Search Results for ‘act conference’
State Representative Dawn Pettengill left the Democratic caucus for the Republican caucus today. The Register has the story from Chris Rants’s press conference, which just happened:
The change cuts the Democratic majority in the House to 53 seats and gives minority Republicans 47 seats. It takes 51 votes to pass legislation.
Pettengill had battled publicly with the House Democratic caucus this year over issues such as labor union fees and the cigarette tax increase. She had indicated publicly she might consider leaving the caucus, although she had suggested she was more likely to become an independent.
“The House Democratic leadership pursued an agenda which veered far from the principles for which my constituents and I stand,” she said in a statement. “My decision gives me the best opportunity to represent the values of my constituents.”
This is going to make progressives — particularly the ones I know who knocked doors for her during the last campaign — pretty unhappy. Pettengill is known for her emotional outbursts, and my sense is that she perceives her district to be more conservative than it actually is.
I posted a while back about why I didn’t think Pettengill was going to defect. It turns out I was wrong. This kind of transition, from the majority to the minority (particularly when it looks like the Republicans will likely remain in the minority through next campaign cycle) is surprising, but Pettengill planted the seed for a defection months ago.
As an aside, this comes as a double-disappointment for many progressives, who were hoping that Rants planned to announce his resignation today. Rumors that he will resign have been circulating for months, and there is no word yet on whether Pettengill’s switch will influence his decision on that one way or the other.
April 30th, 2007
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.
March 22nd, 2007
The rumors are going around, and Vilsack is set to appear with Hillary in DC this week at a Democratic Governors Association press conference. Here’s how the Register reports it:
Some pundits as well as Democratic activists have suggested Vilsack would be a good fit on a ticket with Clinton as presidential nominee. Both are active in the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and both have insisted they will not demand a specific date for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
A few days back, Hotline proposed some theories about the role Hillary could play in the race for the ‘08 Democratic nomination. Theory 1:
…unless she either doesn’t run or appears very vulnerable early on , one theory of the case holds that they will spend their time cozying up to her and tearing into each other. (Grover Norquist endorses that theory, too.) At least in part, they’ll try to use the primaries to audition for the general election.
To be clear: Bayh, Warner, Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack — they all want to be president, not vice president. But they will almost certainly hedge their bets. They will not run a true-blue, rouse-the-base primary campaign.
Theory 2, however, simply says that Hillary is too polarizing a figure and won’t get anywhere. In that case, though, candidates might still stick to centrist rhetoric in an effort to distinguish themselves from Clinton (if the voters aren’t convinced by Hillary’s current centrist bent).
Frank Luntz’s piece today doesn’t talk much about this, but Luntz does attempt to lay out a strategy for Hillary to get elected. I’m really not sure a short, public essay could possibly prove useful to a presidential campaign, but here’s his first recommendation:
First, she must be herself. Her recent tack to the right - from equivocating on the Iraq war, to supporting a ban on flag burning - is fooling no one and is seriously agitating her liberal base. The reason Hillary became so popular in the first place was her unflinching willingness to tell it like it is. She must say what she means, and mean what she says.
Similarly, recent efforts by Clinton to inject religious references into her speeches to prove she’s a person of faith is like fingernails on a chalkboard to Democrat primary voters. Clinton must win the primary first - then worry about the general election. If Democrats really cared about religion, they’d be Republicans.
Will she? And is she really the vicious liberal that Luntz thinks she is in the first place? Perhaps, but it’s not looking like it right now.
I should also note that our coverage of 2008 contenders has been spotty of late. Our schedules haven’t permitted us to attend the candidates’ appearances across the state (which isn’t to say we don’t like getting the invitations, so thanks to the staffers who have kept us on their mailing lists…), so we’ve been reading Chris’s coverage on PoliticalForecast. We hope to get better as our schedules permit, but we still plan to spend more time analyzing the political issues facing Iowa than we’ll spend on national political celebrity watch.
And check out MyDD’s presidential straw poll, now reinstated. Chris Bowers rightly discontinued it four months ago because of how repetitive the results were, but maybe things will be different now.
July 17th, 2006
Nussle released his education “plan” yesterday, which includes a call for more available AP credit, skills training, increased teacher pay, and guarantees that tuition won’t increase more than the Higher Education Price Index.
Sounds really fabulous, right?
Problem number 1: Nussle doesn’t know where this money is going to come from, as usual. Here’s what he told the Register:
Nussle said he had not priced the entire package completely, but it would be funded by “shifting stuff around” in the state budget.
Naturally Culver responded by pointing out how much Nussle sucks with money.
Problem number 2: Nussle ”guarantees” to hold tuition to less than or equal to the HEPI. First of all, the HEPI rises faster than inflation. Here’s an explanation of why by ISU President Gregory Geoffroy. Secondly, Iowa tuition is already indexed to the HEPI, and it’s not stopping exhorbitant tuition increases. Here’s a NYPIRG factsheet showing that indexing has not held down tuition.
In fact, just today the Regents increased fees at public Iowa universities by $200 because the legislature didn’t appropriate enough back in April.
So without knowing where the money will come from, or really having a new solution, I’m not sure I would take Nussle’s “guarantee.”
(It’s also skeezy to hold your education plan press conference at the high school at which your opponent taught.)
June 21st, 2006
A reader has been pestering us to post about Leonard Boswell’s MySpace for a little while now. I saw that Ed Fallon also had one, so I thought it’d be a good time to post some thoughts about how campaigns use the internet.
I’ve thought for a while that most political campaigns — especially in Iowa — use at most about 10% of the Internet’s potential for connecting with voters and organizing supporters. This campaign season is better than past ones here, but still, I’ve signed up for most of the Iowa campaigns’ email lists, and I get fewer than one a week from all of them except for Nussle’s. (Some, I’ve never gotten any from, even though I’ve signed up on their web sites. So maybe there have been errors with signup, too?)
The IDP sends out emails pretty frequently, but this week I’ve gotten about six emails with exactly the same thing each time (about a Medicare Press Conference), and that’s just annoying.
MySpace is nice, but it isn’t going to connect a campaign with rural voters all that well. And emails are good, but they usually only work for people who have already pledged support, because no one else signs up on an email list.
What could be improved? For one, the web sites themselves could all stand to be a lot more usable. That means things like taking more advantage of whitespace, making site organization more logical, making content more readable, and making the design easier to look at for long periods of time.
But it also means more interactivity. Real blogs would be nice (I haven’t seen a single thing I’d call a “blog” on any Iowa sites, even though Fallon claims to have one). Also, the photo galleries should be updated more regularly, so that candidates can say “check my web site to see if your picture got taken today!” at all of their appearances. That’ll get people to the web sites and keep them thinking about candidates.
In general, it seems like the people at the top of campaigns often see web sites as much as a liability as a tool, and that’s not helpful. I’ve been offering my help around to some campaigns, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to help out a little bit with this stuff.
For the money, there’s no better marketing tool than the Internet. Someday, everyone will realize it.
May 15th, 2006
I’m hoping the impacts on Newton won’t be quite so grave, but the news coverage the story has been getting seems to tell a different story, one of a town that essentially is a company. The stories across the country have been touching and surprisingly well-researched (several out-of-state papers have written their own reports instead of using wire services). Here are the four stories I thought were the best-written:
And the Register has comments from all four major gubernatorial candidates, who seem to say roughly the same things. Except Nussle’s comment is much shorter, because he can’t criticize a company that gave him two $1,000 donations last year (and that was just for his congressional campaign account).
May 11th, 2006
In response to a constituent letter from another student, Senator Grassley writes
I believe the original Patriot Act and the current Patriot Act Conference Report provide the right balance between assisting our law enforcement agencies with the means to combat terror while protecting the civil liberties that we as Americans hold so dear. You should know that virtually all of the actions taken by the Federal government under the Patriot Act are reviewed by independent Federal judges.
Virtually all? I don’t know about you, Chuck, but the administration hasn’t exactly earned my trust lately in consulting independent judges.
Here’s hoping Feingold’s move to censure Bush is taken seriously.
March 13th, 2006
