The day after the UI makes a seven-figure coaching hire, the Press-Citizen prints its annual Salary Survey Section, the favorite of all curious citizens.
For the uninitiated, non-Iowa-Citians: Every year the paper publishes the salaries of all public employees making over $40,000. The official reason is public oversight, and they do put the data online. The online edition drops the limit to 20 grand; I'm somewhere in the on line but not in print zone. What the hell; you'll look it up anyway. And as the son of two public school teachers, one of whom was a coach, I grew up with people knowing how much they made so it's never seemed like a big deal to me.
But it goes on line about a week after the print edition. Which makes me suspect that the real reason they do this is to sell papers; it's the biggest selling edition of the year and folks love to gossip about their neighbors.
Which leads me to note that the cover of this year's edition, in color and font, bears a remarkable yet not quite infringing resemblance to the just-released cover of the final Harry Potter book. Harry's Aunt Petunia, who pays too much attention to the neighbors, would no doubt relish it.
I'm going to generalize a hell of a lot here to make the point. I have many gentle readers who should not see themselves painted with the broad brush I'm using.
What people don't get about Iowa City is that it's not the students that make this the most liberal-voting town in the state. Sure, that's what the Republicans who opposed same-day registration were scared of, and anyone who knows no more of my city than Game Day has seen a kid with a Mohawk skateboarding on the Ped Mall. (News flash: that kid is about 15.)
But the students include a share of Niedermeyers along with the Blutos and Flounders, and neither of them vote in large numbers in non-Presidential years. That changed some in 2006, to the benefit of Democrats as Culver won the highest Democratic percentage here since before LBJ `64. I'm hoping that's a trend and polls show young voters trending Democratic. But around here that's only adding to a pre-existing big majority, to Johnson County's job of making up for 15 conservative counties in western Iowa. And Sioux County is waaay wore Republican than Johnson County is Democratic.
The thing that's different about Iowa City is the percentage and nature of people on public salary. The $200,000 a year people who are private sector manager-executive-sales types in private sector in Republican places are doctors and professors on the public payroll here. Republican tax and spend rhetoric doesn't play to the wealthy in Johnson County, because those tax cuts are cuts to their labs and research assistants and equipment and budgets. That alienates the conservatives from their wealthy would be-base, as does the anti-science bent of the theocratic wing of the GOP.
What passes for a conservative base in Johnson County, the real estate developer community, is more concerned with purely local matters than with affairs of state, nation and world. And on purely local matters, Iowa City's not as liberal as its reputation. The students stay home - though this year's 21 bar referendum may change that - and a lot of the faculty are in research-land, more concerned about the war than about zoning, or living out by the Coralville Reservoir or Lake MacBride and ineligible to vote in a city election.
The high-dollar public employees are relatively few in number, but big in influence, and those research assistants and faculty members and SEIU nurses and AFSCME clerks are everywhere. It's folks like that, more than the student vote, that make Iowa City a Democratic stronghold. The important thing about the Salary Survey Section is not any individual number. It's how thick it is.
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