going to seem like I’m greedy. I should say that before I moved to Iowa for college four years ago, I shared the opinion that the importance of the caucuses is unjustifiable, and that a national primary would be more democratic. Then I experienced the caucuses (in 2004), and I changed my mind.
Over on MyDD, desmoinesdem published the second part of her diary series, “How the Iowa caucuses work.” She echoes concerns that we brought up here about inequalities in the caucus system based on delegate assignment, demonstrating that it takes more caucus-goers to elect a delegate in precincts with higher concentrations of activist Democrats who have free evenings than in precincts with lower concentrations of said activists. (E.g., it took about 70 caucus-goers to elect one delegate in the Poweshiek County, where I caucused in 2004, while in less-Democratic and less-populous Fremont County, it only took 22 caucus-goers to elect one delegate.)
The conclusion of all of this? The caucus system (according to our own Geraldine) “favors the old over the young, the rural over the urban, Western Iowa over Eastern Iowa.”
Why is this wrong? Well, while the caucus system seems to create inequalities on the surface, it can compensate for deeper inequalities. Many have complained, here and elsewhere, that the Iowa Caucuses are unfair to families with young children, workers who have evening shifts, handicapped persons, and, generally, people with busy schedules, because it requires them to take several hours out of a weekday night to argue with their neighbors about politics. Not everyone can do that, and it’s understandable.
That is why precincts are assigned delegates before caucus night: if a disproportionate number of Democrats in X precinct have to work the night shift or have young children (or even if there’s a blizzard), the system currently in place ensures that their precinct will still be important. And precincts are the smallest geographic unit our election officials recognize for general elections, so it is assumed that others in your precinct likely represent similar interests to yours. Think of it as a much more geographically specific version of the electoral college. (Maybe you have your problems with that system, too, but at least this caucus math has a constitutional precedent.)
Aside from that, though, here’s a question nobody has asked: what is the harm in giving Iowa’s downtrodden rural hamlets and agricultural areas a little attention from the rest of the country every four years? It isn’t like John Edwards is going to spend the last week before the caucuses camped out in Keokuk and Grundy Counties just because each caucus-goer is worth more there. At the end of the day, Keokuk and Grundy still represent a tiny fraction of the total delegates needed to win, and putting on events and doing GOTV work is easier and far more efficient in urban areas like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
While disparities in caucus-goer to delegate ratios from county to county may seem a little alarming, the truth is that urban areas are still immensely important, and that a candidate can win the caucuses without putting practically any resources into the less populous half of Iowa’s 99 counties. A campaign will hire more than 10 full-time field organizers for Polk County before they will hire a single full-time organizer for Grundy County. And most importantly, I don’t know a single Iowa Democrat who will argue that Polk County (Des Moines area) Democrats don’t have enough influence on state politics, the state party, or the caucuses.
I hope this will be the start of a series of posts written here as a defense of the Iowa Caucuses. Toward that end, I’m looking for more arguments to respond to. So, dear readers, please participate: What arguments against the Iowa Caucuses do you find most compelling?
John Edwards recently sent out the first mailing of the 2008 primary season to 70,000 Iowans. The mailing includes a detailed description of his health care plan and a DVD (found here) that describes the plan. The video is quite effective though it’s unclear how many of the 70,000 people who received it will actually watch it. However, it is a clear sign of how serious Edwards takes Iowa and also of the emphasis that he is placing on health care. It also gives away his campaign strategy.
Edwards’ focus on health care makes Iraq a secondary issue for him. Although he voted for the Iraq War in 2002, he has since made a very public mea culpa and has been forgiven by anti-war left (as Ed Fallon’s endorsement of Edwards shows). This enables him to dodge the debate over Iraq, which will be the most divisive part of the campaign. From this, one can surmise the Edwards’ road map to the nomination. The second tier candidates (Biden, Dodd and Richardson) are running on experience, specifically that they have the experience to help avoid further American embarrassment in the Middle East and one of Barack Obama’s major selling points was that he was against the Iraq War from the beginning. And we all know how Hillary Clinton voted on Iraq. They will all tear each other apart while Edwards can avoid the entire mess. Edwards then sails through the early primary states as the field narrows. Once it becomes a two-man race, he takes on the wounded survivor of the Hillary-Barack fight over Iraq on February 5th. He defeats his badly bruised opponent and becomes the nominee.
With l’affaire Geffen and Artur Davis’s comments in Selma, Clinton and Obama seem to be doing all they can make this scenario possible. However, with Edwards tipping his hand, both Clinton and Obama still have time to change gears before Edwards successfully takes advantage of the media obsession with them so that he can become the nominee.
