What’s Good For The Goose
Tom Fiegen today sent out an attack on Roxanne Conlin and what he termed “her troubled candidacy.” Fiegen stated that her candidacy was tainted because of GOP attacks over the attorney’s fees that Conlin and 150 other lawyers received for their work for the State of Iowa in a class action lawsuit against Microsoft. What’s interesting about Fiegen’s attack is that he’s using it not to attack Conlin personally but saying it gives fuel to “the GOP attack machine.” What Fiegen is saying is that Conlin may have done nothing wrong but the Republicans are attacking her for it and that makes her a weaker candidate. In short, he’s playing the electability card and claiming that this makes him a better candidate as a result.
This tries to turn the conventional wisdom of the race on its head. Conlin has a statewide profile as a former Democratic nominee for Governor and the first female U.S. Attorney in Iowa history. In addition, she is very wealthy and will be able to self-fund against Grassley, who is a 30-year incumbent and has never faced a competitive race for re-election. The problem for Fiegen is that this removes his strongest argument, which is that he would make a better Senator than Conlin.
At the end of the day, it is clear Conlin is the best candidate. She has the money to keep things competitive and will serve as a draw for many activists, particularly women, to volunteer in a year where the Democratic base is not terribly excited. When Chuck Grassley is starting with so many advantages, the ability to match him dollar for dollar is crucial.
Where there hasn’t been much of a debate is determining whether Conlin or Fiegen or Bob Krause will make the best Senator. They all are qualified people who have been active in public life. Fiegen and Krause don’t have the statewide profile that Conlin has but the way to go about getting it is not by complaining about strong-arming endorsements and saying Conlin has too much “baggage.” They have to go out and present a positive vision about what makes them different. With the GOP gubernatorial primary getting so much press, the primary for U.S. Senate will only draw attention from activists and counterintuitive attacks don’t work very well in wooing a dedicated activist base.
If Fiegen wants to make the primary about electability, he will lose. The only way he or Bob Krause want to gain the Democratic nomination, their best chance as underdogs is to articulate a vision about why they’d be the best Senator. It’s how Barack Obama won his Senate primary in 2004 and Jon Tester won his in 2006. Otherwise, they will lose and do what Fiegen is decrying in the first place, “take the focus off Iowa’s working families.”
3 comments December 11th, 2009
