Search Results for ‘work in progress’
An article in The New Republic this week chronicles how Mike Huckabee sold out his belief in balanced budgets and fiscal conservatism to gain the support of anti-tax fanatics like Grover Norquist. This meant embracing the “fair tax” which is a highly regressive economic program that puts a disproportionate burden on working Americans and puts more money in the pockets of the wealthy by replacing our tax system with a sales of at least 30%. This marriage of convenience has already benefited Huckabee at the Ames Straw Poll. However, on most issues, Mike Huckabee doesn’t need to sell out to embracing fringe ideas. Most of the time, he already is embracing strange and extremist views on his own.
Although Huckabee’s opposition to evolution is well known, his embrace of the intellectual and scientific fringes is far more wide ranging. Huckabee just announced that State Rep Dwayne Alons will be one of his Iowa campaign legislative co-chairs. (Alons joins former State Rep and conman Danny Carroll in taking a leadership role on the campaign.) Alons has publicly advocated his theory that the ancient Maya were a race of giants and that global warming will enable modern man to be as gigantic as the ancient Maya.
So to sum up Mike Huckabee’s view of the universe, the Maya were giants, the world was created 6,000 years ago and the best way to help poor people is have a 30% sales tax. It seems like Huckabee’s more fit to run for President of the Flat Earth Society than the United States.
October 3rd, 2007
Cross posted at Iowa Independent
Jerry Falwell died two days ago. Will the Christian Right soon follow? That is certainly one of the questions being debated amidst the 2008 presidential contest. The front-runner for the GOP nomination, Rudy Giuliani, is pro-choice. But he has come under fire; recently for these views and his lead is shrinking nationwide and in Iowa.
Will the Christian Right try to stop Giuliani from winning the nomination? Could they if they tried? In this sense, perhaps the real legacy of Jerry Falwell won’t be known until the GOP has its nominee.
The cover story of the New Republic’s current issue is a lengthy (and intriguing) tribute to the idea that Giuliani can win the GOP nomination. Nestled within, however, is this paragraph:
Then, of course, there is the religious right. Though their power is on the wane, Christian conservatives are not going to allow Giuliani to have the nomination without a bitter fight… Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, put it this way: “If he wins, he’ll do so without social conservatives.” Then he added that a Republican presidential candidate can “no more win without conservative voters than a Democrat can without overwhelming support from blacks.”
Earlier today, James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, and one of the leaders of today’s Christian conservative movement announced he would not support Giuliani if he were the Republican nominee:
Speaking as a private citizen and not on behalf of any organization or party, I cannot, and will not, vote for Rudy Giuliani in 2008. It is an irrevocable decision. If given a Hobson’s – Dobson’s? – choice between him and Sens. Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, I will either cast my ballot for an also-ran – or if worse comes to worst – not vote in a presidential election for the first time in my adult life.
On the other hand, Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, urged social conservatives to give Giuliani a chance. According to the Hotline, Reed told viewers of the Christian Broadcasting Network that Giuliani “can still potentially win over pro-family voters” if he focuses on issues where they agree. Giuliani had campaigned for Reed last May when Reed was running in Georgia’s lieutenant governor primary; Reed went on to lose the election, but has maintained an affinity for Giuliani, apparently talking him up in January at the National Review Institute.
Here in Iowa, Giuliani has the support of former Congressman and failed gubernatorial candidate Jim Nussle, who was conservative on social issues while in Congress. However, Nussle’s running mate, the more conservative Bob Vanderplaats, in addition to the very conservative Danny Carroll, has endorsed former Arkansas governor and pastor Mike Huckabee. Iowa Republicans–especially the grassroots–are well known conservatives. Two polls taken in 2000 showed that about 60 percent of likely GOP caucusers thought abortion should be illegal, according to the Des Moines Register. The Register reported in the same article that Giuliani hasn’t decided yet whether to participate in the Ames Straw Poll, a crucial test of Republican support in Iowa.
Whether Giuliani will win the Iowa caucuses or the nomination remains to be seen. But what is clear is that a Giuliani victory would be a crushing blow, perhaps a fitting epitaph, for the movement that Jerry Falwell helped create.
May 17th, 2007
Today was a big day in the Iowa House, where Representatives voted 59-37 to pass Senate File 427, which updates Iowa’s civil rights law to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (and perceived sexual orientation).
Until yesterday, few people expected the bill to make it to the floor of the House at all, even though it passed the Iowa Senate last month. Without a guarantee that the bill would pass (or even a guarantee that all of the Democrats would sign on), the leadership was reluctant to force its members to make a vote that could hurt them in their reelection campaigns. Ex-Speaker and current Minority Leader Chris Rants was doing everything he possibly could to prevent any Republican members from supporting the bill (even though some Republicans were definitely interested), and it looked like he might succeed in forcing a stalemate through the end of the legislative session.
In the end, though, the Democratic leadership put civil rights ahead of political concerns, and put the bill up to a vote. The result was a resounding victory. And, although Murphy and McCarthy have been getting a lot of grief about VOICE and a few other issues that have worked up our blogging community, this should earn them back some street cred.
More from Mark’s diary over at BleedingHeartland (partially cross-posted with permission):
Senate File 427 updates Iowa’s Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination in employment, public accommodation, housing, education, or credit practices based on age, race, creed, color, sex, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability.
The discussion on various blogs throughout the state over the past few months has focused on what the Iowa Legislature has FAILED to accomplish - rather than the victories. This bill is truly a victory for progressives and for everyone who would like to call Iowa home. Leadership in both chambers made this bill a priority throughout the session - and now we can separate ourselves from the 33 other states where it’s OK to dismiss employees because of their real or perceived sexual orientation.
In particular, it was leadership from Democrats in cooperation with Iowa businesses and civil rights leaders who pushed this bill through to final passage. Corporate America is rapidly realizing that creating a tolerant atmosphere for everyone to work is an important part of growing a business - and a state. According to an article in Fortune Magazine:
So it’s clear where big business is going. What’s interesting is to watch it pull the rest of the country along. It turns out that the most important factor shaping people’s feelings about gay issues is not their age or even their religion - although those do matter - but whether they have relatives, friends or co-workers who are gay.
“The more out and open people are, the more changed the straight people are all around them,” says Joe Solmonese, the Human Rights Campaign president. HRC began organizing workplaces to secure benefits for gay employees. This has inadvertently become a shrewd political strategy as well. “To move the mindset of the American people, we need to find the places where they congregate,” Solmonese says. “Priority one is corporate America.”
April 26th, 2007
Hillary Clinton held a event this afternoon in a coffeeshop in Newton. It was a small event, maybe 80 people were there. Christine Vilsack spoke briefly and introduced the senator, stating that she supports Clinton because her extensive experience will allow her to get results in Washington.
Clinton herself spoke for a half hour. She called for universal health care and attacked insurance company bureacracies for making it hard for ordinary Iowans to receive inexpensive medical treatment. Also, she spoke in favor of college education being more accessible and inexpensive for everyone. There was a lot of applause for that. However, when she voiced her support for a women’s right to choose, there was a mixed response from the crowd.
She spoke out against the corruption by lobbyists and large corporations in Washington, asking for a return to honesty in the political arena. The crowd seemed to find this message quite appealing.
She gave the most attention to the subject of Iraq, when she stated that the U.S. had helped Iraqis and given Iraqis the chance to form a stable government in their country, but that it was time to take the troops out and let the Iraqis form a stable government for themselves. She did not outline a plan for withdrawal. However, when she next brought up Iran, she spoke out against the lack of diplomatic talks with Iran by the U.S. and asked for “diplomatic solutions” to the nuclear issue.
At the end, Clinton graciously thanked the crowd and asked for support. She took only a few questions. One man asked how much Senators earn a month. She fielded it fluidly, giving her guess in the six-figure range and taking it as an opportunity to claim that she had not voted for any pay increases in Congress. The next question came from a woman from Progress Industries, asking for Clinton’s support for people with disabilities in the workplace. She championed Tom Harkin as the leader of rights for people with disabilities in Congress, but did not go into much detail about her own position. The last question was hard to near and not repeated, but her response was to speak against the Bush administration for bypassing the UN before the invasion of Iraq.
She ended the event by mingling with the crowd and answering a few questions individually.
April 21st, 2007
I know, I live in Iowa, so a defense of the caucuses that comes from me is just going to seem like I’m greedy. I should say that before I moved to Iowa for college four years ago, I shared the opinion that the importance of the caucuses is unjustifiable, and that a national primary would be more democratic. Then I experienced the caucuses (in 2004), and I changed my mind.
Over on MyDD, desmoinesdem published the second part of her diary series, “How the Iowa caucuses work.” She echoes concerns that we brought up here about inequalities in the caucus system based on delegate assignment, demonstrating that it takes more caucus-goers to elect a delegate in precincts with higher concentrations of activist Democrats who have free evenings than in precincts with lower concentrations of said activists. (E.g., it took about 70 caucus-goers to elect one delegate in the Poweshiek County, where I caucused in 2004, while in less-Democratic and less-populous Fremont County, it only took 22 caucus-goers to elect one delegate.)
The conclusion of all of this? The caucus system (according to our own Geraldine) “favors the old over the young, the rural over the urban, Western Iowa over Eastern Iowa.”
Why is this wrong? Well, while the caucus system seems to create inequalities on the surface, it can compensate for deeper inequalities. Many have complained, here and elsewhere, that the Iowa Caucuses are unfair to families with young children, workers who have evening shifts, handicapped persons, and, generally, people with busy schedules, because it requires them to take several hours out of a weekday night to argue with their neighbors about politics. Not everyone can do that, and it’s understandable.
That is why precincts are assigned delegates before caucus night: if a disproportionate number of Democrats in X precinct have to work the night shift or have young children (or even if there’s a blizzard), the system currently in place ensures that their precinct will still be important. And precincts are the smallest geographic unit our election officials recognize for general elections, so it is assumed that others in your precinct likely represent similar interests to yours. Think of it as a much more geographically specific version of the electoral college. (Maybe you have your problems with that system, too, but at least this caucus math has a constitutional precedent.)
Aside from that, though, here’s a question nobody has asked: what is the harm in giving Iowa’s downtrodden rural hamlets and agricultural areas a little attention from the rest of the country every four years? It isn’t like John Edwards is going to spend the last week before the caucuses camped out in Keokuk and Grundy Counties just because each caucus-goer is worth more there. At the end of the day, Keokuk and Grundy still represent a tiny fraction of the total delegates needed to win, and putting on events and doing GOTV work is easier and far more efficient in urban areas like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
While disparities in caucus-goer to delegate ratios from county to county may seem a little alarming, the truth is that urban areas are still immensely important, and that a candidate can win the caucuses without putting practically any resources into the less populous half of Iowa’s 99 counties. A campaign will hire more than 10 full-time field organizers for Polk County before they will hire a single full-time organizer for Grundy County. And most importantly, I don’t know a single Iowa Democrat who will argue that Polk County (Des Moines area) Democrats don’t have enough influence on state politics, the state party, or the caucuses.
I hope this will be the start of a series of posts written here as a defense of the Iowa Caucuses. Toward that end, I’m looking for more arguments to respond to. So, dear readers, please participate: What arguments against the Iowa Caucuses do you find most compelling?
March 6th, 2007
The Quad City Times is reporting that the Fair Share proposal for non-union employees to pay their fair share of the benefits they receive due to working in union shops might be dead for the legislative session. The Republican Party has been solid in their opposition to this measure. It’s part of their anti-labor and anti-working families agenda. One hopes that enough votes can be mustered up in the next few days to pass Fair Share and to help puncture the myth that weak labor unions are somehow correlated with a strong business environment. After all, aren’t “right to work” states like Mississippi and Wyoming centers of economic growth? If Iowa wants to attract new businesses, emulating Mississippi is not the wisest way to do so.
And frankly, the opposition to Fair Share has nothing to do with attracting businesses to the state. As a University of Iowa economist pointed out recently, “why would a unionized company care how many of its workers paid how much to the union?” The opposition to fair share isn’t about making sure that people can avoid paying for benefits they receive or about attracting business to Iowa, it’s about Republicans who want to hurt organized labor and working families in the state of Iowa. It’s a shame that even with a Democratic legislature, the Republicans may still be able to impede such an important piece of legislation.
February 28th, 2007
In this post on MyDD by DesMoinesDem that we mentioned before, the way that an Iowa Precinct Caucus works is explained. The post takes care to differentiate the type of party building activity is from a more traditional one-man-one-vote primary. Using data from the Des Moines Register, we did a breakdown of what counties benefited and what counties were hurt by the caucus system in 2004.
In 2004, 122,193 people attended the Democratic Precinct Caucuses to elect 3000 delegates to the State Convention. This averages out to just under 41 caucusgoers per delegate elected. However, this average wildly differed in every county. In Johnson County, home of the University of Iowa and the most Democratic county in the state, it took nearly 80 caucusgoers to elect one delegate. However, in tiny Fremont County located in the heart of Republican Western Iowa, it only took 22 caucusgoers. When one looks at the number of caucusgoers that it takes to elect a delegate in each county, there is a clear pattern. Caucusgoers in small, rural, Republican counties wield disproportionate power compared to those in more urban Democratic counties. In fact, the people who are most disadvantaged by this are students. Of the four counties where it required the most caucusgoers to elect a delegate, three of them had significant student populations: Johnson, Poweshiek and Story. It is a system that favors the old over the young, the rural over the urban, Western Iowa over Eastern Iowa. It is a method that of selecting a candidate that has a clear bias and to be successful, presidential candidates have to spend a disproportionate amount of energy on less populous rural areas. The full breakdown is below the fold:
1 JOHNSON 79.21276596
2 POWESHIEK 69.8
3 JEFFERSON 68.46153846
4 STORY 65.97674419
5 DECATUR 54.625
6 WARREN 52.19148936
7 POLK 50.74651163
8 WINNESHIEK 49.6
9 DALLAS 49.09302326
10 MADISON 45.4
11 CEDAR 42.55555556
12 JASPER 42.45454545
13 MARSHALL 42.4
14 DAVIS 41.25
15 MAHASKA 40.5
16 WOODBURY 40.18518519
17 MUSCATINE 40.11428571
18 BOONE 40
19 MARION 40
20 BUCHANAN 39.47826087
21 IOWA 39.46666667
22 GREENE 39.41666667
23 WAPELLO 39.3902439
24 CLAY 39.33333333
25 ADAIR 39
26 BREMER 38.65217391
27 PALO ALTO 38.54545455
28 LINN 38.22807018
29 WAYNE 38
30 MONROE 37.875
31 HARDIN 37.63157895
32 WEBSTER 37.34146341
33 HAMILTON 37.29411765
34 LOUISA 37.1
35 WASHINGTON 36.89473684
36 DES MOINES 36.84313725
37 BUENA VISTA 36.8125
38 APPANOOSE 36.76923077
39 SIOUX 36.18181818
40 UNION 35.69230769
41 DUBUQUE 35.60952381
42 ADAMS 35.4
43 KOSSUTH 34.9
44 SCOTT 34.57142857
45 HARRISON 34.5
46 MONONA 34.5
47 KEOKUK 34.4
48 POTTAWATTAMIE 34.27941176
49 JACKSON 34.19047619
50 MILLS 33.3
51 TAMA 33.26315789
52 CLAYTON 33.15
53 RINGGOLD 32.83333333
54 BLACK HAWK 32.72058824
55 GUTHRIE 32.66666667
56 PLYMOUTH 32.47058824
57 VAN BUREN 32.33333333
58 FAYETTE 32.18181818
59 SHELBY 32.11111111
60 IDA 32
61 HENRY 31.84210526
62 CASS 31.75
63 BENTON 31.74074074
64 CHICKASAW 31.5
65 PAGE 30.6
66 CARROLL 30.23809524
67 AUDUBON 30.125
68 HOWARD 30
69 FRANKLIN 29.81818182
70 GRUNDY 29.8
71 WRIGHT 29.69230769
72 CRAWFORD 29.58333333
73 FLOYD 29.16666667
74 CERRO GORDO 28.83636364
75 LUCAS 28.44444444
76 O’BRIEN 28.1
77 JONES 28.04545455
78 CLARKE 28
79 ALLAMAKEE 27.69230769
80 BUTLER 27.23076923
81 DELAWARE 27.16666667
82 WINNEBAGO 26.91666667
83 SAC 26.8
84 LEE 26.51111111
85 DICKINSON 26.5
86 HUMBOLDT 26.5
87 POCAHONTAS 26.5
88 LYON 26.33333333
89 CALHOUN 26.09090909
90 OSCEOLA 25.75
91 MONTGOMERY 25.375
92 TAYLOR 24.83333333
93 WORTH 24.8
94 MITCHELL 23.16666667
95 HANCOCK 23.09090909
96 EMMET 23
97 CHEROKEE 22.69230769
98 CLINTON 22.47457627
99 FREMONT 22.28571429
February 27th, 2007
Last month, Hillary Clinton made a widely publicized visit to Iowa to kick off her Presidential campaign. However, since then, she has not been in Iowa at all and has no announced plans to visit again anytime in the future. She still has only assembled a barebones Iowa staff (though there is speculation she will inherit former Vilsack staffers). It seems very peculiar for such a major candidate to have such a minimal presence in Iowa compared to her competitors. Although the Clinton campaign is clearly focused on fundraising right now, it still seems to unwise to lay low in Iowa when John Edwards and Barack Obama have been visiting the state weekly.
February 25th, 2007
In today’s Des Moines Register, Tom Beaumont officially bestows the mantle of frontrunner in the caucuses on John Edwards. Now that Tom Vilsack has dropped out, there is no native son running and everyone can comfortably call Edwards the frontrunner. Beaumont notes that being the frontrunner gives Edwards’ certain advantages but it also means that he now has even more riding on the caucuses.
However, there are rumors in Des Moines that Edwards may have an ace up his sleeve. There has always been a close relationship between Edwards and Chet Culver. Their staffers are to some extent, interchangeable. Key Culver staffers like Patrick Dillon and Brad Anderson worked for Edwards in 2004 (and in Anderson’s case, on his 1998 Senate race.) In fact, Edwards’ state director, Jennifer O’Malley, is engaged to Culver’s Chief of Staff, Patrick Dillon. These ties are the tip of the iceberg. The Culver and Edwards people are heavily intertwined, and the list of connections goes far deeper. The current rumor is that while Chet Culver will not endorse any candidate (since he has to preserve Iowa’s first in the nation status), Mari Culver will endorse John Edwards at some point. This would follow the precedent set in 2004, where Christie Vilsack served as a surrogate for her husband in endorsing John Kerry.
Mari Culver’s commercial during the campaign where she called her husband “a big lug” was considered a turning point in the campaign. It’s unclear exactly how important an endorsement from Mari Culver would be for the Edwards campaign. But it would definitely help Edwards’ standing as the “frontrunner” and add momentum whenever he decides to make Mari Culver’s endorsement public. ( This is assuming, of course, that this speculation is correct)
While we’re speculating on endorsements, it’s worth noting that Mike Gronstal and Tom Courtney appeared at a Chris Dodd event in Des Moines last week. It’s the first reported public appearance at a Presidential candidate’s event by either man. With Vilsack out of the race, state legislators will have a lot more freedom to endorse and it will be interesting to see if either Gronstal or Courtney take advantage of that freedom. An endorsement by either man would give Dodd a lot more credibility in Iowa.
February 25th, 2007
There has been some speculation about the connection between Tom Vilsack and Hillary Clinton. Perhaps some of the ’sack staff will move to the Clinton camp, and that would be a huge boost to Clinton if it happened. But while the staff might go to Clinton, it is way too early to assume that Vilsack’s supporters will automatically flow that direction, too. So the question remains: who will fill the Vilsack vacuum here? Who gains the most politically from the drop-out?
That’s a question that requires two answers, because, here in Iowa, we have gotten to know two different sides of Tom Vilsack. The first Tom Vilsack is the conservative DLC Democrat who was our governor for eight years. He was well-liked by moderates because of his political positions, and he was well-liked by many progressives because he was able to win. It is safe to say that the majority of Vilsack’s caucus support over the past few months has come from folks who got to know Vilsack as a moderate, and these folks are going to be looking for another moderate, probably with some executive experience.
The second Tom Vilsack is the McGovern-esque presidential candidate he had started to become over the past few months. He ran far to the left on the Iraq war, calling for immediate withdrawal and a cutoff of all funding in Congress, and he fashioned himself an expert on environmental issues in general (and renewable energy in particular). He was getting some traction on AirAmerica Radio and on certain liberal blogs (although clearly that wasn’t enough) and using “Courage to Create Change” as his tagline. In many ways, his campaign might have hoped to be 2008’s Howard Dean, another candidate who had a somewhat moderate record as a governor but who broke out as the antiwar left’s poster candidate during his campaign. (Vilsack was even using Blue State Digital, the team that handled Dean’s online strategy 2003-2004, for his web stuff.)
So these are two different voids. In Iowa, though, it is the moderate Vilsack who attracted most of the supporters. So the question is, which candidate matches up the best?
Ironically, Evan Bayh and Mark Warner would probably have gained the most. Unfortunately for them, they both dropped out months ago, perhaps because Vilsack was sucking up all of the moderate governor oxygen. (Yeah, in Bayh’s case, he has Senatorial experience, too, but it was his experience as Indiana Governor that he seemed to be emphasizing to distinguish himself.)
Without Bayh and Warner, it seems that the most likely to gain will be Bill Richardson, but he doesn’t draw as many obvious comparisons to Vilsack as Bayh and Warner would have. If Richardson doesn’t have an excellent Iowa field campaign soon, he will lose whatever advantage he might have gained, because folks who were comfortable settling on Vilsack this early could be looking for another candidate to settle on soon. He has a strong Iowa field director already, but that won’t be enough. Maybe this will encourage him to buy access to the state party’s VAN (the super-high-tech voter file), which is the mark of any serious Iowa Caucus campaign.
Either way, all of the non-”rock star” candidates must be breathing a sigh of relief today. Tomorrow, we’ll find out which one is “rock solid” enough to fill Vilsack’s two pairs of shoes.
February 23rd, 2007
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