Bill Richardson is coming to Iowa in early March and one of the events on his schedule is a house party at the Indianola residence of State Representative Mark Davitt. Needless to say, when a state legislator has a house party for a Presidential candidate, it seems quite likely that the state legislator is supporting that candidate. And if Davitt is endorsing Richardson, it offers Richardson a major boost in Warren County.
Davitt is a well-liked State Representative who defeated another popular incumbent, former State Senator Doug Shull, to win re-election to his third term in 2006. Davitt’s family also has strong local roots. His father also served as a State Representative from Warren County and his wife is the publisher of the local paper. Davitt is the leading Democrat in the 14th most important county in the state in the Iowa Caucuses.
Mark Davitt is comparatively unknown next to another politician who endorsed a candidate in the caucuses this week, Tom Daschle, who endorsed Barack Obama. But it’s doubtful whether the mind of any caucusgoer will be swayed by Tom Daschle’s endorsement. However, while Mark Davitt is nowhere near as well known nationally or even statewide as Daschle, his opinion is a lot more likely to sway caucus goers, particularly those in Warren County. Iowa Caucuses are not won by the endorsements of major national politicians, they are won by the support of well-respected community leaders like Mark Davitt. If Davitt is backing Richardson, his endorsement is worth more than that of 10 Tom Daschles.
February 25th, 2007
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
Some of these topics deserve a bit more coverage than this post will give them, but still, here are the skinnies…
- Tom Vilsack will make his first visit to New Hampshire next month, headlining a fund-raiser for Democrats from Manchester (NH’s largest city). He was supposed to go last Fall, but somehow hurricane Katrina forced him to reschedule. Past guests at this particular event include both Al Gore and John Kerry.
- Results from the immigrant protests are beginning to be quantified here in Iowa. United for the Safety and Dignity of Immigrants, a big immigrants’ rights organization here in Iowa, has estimated that 40,000 Iowans participated in the May 1 “Day Without Immigrants.” It’s also being estimated that 17 Iowans who participated were fired as a result. It seems impossible to even begin to understand how either of those statistics were compiled, but there they are.
- The University of Iowa is trying to improve gender equity in its faculty hiring and promotion process. They’re still well short of their (somewhat meager) goal of making their faculty 32% female by 2010, but a committee today proposed improving the situation with a fairer tenure review process that wouldn’t penalize women who take maternity leave. Women make up an “increasing” percentage of their faculty, but the “increase” is less than 1% a year.
- Archer Daniels Midland is building two new ethanol plants, one of which will be in Cedar Rapids (the other will be in Columbus, NE). Both plants will output about 275 million gallons a year. The Cedar Rapids plant will be finished in the second half of 2008, and it’ll expand ADM’s ethanol output from 1 billion gallons a year to 1.5 billion.
- Diebold screws up again, and it looks like it’s going to affect us in Iowa. Computer scientists are calling this newly discovered way of tampering with “black box” voting machines the “worst case scenario” and the “most serious security breach.” They won’t even describe the flaw because of the risk of any Joe Schmo doing it to tamper with or disable the voting machines. Maybe private companies shouldn’t be controlling the way we elect our government officials?
- And, finally, Iowa’s corn is looking a little purple. I don’t know enough about agriculture to know how big a deal it is, but it sounds kind of funny.
I’m going to try to take some time to write up another post about the political implications of the Maytag closure tonight, so don’t be alarmed that I haven’t included a single story on that in this roundup.
May 11th, 2006
