Empty suit Jeff Lamberti, heir to the Casey’s General Store petroleum-and-stale-pizza fortune, endorsed John McCain today. McCain couldn’t have been more thrilled:
Senator John McCain expressed his appreciation for Lamberti’s support. “During his career in public service, Jeff has been a tireless advocate for our shared common sense conservative values,” said Senator McCain. “Jeff is a respected Iowa leader and I’m proud to have his support as we continue to build our grassroots organization.”
You might remember empty suit Jeff Lamberti’s particular brand of “common sense conservatism” from his deceptive hit pieces against Leonard Boswell, who beat him pretty resoundingly last November. I particularly like the grainy pictures he used when he talked about the Boz:
I don’t know what Lamberti was trying to do there, but doesn’t that photo make Leonard Boswell look a little like Elvis? Maybe that’s why the millions of hit pieces that got mailed out by the RPI and 527 groups to hurt Boswell ended up failing so miserably.
This is all to say, of course, that John McCain has obviously switched gears since the last time he ran for president, back when he thought that you could win the Republican primaries by placing importance on authenticity and “straight talk.” Now that he knows that Republicans don’t care about those things, he and Jeff Lamberti can have a wonderful friendship.
I suppose the only real question left, then, is whether Lamberti should’ve shaved the handlebar mustache or not. (I vote no.)
John Deeth linked to the National Journal’s ranking of all the members of Congress from most liberal to least liberal. What’s interesting is that, despite the big Democratic year in 2006, Iowa’s most liberal congressman got defeated. That title was held by Republican Jim Leach. Leach was one of the last of the liberal Republicans but lost to the much more liberal Dave Loebsack. Although Leach was a liberal Republican, he voted for the Republican leadership and was one of the worst of the Clinton haters in Congress in the mid 1990s (although he probably wasn’t sincere about his Clinton-hating. Instead, he was just unsuccessfully angling for the 1996 Republican nomination for U.S. Senate against Tom Harkin).
But the fact that Leach was the most liberal Congressman from Iowa means that Democrat Leonard Boswell wasn’t. Boswell was only a mere four places behind Leach (although that made him less liberal than one other Republican, Libertarian Ron Paul.) This put Boswell in a three way tie for the 173rd most liberal member of Congress with Artur Davis of Alabama and liberal sweetheart John Murtha. This emphasizes Boswell’s vulnerable position. He represents a swing district, albeit one where the base Democratic voters are relatively liberal (as opposed to many of Boswell’s fellow Blue Dogs from the South). Boswell has to walk a fine line to protect himself from a primary challenge and to retain his appeal in the district in a general election as much of the rural 3rd District is proving increasingly invulnerable to his charms as a rural Democrat from Decatur County. Boswell has walked this tightrope well in the past but as questions about his health and age continue to build, it will become increasingly likely that he will either slip or be pushed.
Finally, it’s worth noting one bit of trivia. The most conservative congressman from Iowa is not Steve King but rather Tom Latham. While King may be nuts, he at least is an independent thinker. Latham accumulated a more conservative record by being a straight party-line, pro-corporate Republican hack. It allows Latham the benefit of a seat on the Appropriations Committee for the small cost of independent thought and free will. One hopes that Selden Spencer will use this information to his advantage for his second bid for the 4th District.
Dave Loebsack, Iowa’s newly elected Congressman from the 2nd District has been raising money from Political Action Committees at an incredible rate since Election Day. Between Election Day and the end of the year, Loebsack raised $71,000, most of which came from PACs. In contrast, over the last five weeks of the election, Loebsack raised less than $40,000 from PACs. All the money that Loebsack received from PACs made him the leading fundraiser among all House freshmen. In fact, despite Loebsack’s lefty credentials, his contributors include a Houston law firm run by a Bush Pioneer and the American Bankers Association. As the Des Moines Register notes, Loebsack’s cash windfall stands in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Jim Leach, who didn’t accept money from PACs. In 2006, Loebsack and Leach combined raised less than one million dollars, which was the lowest combined total, by far, of any competitive race in the country. It certainly looks like things are going to be a lot more expensive in 2008.
The Quad City Times reported today that Republican attempts to smear Bruce Braley in the 2006 election did not work at all. Although Braley’s 12 point win provided strong circumstantial evidence to this effect, a recent poll showed that two thirds of all voters who had heard a lot about Bruce Braley being a “greedy trial lawyer” still supported him over Mike Whalen on issues like the economy and health care. The same percentage thought that the attack ads against Braley that claimed his “ ‘lawsuit abuse’ made things worse for expectant mothers” were unfair as well. The Republicans slung a lot of mud during the last election and it’s reassuring to know that all their smears directed against Bruce Braley, as well as Leonard Boswell and other Democratic candidates across the country, didn’t work.
In the already short period that Congress has been in session, one of Iowa’s two newly elected Democrats, Dave Loebsack, has been carving out a distinct niche for himself on the left wing of the House Democratic Caucus. He’s signed as a cosponsor, not just of John Murtha’s resolution to withdraw from Iraq at the earliest practicable date, but also Lynn Woolsey’s much more extreme resolution that requires all U.S. troops to be withdrawn within six months. In addition, he’s also signed to John Conyers’s universal health care bill. For all this talk about newly elected Democrats who are trying to keep in touch with their moderate districts, Loebsack is doing almost the complete opposite and clearly identifying himself as a liberal. But then again, very few other newly elected Democrats represent districts that John Kerry won with 55% of the vote. It’s a sign not only that Loebsack is feeling very comfortable in his ideological skin and but also that he feels very confident that he’ll be in Congress for a long time to come.
Where does the Red Flag wave highest in Iowa? According to the results of the last election, it’s in Ladora, Iowa where Helen Meyers, the candidate of the Socialist Workers Party received 5% of the vote. I know you’re thinking two things. First, that the Socialist Workers Party isn’t Socialist at all, instead it’s a Trotskyite group that adheres to the Pathfinder Tendency and second, Ladora, Iowa? Ignoring the first point as niggling (after all, Ladora, Iowa, Stronghold of Trotskyism isn’t a very good headline), why Ladora? Well, Iowa County itself was Helen Meyers’ strongest county in 2006, she pulled over 3% of vote? But what made Ladora particularly Socialist or rather Trotskyite. Looking at the results, the clear and unexciting answer is a mathmatical fluke. After all, 10 votes out of 207 isn’t terribly statistically significant. But it’s worth noting that Meyers did much better in the rural areas than in Polk County (Des Moines). She got 2% outside of Polk and 1.3% in Polk. Although Boswell’s a relatively moderate Democrat, the 3% obviously wasn’t a liberal protest vote. If there was such a thing, it wouldn’t have been in Iowa County which isn’t that liberal, it would have been in Polk, which contains some of the most liberal parts of the 3rd District. So what’s going on?
The answer as best I can piece together is pretty simple. There was a decent number of people in rural areas tired of what was happening in Washington who didn’t want to vote for an incumbent-even a Democratic one-but sure didn’t want to vote for Jeff Lamberti. So, instead, they voted randomly for the Socialist candidate at the spur of the moment. (It’s noteworthy that Meyers did significantly better on Election Day than on absentee ballots) It wasn’t a lot of people but enough to be noticed. I suppose this is probably bad news for those who looked forward to Ladora being the cradle for Iowa’s dictatorship of the proletariat but, not to worry, Helen Meyers didn’t do too badly in North English either.
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.
So John Kerry said that we made a mistake by going into Iraq and then Bush and the Republicans said that his remarks were insulting to the troops…again. This latest rendition of the familiar tune evokes a series of responses. So let’s just move beyond the fact that Kerry’s remarks were pretty much true, even if in poor taste, and the chagrin of seeing yet another flashback to 2004.
We’re all pretty hyper-sensitive to anything that might possibly in the slightest way impact the outcome on Tuesday. In Iowa it seems to have devolved into the implication that if you have any connection to John Kerry then you too hate the troops and America and are in fact working in cahoots with the terrorists.
Jeff Lamberti, the Republican candidate in Iowa’s third congressional district, says his opponent — Democrat Congressman Leonard Boswell — should give back the money Kerry’s donated and still raising for Boswell’s campaign. “Leonard Boswell should be calling on John Kerry to apologize…and quite frankly, ought to be giving back the east coast special interest money that agrees with John Kerry on this,” Lamberti says.
This is almost too ridiculous to warrant debunking. Both Boswell and Lamberti receive money from out-of-state sources, and there is nothing wrong with that–every candidate does. Furthermore, candidates receive donations from many different sources and that doesn’t mean that they believe everything that the donor believes. Lamberti takes this preposterous assumption one step further to say that Boswell shouldn’t take contributions from friends of John Kerry.
The point is that Republicans are trying to turn this into the Democrat’s Foley, but I don’t think it takes much insight to see that John Kerry’s remarks about Iraq are in no way as reprehensible as Mark Foley propositioning an under-aged page via instant message. As Vilsack points out in the same report:
“(Kerry) obviously made a mistake and it’s an unfortunate mistake but you know what really is unfortunate is that we’re talking about this instead of the fact that 105 American soldiers lost their lives in Iraq in October in one of the deadliest months in that war.”
One can only hope that Democrats everywhere will adopt this reasoned response, and keep the focus on the job that Bush and the Republicans have done in office, because their record pretty much speaks for itself.
Jeff Lamberti is at it again with those bizarre campaign tactics. Yesterday at the state fair grounds, George Bush made a campaign stop for Lamberti. In what I’m sure was a confidence-inspiring speech, Bush assured those present:
There’s “no doubt in my mind, with your help, that Dave Lamberti will be the United States Congressman,” Bush said. “Dave and I believe a lot of things.”
Dave? While the Iowa Republican Party thinks that Mr. Bush’s visit will energize the GOP vote, just whom are they turning out the vote for? As if ballots weren’t confusing enough. But surely even if the president doesn’t know the guy’s name he can make an accurate prediction about how he would vote in congress.
There is also the possibility that this whole bring-in-the-big-guns scheme won’t work because people don’t actually like the president very much right now. Bringing in the president to tell us that he and ‘Dave’ share a lot of opinions will probably discourage many Republicans and serves as a convenient reminder to Democrats of just why it is important to vote, volunteer, and donate in the next week and half.
We had a lot of bloggers at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner over the weekend, but because this week is an academic break for us, I’m not sure when we’ll post about that. I did think this was worth mentioning, though:
Yesterday, the Times ran a piece identifying what the GOP considers its best “pickup” opportunities — that is, seats held by Democrats that the Republicans could win. Because of the political climate, there are only three of them that they’re devoting resources to, and one of them is you-know-who:
For Republicans, the vast majority of that money has gone to protecting incumbents. The party is on the offensive in races for three seats: two held by Democrats, Representatives Leonard L. Boswell of Iowa and Jim Marshall of Georgia, and one being vacated by Representative Bernard Sanders, an independent from Vermont who typically voted with the Democrats.
Perhaps the other notable point made in the article is that the GOP has all but given up on Ohio. Those Grinnell students out there from Ohio (and there are a lot of you), keep this in mind: the Republicans have written off the DeWine campaign and the Blackwell campaign, and are pulling their resources from the state.
The decision about Mr. DeWine’s seat came after recent internal polls showed Mr. DeWine’s Democratic challenger, Representative Brown, jumping to a large lead. Mr. Brown’s surge came despite a barrage of Republican advertisements intended to portray him as weak on national security — the very line of attack that had given party officials confidence earlier this year that Mr. DeWine would be re-elected.
Normally, a party would be averse to scaling back its help for a senator in a state with as many as five competitive Congressional races also on the ballot. But in this case, Ohio Republicans said, Mr. DeWine and Republican Congressional candidates face the added problem of being dragged down this November by the party’s candidate for governor, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who polls show is facing a double-digit loss to the Democrat, Representative Ted Strickland.
If you’re from Ohio but live in Grinnell and have been on the fence about whether to vote here or there, you know what to do.
Empty suit Jeff Lamberti, heir to the Casey’s General Store petroleum-and-stale-pizza fortune, endorsed John McCain today. McCain couldn’t have been more thrilled:
