Chase has the story - it looks like our friends at the Iowa College Republicans have decided to throw their own sweaty hat into the ring that is the Iowa blogosphere. If the first few days are any indication, it’s going to be a riot.
Here’s a gem from dreamboat and Executive Director Matt Beckstein:
I look forward to reading the insights of the many brilliant minds with the “right” perspectives, and laughing at the argument postings of the morally-challenged leftists. I’d like to encourage professional dialog however, with the exceptions of those who genetically lack the mental capacity on the left, we must be fair of course.
A google search for “argument postings” elicts 34 results. They must have their own language or something. Go figure.
Simon Stevenson at Bleeding Heartland had this to say about the new look College Repubs:
The college republicans have exactly one woman out of their ten executive board members. On the plus side for diversity, I am under the understanding that gay men are actually overrepresented.
For the record, we didn’t say it.
October 16th, 2007
Conn Carroll over at Hotline has been interviewing Iowa bloggers, and the first interview (of Chris from Political Forecast) went up on their Blogometer today. The IowaProgress team just finished our interview, which should go up in the next few days as well.
And keep checking back here, too, because IowaProgress Radio, our podcast, which has been on a hiatus for quite a while, should be making a comeback in the next day. If you’d like to catch a bit of history, check out our old podcasts from during last year’s gubernatorial primary. Oh how we’ve grown since then.
February 5th, 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
I posted about this a few days ago: Nussle made the first TV buy of the 2006 gubernatorial election — and it only cost $500,000! The ad is now online, so watch it a few times (Quicktime, Windows Media). It’s short and incredibly empty of substance, but here’s what it claims (and why it’s flat-out wrong, line by line):
Nussle learned leadership “from the ground up.” That’s mostly just a stupid thing to say. I wonder whether they focus grouped to determine that the “from the ground up” leadership style was more appealing than other less creative, more conventional leadership styles. (The “don’t make a huge surplus into a huge deficit” style of leadership comes to mind as one potential alternative…)
Keep reading; the fun has just begun.
“In Congress, Jim is a leader in the fight to control spending and clean up the house ethics scandal.” I can’t believe he went there. My only guess why is that he knew the Democorats wouldn’t have the money to spend on response ads right now, so audiences wouldn’t hear about how he is as responsible as anyone in Washington for the devastating budget reversal that turned a $236 billion surplus into a $412 billion deficit.
And I’d like to see him try to prove the claim that he’s a leader in the fight to “clean up the house ethics scandal,” but I’m suspicious that the language here, too, is more “manipulative” than, say, “truthful.” The phrase “clean up the house ethics scandal” seems to achieve a number of marketing objectives: First, the language of “cleaning up a scandal” is a lot more favorable to Nussle than the language of “cleaning up a group of crooked politicians,” because Nussle is, on many accounts, a crooked politician. Second, calling it a “scandal” makes it sound like anyone who mentions it or tries to draw attention to it is just a gossip (a gossip who hates FREEDOM). And third, it makes Nussle’s position offensive rather than defensive. If his position were merely “I’m not scandalous,” it would be a weak, defensive position. “I fight scandal” is offense. And he has the money, so he can preempt us like that.
Nussle wants to “make Iowa’s schools the world’s best.” He should’ve thought about it before he co-sponsored the now-infamous No Child Left Behind Act, which attempted to force Iowa to model its education system after the bottom-of-the-barrel Texas system. You’d think that Nussle would at least realize that such a flawed un-funded mandate was a bad idea after the fact, but no, he still touts it on his generic, uninspired education flyer.
He also has his own plan, called “Empowering Parents With Choice in Education” (oh, so now he’s pro-choice). It is also just a tax credit, but it doubles as a creative backdoor into a school voucher program. Except, unlike the other places where school voucher programs have been proposed, this won’t be targeted towards the socioeconomically needy. He just wants to give away $1,500 in tax credits to anyone who wants to send a kid to private school. That’s per kid (maximum $6,000 for married couples or $3,000 for single filers). Iowa already ranks in the bottom half of the nation in per-pupil spending and is losing teachers to bordering states. Do we really need to make it worse? And is a tax credit alone really something Nussle has the right to call an education plan of any kind? I’m thinking not.
Nussle wants to make Iowa “the renewable energy capital of the world.” According to Nussle’s “Energy Project 20/20″, that mostly means tax breaks. Past that, his position is wishy-washy. He does borrow some pretty sweet corn photos from the Iowa Corn Promotion Board, though.
Nussle wants to promote “affordable health care.” He has no health care plan on his web site. He does have a PDF of his “record on health care”, though, and it ain’t pretty. The first vote listed is, well, see for yourself: “Nussle Fought for Iowa Hospitals to Ensure Fair Reimbursements, Extended Coverage and Greater Flexibility.” It made sure hospitals got more money, which Nussle thinks might have also meant employees got paid more. In particular, “providing higher payments for all physicians with a 5% bonus payment to physicians in rural areas.” Way to fight for the underdog.
The second “accomplishment” listed is merely that, as budget chairman, Nussle oversaw the passage of the 2006 budget, which, among about a bazillion other things, “resulted in continued funding for Medicare and Medicaid.”
The rest are generally pro-hospital and pro-doctor (including fighting against “frivolous law suits” and voting “to cut away needless paperwork”).
And finally, he claims that he’ll “energize Iowa’s future.” I don’t see that happening.
April 24th, 2006
