Conventional Thinking

Conventional Thinking

One of the things I always tell candidates is: Spend as much of your time as possible doing stuff that only you can do (this usually means talking to voters, the biggest share of the fundraising, the day job, and being a parent/spouse/etc.) The corollary, of course, is that anything that anyone else can do, let them.

Taking that wisdom to heart, I skipped out on the state convention. I had better things to do with my time than platform fights. (Unfortunately, those things were Smallest Farm things and the weather refused to cooperate. Between showers I was able to pick some mulberries and note that the pole beans have reached the top of the eight foot fence.)

And some someone elses did do things for me. O.Kay has a nice write up of events, and Kathie Obradovich notes that Roxanne went on offense. And Jon Murphy was duly nominated for state auditor. That should at least keep Vaudt a little busy with his own stuff rather than campaigning full-time for Branstad.

The substantive battle of the day as Jason Hancock notes was the shot at Chet Culver wrapped in a rules debate over how the lieutenant governor is nominated. I'm actually surprised the vote was as close as it was - 173 to 128. The whole fight never made sense to me. If the left end of the party is unhappy with Chet, then they should have primaried him, rather than pulling a stunt that, if successful, could only have hurt the ticket for November. And as I note every chance I get, Barb Kalbach's incumbent Republican state senator and representative are unopposed this fall, offering more appropriate outlests for "grassroots democracy."

Best wishes for a speedy recovery for Mike Kiernan. In the meantime, Sue Dvorsky was one of the first people I met when I moved to Iowa 20 years ago and the ship is in great hands.