Bernie Sanders Is Not Running For President

George McGovern's queer idea that he could get himself elected President on the Democratic ticket by dancing a muted whipsong on the corpse of the Democratic Party is suddenly beginning to look very sane, and very possible.-Hunter Thompson, "Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail," June 1972

I love me some Gonzo, and I love me some McGovern... but that's not what I see here.
Despite his strong interest in our dead dear caucus state - I meant to say DEAR dear caucus state, but in honor of Chuck Grassley I have to leave the typo in - Bernie Sanders is NOT running for president.

What is he doing, then? Sanders is not focusing at all on an inside game or talking to any of Jennifer Jacobs' Top 50 Democrats (Congrats Paul, Sue, Dave, Zach and Ravi).  Instead, she writes:

Tuesday morning, Sanders did some private stops - he met Hugh Espey, the executive director of the Iowa CCI Action Fund, for breakfast at the Drake Diner; he met with other liberal activists in the afternoon; and he toured the veterans hospital in Des Moines. He did a noon town hall meeting at Collegiate United Methodist Church in Ames, and was to deliver the keynote speech at a dinner for the liberal group Progress Iowa in Altoona Tuesday night.

That's a pretty... unpaved route to a Democratic presidential nomination, which tells me, that's not what he's up to here. Erin Murphy:

Sanders said he will run in 2016 only if he thinks he can establish the nationwide ground-level campaign structure necessary to win a presidential election.

Sanders said a grassroots political movement is needed in the country, whether or not he runs for president. He called for a “radical increase and improvement in public consciousness in this country, in political consciousness.”

Sanders has not said if he runs whether it will be as an independent or a Democrat.

As I've noted many times here, Sanders still won't say "I'm a Democrat," a seemingly necessary precondition to running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

And though I voted for Ralph Nader myself, have no regrets, and would do so again given the same Democratic nominee... the coin flip on its edge outcome of 2000 set the idea of a third party of the left back a generation. No, more than a generation - a lifetime at least, until every limo liberal who ever heard the words "butterfly ballot" and "hanging chad" is dead, buried, and on the Cook County Illinois voter rolls.

Read this sentence again:  

Sanders said a grassroots political movement is needed in the country, whether or not he runs for president.

It's not about the running for president part at all.

It's about the grassroots movement part.

Yes, Sanders did come to our Johnson County Democratic Party barbecue last fall, and for that I'm grateful. But, notably, he stepped on that with another event immediately afterward hosted by the Iowa Citizen Action Network.  That way, people who just wanted to see SANDERS without giving a few bucks to the impure DEMOCRATIC PARTY "machine" didn't need to show up at our event.

(Also noted: One of his leading local Sanders organizers who DID show up at that BBQ  refused to wear a "Johnson County Democrats" sticker that doubled as a meal ticket - reportedly because of some old grudges against the local party. Some of which were against a former chair who's now DEAD.  One of the Cs is for Counterproductive.)

That's why, in Sanders World, those non-electoral players like CCI and ICAN and Progress Iowa matter more than legislators and county chairs.  But he's smart enough to know that coming to Caucusland gives him the stage to do those things.

I appreciate Sanders' efforts, and might even caucus for him, if some of his local supporters would talk to me and answer some lingering questions, about Sanders and more... but I'd immediately commit to Elizabeth Warren if she announced.

Also: some of Sanders' allies could try to cut us "party hacks" some slack for being players on the same team, just coming at it from a different angle, rather than pouncing on every impurity.  Even the "party hacks" in Johnson County are pretty darn progressive.

I'm an electoralist and I make no apologies for it, and I'm much more of a pragmatist at 51 than I was at 31 (when I was silly enough to think I could win an election in a rural Republican district).  But in this post-Ferguson moment, in what is electorally already the post-Obama era, I feel some wheels shaking off the axles, and I know that the electoral wagon that is my party needs some big repairs.

But power takes more than consciousness raising.

The quote is apocryphal, but supposedly a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: "You have the vote of every thinking person!"  To which he replied "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority."  We know how that turned out.




So. many. punchlines.

This fall I had the chance to meet and see both Sanders and the other progressive dream candidate, Elizabeth Warren, up close.

Sanders is pure issue, pure message, which activists love but is overwhelming to regular folks. There's no Bernie there.  And, it seems, he's proud of that:

“We have reached the stage where people who actually talk about the issues like me seem to be kind of weird,” Sanders said. “Imagine somebody involved in politics talking about issues.”

A fair critique. But Warren carried much the same progressive message as Sanders, only wrapped it in the family and biography and story that Americans seem to need in order to digest issues.

Other nations have a symbolic president or a monarch who can carry the flag and the national narrative, while a purely political prime minister does the heavy lifting of issues and governing. The American presidency is a rare office in this world, both head of government and head of state. We Americans simply can't handle issues without story, issues ALONE aren't a story, and when the two are pitted against each other, story wins.

That's more than even the most radical electoral and campaign finance reform plans can change.  Especially with the presidency, we Americans have a deep, maybe irrational need to connect with our officials.  Rebutting that with nothing more than "it needs to change" is a disqualifying denial of reality.  It just means your messenger isn't a good story teller.

In Iowa, Bernie Sanders calls for a revolution, says the headline... but in the end, all we'll get is some platform resolutions and some CCI folks getting elected to central committees, who will drift away once Hillary Clinton is the nominee and it's time to make GOTV calls.  Because, and this is one of the first pragmatic lessons I learned in politics, it's next to impossible to do deep, serious, educational ISSUE work in an election year.

Another reason Sanders won't run, and probably not Warren either: too much to lose.  As I noted last summer: "A sitting senator or governor who challenged Hillary and lost would be in the permanent White House dog house, and their whole state with them." At the time, I concluded the Not Hillary front runner was Russ Feingold. But now, it sounds like my fellow Cheesehead is being recruited for a rematch with Ron Johnson.

I got my Martin O'Malley Christmas card this week, but he has dropped more than a few notches by failing to get his lieutenant governor across the finish line in Maryland. So I've got a glum feeling that Jim Webb - Jim WEBB?!? - is gonna be it. He fits all the criteria I set out in July: Not currently in office, no real ties to the administration, and no ambitions to join the new one, some sort of national profile, an unorthodox persona, and male.

And if Jim Webb is all we get... heck, even I might have to get ready for Hillary.  (I still have a couple questions to ask, though.)

So it's the 2000 primary all over again with Webb as a much weaker Bill Bradley... and, it seems, with a Bush on the Republican side.

Time For Ernst To Quit Guard

Dear Senator Ernst:

Congratulations on your victory.  I did not vote for you, and do not expect to vote for you in 2020, but the people of Iowa chose you and that's what democracy is about.  I wish you well in your term and hope for a few occasions where you can put Iowa ahead of partisanship.

Democracy is also about serving all the people, not just your supporters, and it's with that in mind that I want to discuss your other service, in the National Guard.

You've said you'll decide in the spring whether or not to retire from the National Guard, which you are eligible to do. Your military service was central to the public persona that, more than actual positions on issues, helped you win.  You are to be thanked for that service, along with millions of other service people less prominent than you, though it should not make you immune from other criticism.

Serving in public office is also serving your country.You missed some votes in the legislature for Guard duty. You missed more votes campaigning than on duty, but the Guard duty blurred that distinction.

Ironically, despite missing those votes, one of your most effective messages was attacking your opponent for missing meetings, Veterans Affairs committee meetings.  The charge - Bruce Braley doesn't care about veterans - was easier to grasp than the reality - ALL meetings of ALL committees are poorly attended and overlap with other meetings and duties.  You know that just from your four years in Des Moines and it's true squared in DC, but that reality was impossible to explain in an ad.

But having made that attack, fair or not, you now have an extra obligation to show up.

Your continued personal military service at this point is largely symbolic, more about maintaining that public persona than about actually defending the country.  You have a new role in public service, a different role in defending the country.

You'll be on the Armed Services Committee and the Homeland Security Committee (along with Agriculture and Small Business). The best thing you can do for the country is to be at those meetings, and to be on the floor casting votes to represent us three million Iowans.  Yes, even though those votes will mostly be the opposite of what I want.

Remember - that's the standard you set for your opponent.  And even if you hadn't made those attacks, that's the role you sought and earned.

Symbolically staying "close to the troops" by staying in the National Guard is not going to work.  Uniform or no, you are never ever again going to be seen as Lt. Col. Ernst.  You're SENATOR Ernst.

And Senator, it's time to retire from the National Guard.

Adopt A Senator

The first vote of my life was for William Proxmire, running for his last term in 1982. And even though I wasn't here yet, one of the highlights of an awful 1984 election night was when some guy in Iowa named Harkin picked up a seat against the Reagan landslide.

I got in one last Wisconsin vote for Herb Kohl before I moved to Iowa in 1990, just in time for Harkin's second term race and his presidential campaign.



So with Harkin's farewell speech today, I realized:

I've never not had a Democratic U.S. Senator before.

I did spend one summer in DC, in 1989. While I was there, some friends of a friend who lived in the District told me that, since they didn't have a voting member of Congress, they'd decided to adopt one from someplace else. And though I hadn't heard of him at the time, within a year he became my for real Congressman. Out of all 435, these folks had picked Dave Nagle.

I remembered that as I considered my consternation without representation (well, I still have Dave Loebsack which is good.) So that gave me an idea. Why don't Iowa Democrats adopt a Senator?  It'll be at least a couple years till we can get our own, and unless something significant changes, probably longer.

This is too big a decision to make myself. I need the help of the readers.

I limited the criteria a bit: I'm only considering the Democratic Senators from Iowa's border states.

Who should Iowa Democrats adopt as their surrogate Senator?
	Tammy Baldwin (WI)
	Dick Durbin (IL)
	Al Franken (MN)
	Amy Klobuchar (MN)
	Claire McCaskill (MO)

Sorry, Republican readers. This is a closed primary so Democratic options only.  Besides, you got the two real Senators.

An interesting array of choices: Durbin the power broker. Baldwin, the progressive barrier breaker. McCaskill, a tough but sometimes polarizing survivor?

And two Minnesotans who may split the vote: how will that affect me, Al Franken?

Contest will run until I say it doesn't anymore. Vote often and early for James Michael Curley, and don't let the poll's color scheme influence your vote.

If a meeting falls in the forest and no one covers it, does it make a sound?

Hey, did anyone in local media notice that the Iowa City Council and Johnson County Supervisors had their first joint meeting in years yesterday?

The big story, other than the fact that the long-deferred meeting between the two bodies who don't always get along well has actually finally happened, was that Iowa City wants to push ahead on their local option sales tax do-over. (More on that in a future post.)

But only the Daily Iowan was on hand to report the meeting. Good for them; they must have extra time on their hands now that their monthly sit-down with Sally Mason has been cancelled.

(Gutsy move, that prominent two-page layout for that piece.)

When I first started working for Johnson County, in 1993, I was a part-time minute taker. There was ALWAYS a reporter at EVERY Board meeting, and usually more than one. The DI, Press-Citizen and Gazette all had reporters assigned to the county government beat. Granted, a lot has changed in journalism since then, and there's only about four full time professional print journalists in this town anymore...

...but then maybe it's time we change how we deal with newspapers on the government end?

In the little-noticed dark and dense last pages of the paper, mixed in with the dwindling classified ads, you will find Legal Publications. Even though full sets of minutes are promptly available on line from even the smallest cities, and even though Johnson County has full meeting video free and on line for most meetings, the assumption of Iowa law is that these delayed, small-type printed minutes are critical enough to be mandatory.

It'd be a tough law to change.  The small-town papers, which people actually still read, would have kittens if this lucrative subsidy - call it what it is - was cut off. But they still earn it, to some extent. In larger towns, my parents' generation of 80somethings is the last that will get a large share of its news from printed newspapers.

But in smaller communities, the papers are still sold, and read, by big percentages of a much smaller population.  (And those legal publication dollars still matters more to survival for those small town papers.)  For my money, one of the best political journalists in the state is Douglas Burns of the Carroll Daily Times Herald.

Of course, at the first threat of changes to the archaic publication laws, papers will scream about the value of their local government coverage, even though it's taxpayer paid minute takers actually providing said "coverage."

And more to the point here, Johnson County's other two legal publication newspapers, the Solon Economist/North Liberty Leader and the Lone Tree Reporter do a far better job of actually covering local government than the local edition of the Des Moines Register Iowa City Press-Citizen.

You may not have noticed it, but the Press-Citizen died last month, a victim of Gannett's latest downsizing re-structuring.  Oh, there's still a thing called the Iowa City Press-Citizen, but it's a zombie paper, a locally branded version of USA Today.  Yet they're still getting ballpark of a thousand bucks a month to print minutes, written and fully prepared by the county, of meetings they don't bother to cover.

Yes, it'd be a tough law to change.  But local governments can FOLLOW it differently.

Next month city councils and the Supervisors designate their official newspapers for publications during 2015. Before they decide who gets that money, maybe they should think about which papers are and aren't showing up to cover local government, or even watching the video at home and posting in their pajamas?

Is it time to pull the plug on this artificial life support for the Press-Citizen and send a bigger share of money to the Solon Economist/North Liberty Leader and the Lone Tree Reporter? Or even to the DI?

And if the County is expected to pay ballpark of $12,000 a year to subsidize a "local" edition of a corporate paper, is it too much to ask that they do their job and actually cover local news?

The Animals' Pope

The First Amendment has religion in it too.

I'm not a churchgoer, mostly because I can't sit still for an hour long service, but I'm still a believer.  I was raised Lutheran and am still comfortable theologically and politically with the mainline Protestant churches.

But I continue to be impressed with Pope Francis, and something he said recently was especially moving.

In his weekly audience in St Peter’s Francis quoted the apostle Paul who comforted a child who was crying after his dog died.

“One day we will see our animals again in eternity of Christ’, Francis quoted Paul as saying. The Pope added: “Paradise is open to all God’s creatures.”

His position is markedly different from that of Pope Benedict XVI said that the other animals ‘are not called to the eternal life’.

One of the things which makes us most human is our love for other animals.  We love our pets as family members, and sometimes we find cruelty to animals more disturbing than cruelty to humans.

I'm a skeptic on stereotypical supernatural things, like ghosts and angels. I like to think that what lies beyond is more than we can see or even imagine.

But sometimes I wonder.

Our animal friends help us feel and see God's unconditional, non-judgemental love. What if they are the real angels, and that's why they are only able to stay with us so briefly compared to our long lifespans?



These are my friends Butter and Spot. They comforted me in some of my darkest days. They've been gone six and five years now, and though I still have my other friends Dylan and Xavier, I miss Butter and Spot all the time.

I like the idea of a heaven with Butter and Spot in it.

Francis of Assisi was patron saint to the animals, and Jorge Bergoglio chose that particular name which no other Pope in 2000 years had ever used.  Maybe now we know a little more about why.

If nothing else, he has given some comfort to two billion Christians, and maybe to people of other or no faiths. And that's part of what belief is about.

It's the First Amendment For A Reason

Freedom of speech was my first issue. It's been the central guiding principle of my public life, from high school newspaper editor to college DJ fighting PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT LYRICS to grad school TA to public radio journalist to running for office to this little corner of the internet.

So I'm not surprised at myself that on Friday, when Serhat Tanyolacar stumbled into a Borat-worthy ham-handed cross-cultural misunderstanding by planting a KKK-themed statue on the Pentacrest, my first instinct was the First Amendment.

(Borat-worthy: does anyone else wonder if this whole thing is a put-on, being secretly filmed to test our reaction?)

Part of why that was my first instinct was of course my relatively privileged background. And part of it was because I came to it with "warning," from a distance, on line, clicking a link that said CONTROVERSIAL ART!!!1!OMGWTF.

From that perspective, cultural and technological, it seemed clear. The images were close up so the textual part of the piece, central to Tanyolacar's style, was clear, and because of course I brought my own old bald straight white guy experience to the table.

After several hours of heated online discussion, and with too little understanding until the critique came from someone I know personally (thanks for helping me get it, Kingsley), I think started to understand.  Which is dangerous to say, because one of the critiques, of both Tanyolacar and White Liberals, is "you're making it all about you."

Given the timing (break of dawn), place (site of a rally the previous night), the nature of the piece (text being integral but only legible from close up), and initial anonymity, I can understand the on the spot reaction, quoting here "we though the KKK was coming to string us up." Or, translating here, that this was a legit, real cross burning.  (Not EXACTLY a cross burning, because that wasn't the precise image used, but a rhetorical equivalent).

I'm sorry it took me a few hours to get to that point. People have a right to feel what they feel, and I don't want to delegitimize that.

That said, the free speech aspects of this, not just what was said but what it meant and who if anyone should be allowed to say it, are being too easily dismissed as  "privilege" talking.

I'm a free speech absolutist, and maybe that is privilege, and I get, as this incident shows, that free speech absolutism can hurt.

It's just that I think the alternative is worse.

What's funny here is that more people on the right than on the left seem to be on my side, at least locally. There's an unpleasant thread on the left, from anti-porn feminism through Tipper Gore's apologists ("Oh, that was no big deal") through "campus speech codes" to put free speech below other rights.

(You just KNEW I was going to work Tipper in, didn't you.) 
 
But I just checked the Constitution and I don't see anywhere that guarantees me a right to not be offended.

I see freedom of speech. I see it FIRST in the Bill of Rights.

And I think it's first for a reason.

I usually qualify that with the words of that great western philosopher Ice T: Freedom Of Speech, Just Watch What You Say.  The First Amendment does in fact give you the right to say stupid shit, something I'm thankful for every time I hit POST.   But making your intent clear, Mr. Tanyolacar, is your own job.  So is dealing with the consequences.



As illustrated here.

A few years back I was accused of "hate speech" in my own chosen art medium, this space, by someone with a political agenda in opposition to my own, who used what I considered hate speech toward me. (I got called a Nazi. Hard to misinterpret that one.) My response? It shut me up and I'm still leery about discussing that issue, even though it's a crucial one.

I'm not saying this to play the victim. I've got plenty of other stuff to write about. But if we silence discussion, we don't make any progress. Misguided or under-informed allies will retreat and withdraw. I think it will be a VERY long time before Tanyolacar tries to address racial injustice in his work again.

"There is no room for divisive, insensitive, and intolerant displays on this campus.The display was not approved by nor sanctioned by the university. The UI respects freedom of speech, but the university is also responsible for ensuring that public discourse is respectful and sensitive."

This initial response from the risk-averse, donor-oriented, Mason Administration made no one happy. Black students wanted a stronger condemnation, free speech advocates resented the chilling, Orwellian tone.

But it's far from the worst response. No, that came today in the Daily Iowan from David Ryfe, the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication: “If it was up to me, and me alone, I would follow the lead of every European nation and ban this type of speech.”

Again, this is from the head of the journalism school. The JOURNALISM school.

One thing Ryfe does get right: no other country in the world has anything like our First Amendment. In other countries, someone decides. Who decides? I guess that's up to me, and me alone, huh. I just hope it's not that guy who called me a Nazi because I criticized the Israeli government.

Offense fuels some of the most powerful free speech, from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin through South Park and, yes Borat.  And Ryfe's statement, more than anything else in this whole controversy, pushed me off the fence where I've uncomfortably sat since about Saturday afternoon and made me commit: despite the very real pain that I can never completely understand, despite the failed intent and the cultural insensitivity, the free speech angle really is the central question.

The unofficial response from the community gets credit for its honesty, but is still way too dismissive of the free speech aspects.

Here's some examples. There's the bureaucratic cop-out: "He was not censored because of the content of his work. He was directed to remove the piece because he didn't follow required procedure to display it in that space." So if someone had violated procedure and placed a statue of kittens and puppies on the Pentacrest? It wouldn't have escalated to a campus security crisis and probably would have sat there ignored all day. Of COURSE it was about the content.

One of the better responses: sidewalk chalking the Pentacrest in similar "unauthorized" fashion Saturday. Meeting free speech with free speech. That's how it's SUPPOSED to work. And way hamhanded for the UI to wash it off. Should have let it stay till the next snowfall melted.

The calls to fire Tanyolacar: "The university should not support someone with such a selfish, ignorant stance on education." If anyone needs to get fired over this whole controversy, it's not Tanyolacar, it's Ryfe from the the journalism school. The JOURNALISM school.  I'm not sure what's worse: the statement itself, or the fact that the student journalists at the DI buried their lede in the LAST paragraph.  Either way, he's not doing his job. Only possible explanation: he's being misquoted. In that case, still not doing his job.

I just can't say it enough: the JOURNALISM school?!?

The Some People Can Say It But Others Can't: "a Ku Klux Klan robe made by a non-black person should be silenced."  This argument, though deeply flawed, at least, raises a good question. How would this conversation have been different if the piece and placement were identical, but the artist were African American rather than a visiting international scholar?

I know I'm privileged, but I do have a problem with the idea that images or words of oppression may ONLY be used by members of the oppressed class. I don't recommend it, not without treading very carefully and being very ready to accept consequences, this incident being a textbook case.

But it CAN be done.

The combination of December 8 on the calendar and this controversy made me think of one of my first heroes, John Lennon, and this song. It's not "Imagine" or "Revolution," but that's a pretty high bar even for Lennon. It's a little strident. OK, a LOT strident. But it's still a bold and thought provoking statement, and one he cared about a lot.  The title contains what is now the eighth word you can never say on television. And ANY other word would have made that song infinitely less powerful. But he can't say it because he's a rich white male? (In fairness: Yoko said it first.)

I'm choosing not to say the title. But the fact that I'm CHOOSING makes all the difference. If you ban stuff, the way western Europe does, you just give the hateful symbols of the past more power. Meanwhile, the real bigots will just keep their thoughts behind closed doors, making it harder to expose and defeat them.

I also think banning "hate speech" empowers oppressors by letting them play victim. You see this all the time in anti-gay rhetoric: "you're trying to take away my freedom of religion" but really my right to discriminate.

Silencing an enemy is not defeating an enemy. Better to let these thoughts and symbols rot and wither in the open.That's not easy. While things rot, they stink. People will hurt. (Free speech tangent, attention Bobby Kaufmann: apparently money is free speech, but flag burning isn't?) Being a free speech absolutist is a lot like opposing the death penalty: defending the principle does not equal defending the action.

That said: I will admit that such abstractions are in and of themselves a privilege.

The JOURNALISM school.

This has been a powerful discussion since Friday. And even though less people would have felt immediate pain, It would have been a much less powerful discussion had Tanyolacar's piece been placed in a traditional museum setting or even if it had been accompanied with "proper interpretation." The shock, even though that doesn't seem to have been part of the intent, became part of the art, and without the shock and the very real pain, the discussion would have been very different.

The dialogue is beyond the artist now. He started something here, even if he doesn't quite understand what it was he started and seems too focused on his own feelings.

The question is: was this discussion worth it? For ME it was because I learned. But I also viewed it with privilege. For someone else, encountering it out of the blue or doing the heavy lifting of explaining their reactions and emotions to others, which they didn't necessarily want to do, the price may have felt too high.

I respect that. And all I can offer is the idealistic to a fault notion of meeting speech with speech, taking that Pentacrest space with that chalk. The powerful can use both freedom AND restriction of freedom. The powerless can only use the freedom itself.

Random Thoughts While Waiting For Kickoff

Anyone else had the thought that the Pentacrest artist could be a Sacha Baron Cohen type, feigning cluelessness and provoking controversy just to test our reaction? Very unlikely, but Borat and Bruno fooled a LOT of people, and this all seems so clumsy as to be unreal...

I'm not ready yet to offer Definitive Thoughts on the incident, and don't know when if ever I will be. All I could do at this point is compile still-live Facebook threads. Everything anyone says offends somebody and I have enough other issues to offend people about.

But I will offer this Washington Post headline: Why Eric Garner is the turning point Ferguson never was. tl;dr: Video.

Here's an unusual thing about Iowa: We're one of the few states where the most Republican places are more Republican than the most Democratic places are Democratic. Some of that is our relatively small minority population; we're one of teh few states where Obama won, twice, with white voters. And it's not just "gerrymandering," that word so many use and so few grasp. Greg Sargent notes:

(Ohio and Pennsylvania) are particularly lopsided because Democratic districts are “heavily urbanized,” with huge numbers of Dem voters concentrated in them around Columbus, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.

But even if Democrats were to get something approaching neutral maps in these big states, Wasserman estimates, it could result in just a couple more seats in each state — adding up to a total of maybe 10 additional House seats for Democrats. That would obviously help, but it would still be short of the 30-seat edge Republicans currently hold. Democrats would still have to post pretty big victories in the next few cycles to get close to the majority. In short, beyond the problem of redistricting is the even more serious problem (for Democrats) of population distribution.

“If Democrats were to get neutral maps drawn by God in all 50 states, they would still fall well short of winning back the House,” Wasserman concludes. “What Democrats really need is a massive resettlement program.”

 Speaking of settlements, the Israeli parliament formally dissolved today...

Israel is a textbook case in proportional representation as government gridlock, with multiple small parties with esoteric demands and major contentiousness over minor differences holding power beyond their numbers when it comes to the rise and fall of governments. The 120 seats are divided among 13 parties, and Netanyahu's party only holds 19. It literally is the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea.


Irony: The other textbook case of extreme proportional representation to the detriment of democracy? Weimar Germany, where 14 parties split the seats in the final free election and a majority of the members opposed democracy itself. But I suppose I'm not allowed to say that.

Of course America goes to the other extreme with Two And Only Two parties. It's not just our winner take all electoral system. The know-nothing nationalist UK Independence Party (UKIP) just won its first two seats in Parliement in "by-elections" (I love that term for special elections) with ex-Conservative MPs who resigned to run. (The ONLY ethical way to do a party change). With their wins, the British Parliament now includes TWELVE parties, and a couple independents, despite a winner take all single member district system. Half these parties are only regional. But both American major parties are being accused of that anyway.

No, it's more the American political culture, as Ezra Klein notes at great length while dismissing the idea of an imminent third party uprising:

In Washington, the yearning for a third party is often by elites — and for elites. It’s for the third party of Unity08, or No Labels, or Mike Bloomberg, or Simpson-Bowles. It’s a third party of technocrats: fiscally moderate, socially permissive. A third party of sober moderates. A third party of things people in Washington already care about.

The space for a third political party — if it exists — isn’t in Washington’s zone of elite agreement. It’s in the zones of popular agreement that elites have little patience for. America’s unaffiliated voters aren’t moderates. They are, by Washington’s standards, extremists — they’re just extreme in a way that blithely crosses left and right lines, then doubles back on itself again. They support single-payer health care and tax cuts. Or they’re against gay marriage but for a living wage. Or they're for open borders and cuts to social spending. Or they want a smaller military and sharp restrictions on abortions.

$2 Gas? NOT a good thing

@kfor #gaswar in progress @ SE44th & Shields. @OnCue E-10 is $1.99! pic.twitter.com/y3X0g27vuD
— Marc Dillard (@F5Video) December 3, 2014

Nice as it may seem in the moment of filling your tank, in the big picture this is NOT a good thing.

Even the most anti-science, These Are The End Times Luddite has to acknowledge that fossil fuels are at some point finite.

Yet even the greenest liberals are reluctant to say out loud that reducing our fossil fuel reliance is going to take more significant life style changes than than some high profile feel-good recycling.

It takes energy to heat and cool things and to move things. And on a global scale, Americans pay an insanely low price for gasoline. Here's a map from a couple years back. Prices were on the high end then, but for rough comparison this map still gives you the idea.



In general we're paying about half what western Europe does. (You know what else Western Europe has? Good public transportation). America's artificially low energy prices subsidize energy wasters like 50 mile one way commutes to refrigerated cities in deserts.

Granted, I'm a maniac who chose my home because it was four blocks from my office. But we need a few more crazies like me.

In my anecdotal experiences, nothing makes people think harder about transportation alternatives than gas prices. The tipping point seems to be around four bucks a gallon. At that point, the minor inconveniences of public transit or car pooling start to seem like smaller problems than that $65 tankload.

Free market in action. And if the free market won't do it, look at the tax structure. In the long run, until Magic Cold Fusion happens, we need to pay more for gas and live closer to work.

Can we finally talk about...?

Looks like the Netanyahu government fell apart overnight (USA time):

Netanyahu was seeking to gain Lapid’s support for a number of contentious bills, chief among them a bill to declare Israel a “Jewish State.” While Israel’s Declaration of Independence already describes Israel as a Jewish State, the new bill is being touted by Netanyahu as necessary to establishing Israel’s national identity.

Critics say it is an unnecessary bill that will infuriate the country’s Palestinian citizens and fuel anti-democratic legislation.

Elections will overlap the start of the American primary-caucus season. Does this mean the US will finally be able to have an honest discussion about the Middle East?

I doubt it, so I won't say much more. Still afraid to. That said, Israel-Palestine is really my big concern about Hillary Clinton, a far bigger concern than her Hamburg Inn pie shake intake.

Not that Americans are strangers to our own forms of nationalism:

(The Republican) political dilemma here is pretty obvious. They can’t endorse a path to citizenship, or even just legal status for undocumented persons, because the conservative base wouldn't tolerate it. Ideas that attempt to find some middle ground, like Carson’s proposal, don’t fully address the problem. What the base really wants is to deport almost everyone living in the U.S. illegally—something that's not possible, as a practical matter, and would be political suicide if somehow it did work. Even those Hispanics sympathetic to the Republican Party now would abandon it.

Yep, the King Wing is making all the noise these days...  and Jay Michaelson argues in open letter format that it's the evangelicals who've been getting the short end of the stick for 30-plus years:

What happened to the Christian concern to “love the least of these,” the most vulnerable, the most destitute? In my opinion, supply-side Republicans have convinced many Christians not merely that the welfare state is a bad idea, but that generosity itself is a vice, that public assistance equals dependence, and that giving the wealthy even more breaks is the way for benefits to “trickle down” to the rest of us.

Don't worry, he talks about fetuses and stuff too.

Local item that fits nowhere else: Save Hoover folks already gearing up to knock off three Iowa City school board members. Technically, that September 8, 2015 vote is our next scheduled election, though I'll be shocked if we don't have one or even two more before that.

Speaking of special elections: Should Dems even bother to try in the two upcoming legislative special elections? Joni Ernst's seat is the third or fourth most Republican, and the late Dwayne Alons had the number ONE Republican House seat.

Happy Thanksgiving

Enjoy your turkey, pass the collective guilt:

From 1616 to 1619, a series of virgin-soil epidemics spread by European trading vessels ravaged the New England seaboard, wiping out up to 95 percent of the Algonkian-speaking native population from Maine to Narragansett Bay. The coast was a vast killing zone of abandoned agricultural fields and decimated villages littered with piles of bones and skulls. This is what the Pilgrims encountered when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Not a pristine wilderness, but the devastated ruins of a once-thriving culture, a haunting boneyard which English libertine Thomas Morton later described as a “newfound Golgotha.”

It is an inescapable fact, therefore, that this proud country was born in the aftermath of a shameful ethnic cleansing that is largely absent from the collective memory. It behooves us to refresh that memory.

If only the Natives had enforced a tougher immigration policy and deported smallpox.  Side dish of irony: "Thirty-five percent of respondents said that immigrants who entered the country illegally should be required to leave."

Not the worst survey stat of the week: 77% of white evangelical Protestants believe climate change is caused by "biblical end times."

That doesn't encourage looking to the future. But Brad Anderson, who ran 2014's best yet unsuccessful campaign, looks to the future for Iowa Democrats:

Nathan Blake. Nathan Blake ran for State Senate, he ran a positive, optimistic campaign, came in a close second but people really look to him as potentially a future leader. There's a guy who runs Hawkeye Hotels who lives in Iowa City, Ravi Patel. He's a good democrat, young guy, people aren't really talking about him publicly but I can tell you behind the scenes they are. And so these are new people. We've got Janet Petersen, of course, who a lot of people look to. Liz Mathis out in Cedar Rapids. So we've got people in place and, again, I think there will be new people down the road that we're not talking about.

The ages of some key founding fathers in 1776: Aaron Burr, 20 Alexander Hamilton, 21 James Madison, 25 We need more young people in power.
— Lauren Epstein (@superlau77) November 25, 2014

And if the Democrats want to go Back To The Future, we could hardly do better than the Howard Dean years:

There are Democrats everywhere, and if you want to nurture the party you have to nurture all of them. If you focus only on the states that are mostly Democratic, it’s demoralizing to the other states. So you never get any growth. So the origin of the 50-state strategy was to be prepared to go anywhere. The idea was, if you ever wanted a Mark Begich, you had to invest in Alaska before a Mark Begich came on the horizon so you could be ready. Mark Begich is the example that I use. Nobody expected Ted Stevens to be indicted, but when he was, we were ready.

And no one expects Chuck Grassley to do the Last Minute Switcheroo, either...

Pate Relaunch Nothing Much

Paul Pate 6.0 is relaunching this week. The grunge-era Secretary of State, returning to office on less than 50% of the vote, spoke Wednesday at a Republican breakfast in Des Moines, and appeared in a couple newspaper pieces.

Kathie Obradovich was live tweeting the breakfast, and Team Paul Danny chose to retweet some of the bon mots he considered most significant.

Secretary of state-elect Paul Pate says he doesn’t want either party picking up absentee ballots. #ialegis #iapolitics
— Kathie Obradovich (@KObradovich) November 18, 2014

This?!? THIS is you big thing?

"I believe no one should be touching your absentee ballot except you, an authorized election official or a postal worker," Pate said back in September, addressing a problem that wasn't really a problem. The idea is to end the practice of "chasing," where campaign volunteers and staffers pick up ballots from voters and deliver them to auditor's offices.

I only know of one significant ballot chasing problem in my 13 general election cycles in the state, a 2002 situation where Democrats hurt their own team (an exhausted staffer forgot to turn in ballots in Election Day).

The response even then was overkill: Chet Culver's "ballot courier" law that limited who could chase ballots in 2004 and 2006. There were mandatory yet pointless training sessions (summary: duh, you have to bring the ballots back), a tedious check in process, and cumbersome paperwork.

The main effect of the courier law: Countless times in 2004 and 2006, I had to tell people they couldn't hand in their spouses's ballot, or their 90 year old mom's ballot. The absurd solution: directing them to the mail box outside.


The more effective change was an unfunded mandate: counties are required to pay return postage on mailed absentees. I don't have numbers, but just anecdotally it seems like fewer ballots are getting chased and more are getting mailed. So "no one should be touching your absentee ballot except you, an authorized election official or a postal worker" is a lot like the theatre of airport scanners: making things more complicates is supposed to make you feel more secure, but doesn't really solve anything.

Pate says he wants Iowa military stationed overseas to be able to vote online. #iapolitics
— Kathie Obradovich (@KObradovich) November 18, 2014

Paul should have studied, instead of just relying on what he remembered from 1996: military folks and overseas citizens already have access to emailed ballots.

Here's one Pate didn't retweet.

Pate defers questions to #ialegis about combining school-board elections with general/closing polls at 8/shorter absentee time. #iapolitics
— Kathie Obradovich (@KObradovich) November 18, 2014

Instead, he shared this:

Pate says his focus is on “cleaning up what we have” instead of pushing for new policy. #iapolitics
— Kathie Obradovich (@KObradovich) November 18, 2014

Pate paid homage to post-Obama Republican base orthodoxy on voter ID, but he's enough of a pragmatist to tone it down now that the election is over.

That's a realistic attitude. Anything is an improvement over the hyper-partisanship of the Matt Schultz era (just don't commit voter fraud in Madison County!). The reality is, no major changes in Iowa voter law will happen until one party has a trifecta again. That's how election day registration and changing the length of school board terms happened.

Pate says he still wants to see a national clearinghouse to make sure voters aren’t registered in multiple states. #iapolitics
— Kathie Obradovich (@KObradovich) November 18, 2014

 That's a real issue. There's some cross state matching, and it's slowly improving, but most out of state cancellations rely on self-reported data. When you graduate from the UI and move back to Aurora, and eight years later when you have kids going to school and you decide to start voting, you need to remember that you registered in Iowa that one time to vote in a bar election. And then Aurora needs to send that notice back to Iowa. (No one gets canceled just for not voting.)

But ultimately, that's a federal issue, just like voter ID is a legislative issue. Pate seems to realize that in Iowa, Secretary of State is part administrator, part bully pulpit. (And, based on past secretaries Baxter, Culver, Pate, and Schultz, part campaign launching pad.)

Pate's also using his bully pulpit to talk caucus issues. He seems to think the Iowa parties should hire caucus consultants to help run the show. While I might apply for that job, I'm not sure it's needed. That almost feels like a backhanded slap at the party activists... but given the problems the Iowa Republicans had in 2012, I can see why.

Pate also said no one who endorses a 2016 presidential candidate should be involved in process of reporting the precinct results.

His points of emphasis are interesting because they illustrate the deep differences in how the two parties run the caucuses.  As I've followed Iowa GOP politics from the outside, I've seen a huge huge emphasis on endorsement and internal process. There seems to be a strong feeling that anyone in an Official party position should refrain from or be restrained from making a formal endorsement.

The real problem with the 2012 Republican caucuses wasn't that it was a tie. Anybody can have a close election. And it wasn't that Matt Strawn "declared" a winner, and it wasn't the "certification" process. Those items made Iowa - not the Iowa Republicans, IOWA - look bad, and I'll support whatever makes the caucuses stronger for both parties. But those weren't the real problems.

The real problem was that Ron Paul finished third but got all the delegates, exposing the fact that the "straw vote" had no direct relation to the delegates.

Democrats see the caucuses' problems from a completely different angle. We, or at least the DNC, sees the problem as inclusiveness. And that's amplified because the person who made that argument in 2007 is now the near certain 2016 nominee.

I'm leery of the "satellite caucus" thing. I preferred a tightly controlled proxy/absentee process, though I can see the worries about people going two places. But as a credentials guy, it's logistically harder to assign the delegates and do the math. And I just have this gut feeling that Team Hillary will overkill the satellite caucus idea just like they used to overkill Sign War.

Still looking for the Grassley challenger

You might have a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school, never practiced law, serving as the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Because if Democrats lose the majority, Chuck Grassley will be the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee - seen on a tombstone near Waterloo

Give Bruce Braley credit - he called it.

Chuck Grassley comes out of the 2014 election as maybe the year's biggest winner who wasn't actually on a ballot, his status enhanced both at home and in DC. He even won a House race by proxy as his Mini-Me, David Young.

Grassley will be on the ballot in 2016, and amidst all the speculation about other races - Rod Blum already has a target on his back - there's not much discussion about the 2016 Senate race and the need for a credible challenge to Chuck Grassley.

"Surely," you ask, "you don't think the Democrats can beat Chuck Grassley?"



No. But that question contains two assumptions: 1) that winning the seat is the only goal, and 2) that Chuck Grassley is the candidate.

Grassley has already announced, in September 2013 to mark his 80th birthday. He's got more energy than many half his age, and WAY more than Terry Branstad, who looked almost cadaverous in some of his ads. And Chuck's got the knack of this newfangled Tweeter thing to the point where he's his own meme.

Fred and I hit a deer on hiway 136 south of Dyersville. After I pulled fender rubbing on tire we continued to farm. Assume deer dead
— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) October 26, 2012

TWO memes, counting the entry of The Full Grassley into the Iowa and national political lexicon.

The Republican Senate takeover, and the certain national spotlight at the next Supreme Court vacancy, probably motivates Grassley to want to stay. For now I take him at his word.

But.

Things can change fast in your 80s, and people change their minds. Grassley will be 89 in the fall of 2022, at the end of a seventh term, and completing sixty-four consecutive years in public office.

Can he win? Sure. Will he want to? NOW he does, I'm sure. In December 2012 we were all gearing up for one last Tom Harkin campaign, too. But in a year, with the prospect of a solid year of call time staring him in the face?

And when there may be an exit strategy?

The rumor mill burned all last winter that Terry Branstad was thinking of pulling a switcheroo at the last second. He'd accomplished the major task of Term 5 simply by running; he was the only Republican who could beat Vander Plaats in a primary, and Vander Plaats was the only Republican who would lose to Culver.

Somewhere along the line Branstad got his heart set on the Guinness Book Of Governor Records, and also got focused on coattails and political legacy. He achieved that in a big way with Joni Ernst - I can't say enough how bad it burns us Iowa Democrats that the Republicans broke the gender barrier first. And the chance to create with his own signature on a resignation letter the first female governor, too?

I'm still not convinced Branstad serves out the term, and bet he resigns once he passes George Clinton for the record in the summer of 2016.



He may have the record, but he'll never have a Mothership.

(The resignation lands just after the 2016 election, and before the 2017 legislative session. Let Governor Reynolds get a session in before the inevitable primary challenge from the right.)

I'm less suspicious of Grassley, but Grassley is better situated for a smoother handoff.

Grandson Pat beat tough opposition in a 2012 pair-up legislative primary, got to know all Grandpa's donors, and is now legally old enough for the US Senate. He's getting mentioned for Secretary of Agriculture should Bill Northey do something else, or should Grandpa follow through and run in 2016. Pat has close ties to Kaufmann son and father, and could probably unite the party especially if it's at the last second and it's Grandpa's Parting Wish.

No matter how slim the chance, it's a scenario Democrats need to be ready for. We weren't ready for the Tom Latham retirement, and when it happened we were already locked into Staci Appel. She did well, or at least seemed to till the very end, but she was a B list candidate who would not have been a first choice had we known earlier that it was an open seat race rather than a long shot challenge.

Right now Democrats have a pair of C-minus list Senate candidates. It's a rerun of the 2010 primary without the winner. Bob Krause and Tom Fiegen together won just 22% of the primary vote against Roxanne Conlin. An April 2010 FEC report showed Krause with $352 cash on hand and Fiegen with $582.

There were some hard feelings in and after that primary. Fiegen and Krause got in early, when Grassley looked as strong as he does now. But he stumbled in the summer of 2009 with his "pull the plug on Grandma" comments on Obamacare. For a fleeting moment he looked vulnerable, and the Des Moines Beltway crowd recruited Conlin, who raised enough money (including her own) to run a credible campaign.

Not a winning campaign, sure. But a credible campaign, the strongest one ever by a Grassley challenger. In a horrible year Conlin did something no Grassley challenger had ever done: she won a county.



This looks familiar.

Granted, it was Johnson. But Grassley's three prior opponents are all Johnson County Democratic Hall of Famers (Dave Osterberg is our only Hall of Famer not actually from the county), and they all lost. Badly.

In 1992 Jean Lloyd-Jones got off to a rough start for reasons not of her own making. She was chairing the Senate ethics committee, there was a controversial investigation that stepped on her rollout, and all anyone remembered from the story was "Jean Lloyd-Jones... ethics violation" even though the ethics violator was someone else. Lloyd-Jones almost lost her primary to a candidate who was literally a nut job. The hyphenated last named grated on some folks 20 years ago, even though she was born Jean Hall and Lloyd-Jones was her husband's given name.

(A lot of us here in Iowa City are thinking of Jean right now, as her husband Jix passed away last month.)

Lloyd-Jones ended up at just 27%.  Everyone forgets because of Bill Clinton. But 1992 was a bad year for Iowa Democrats. We lost the Iowa House by one seat and lost two congressional seats we had a shot at. Just anecdotally, from my seat as a field staffer, the Ross Perot vote went straight Republican the rest of the way down the ballot. Could a stronger Senate race have bolstered the ticket enough to help in a couple Iowa House seats? Could it have saved Dave Nagle and Elaine Baxter?

The story of 1998 is the story of Tom Vilsack, who was as far behind in the early polling as his Senate ticket mate, David Osterberg. Vilsack benefited from a bad opponent running an even worse campaign (TOTALLY NUDE DANCING?!?).

Osterberg felt a little like a second choice. He had been looking at a primary with Dave Nagle, and the smart money was on the ex-congressman. But Nagle suffered a defeat that year in his battle with alcohol (a battle I fight myself) and dropped out. Osterberg made the best of his hand and played to his strengths, canoeing down the Iowa River in search of local free media. Good enough for 30%. The Democrats won most of the statewide offices, but Vilsack came in with a Republican legislature.

2004 was the weakest challenge yet. Art Small would have been a great candidate for the seat three cycles earlier, in 1986, when he left the legislature for a losing bid in the last-ever lieutenant governor primary.

(Speaking of 1986. I wasnt in Iowa yet when John Roehrick ran. I worked under him when he was state party chair in 1992 and wasn't impressed.)

Small was a last second recruit who barely qualified for the ballot. It was him or no one, and no one is too big a risk. LaRouchies, Klansmen, and other assorted maniacs have all won nominations by being the only one to file, or by winning primaries against other Some Dudes. In 2010 in South Carolina, and in 2012 in Tennessee, Democrats had to denounce their own Senate nominees.

So Small did the party a favor by running. But there was less than no effort on his behalf; donors were actively discouraged. Small won 28%, and with fewer third party contenders Grassley topped 70 for the first time.

So it was never in doubt... but could an even slightly stronger Senate campaign have helped John Kerry round up the extra 4000 votes he needed to win Iowa?

There are a couple points to this history lesson. First off, note the pattern. A run against Grassley has been a career valedictory, a last race. Is that the pattern to follow again? Or should we be looking for someone on their way UP, looking to build a name?

The more important point is that a ticket reinforces itself. US Senate is the second thing on the ballot in 2016, right below Hillary Clinton vs. Scott Walker. And straight tickets are still important. (Just ask soon to be former supervisor John Etheredge.) Johnson County still sees close to a third of its votes on the actual straight ticket line, with untold thousands more marking de facto straight tickets.

A party wants to keep that straight ticket momentum going as far down as it can. A weak link in the second spot hurts everyone below the Senate race.

So Democrats need a candidate who can hold the faithful and can be visible enough to let people know there's a race. Roxanne Conlin fit that bill; indeed I think part of the reason she was recruited was to strengthen the ticket led by a clearly vulnerable Chet Culver. (Technically the federal races are first on the ballot, but an incumbent governor in an off year is pretty much head of the ticket.)

Bob Krause and Tom Fiegen don't fit that bill. They're good guys and they're making the rounds of the party activists. But they're unknown beyond that, just as Art Small was unknown 18 years after leaving the legislature. They're not people who can help the rest of the ticket. (Though Fiegen might want to take a look at Bobby Kaufmann...)

But why stir up the sleeping giant? Wouldn't it be better to let Grassley go with just a token challenge from Fiegen or Krause, rather than get him motivated and working, and thus getting out votes for the rest of the GOP ticket?

There's some truth to that theory... in most cases. But the man whose name is now a synonym for visiting every county every year, whose slogan is Grassley WORKS, is going to WORK no matter what. He's never going to be caught sleeping like Pat Roberts was and need the national party to bail him out.

But the more important reason for a strong Democratic Senate candidate is the switcheroo scenario. It'll be our own fault, should Chuck step down at the filing deadline and hand off to Pat, if we're stuck with the winner of a primary between third and fourth rate candidates.

So the search continues for the one who's Just Right, not so weak as to drag down the ticket, but not strong enough for or geographically right for the more tempting challenges to Rod Blum or David Young.

Costello announces for Ernst legislative seat

One and probably two legislative special elections coming up in the state's southwest corner, as KMA reports that State Rep. Mark Costello is running for Joni Ernst's seat, State Senate District 12.

Almost forgotten in the noise of the Senate race, at least since the primary, was the factoid that Ernst was mid-term. According to the article, Ernst has not yet resigned from the legislature, therefore Terry Branstad hasn't yet set the date. But with the session coming up, the dates are limited and it'll no doubt be in the middle of the turnout-killing holidays.

Normally any special election in the near-tied Iowa Senate would be a huge deal; the Democrats' only major win this year was holding onto that 26-24 edge.

(Humor me and picture just for a moment an alternate universe where Bruce Braley wins and Joni Ernst falls from her national rock star status back to a back bench in the Iowa Senate minority.)

But Ernst's seat is bloody red, the second most Republican in the state last I checked. She first won in January 2011 in a district that was further east, when Kim Reynolds became lieutenant governor. Democrats nominated Ruth Smith in that special but made no real effort. My guess is that played a role in Smith leaving the party and running as a             for US Senate this year.

(That's right,              . No identifying label at all. Still no satisfactory explanation why the traditional "nominated by petition was dropped for Smith and "Independent" Rick Stewart, but my bet is Stewart got at least half his votes from the I word and hurt Braley more than Ernst. Which I think was the idea.)

The district as configured now is Page, Fremont, Mills, Montgomery, Taylor and Ringgold counties. Fremont, Mills and the northern 2/3rds of Montgomery would face a second special if Costello, just re-elected unopposed to the House, wins.

Costello lists the other key players in the seat and rules them out. This is safe enough turf that a Republican could easily and confidently resign the House seat to run for the Senate, without risking either. That would save the cost of the second special election. The only person in living memory to have done this was Democrat Bob Dvorsky, who resigned from the House in February 1994 to run for the Senate seat in a special.

Hillary's Amazing Expanding Map

So Hillary Clinton wants to expand the map.

As an old 50 State Strategy Deaniac, I think this is a good thing. I'd even like to play for the future in a few places. Wendy Davis may not have been the perfect messenger and the campaign had a lot of problems, but Texas is a long range investment. And does anyone else remember that brief stretch where Mississippi - MISSI-freakin-SIPPI - had a 3-1 D House delegation?

The more interesting states, and the better long term investments, are Georgia and Arizona. Georgia was briefly in play in 2012 and competitive this year. Arizona would likely have flipped Democratic in 2008 had John McCain not been the nominee.

But in the medium range?

The unanswered question for the post-Obama era is how much were thoughts about Obama, and by extension about the Democratic Party, motivated by race? Both negatively AND positively.

Clinton bases her case for Arkansas, Missouri and Indiana on her appeal to white working-class voters, pointing to the 2008 primaries.

Chris CiIizza notes: 

Fair(ish). But remember that Clinton's performance in those primaries was against an African American candidate named Barack Obama, not against a Republican in a general election. And that coming close isn't the same thing as winning. Yes, Clinton would almost certainly do better with white working-class voters than Obama did. But, in some of the states that Stewart puts in that first bucket, that's a pretty low bar.

Kentucky's gone, as is West Virginia (carried by DUKAKIS in `88). That's more than Obama, though he's doubtless a factor. Is we saw in the House Democratic split over the Keystone pipeline this weekend, the environmental wing of the Democrats outnumbers the old-school labor wing,and Kentucky and West Virginia see Democrats, not just Obama, as job killers.

Arkansas seems to be on the list out of sentimentality. Bill Clinton couldn't save Mark Pryor this year, but maybe a Clinton on the ballot would bring some folks back one last - and it would likely be last - time.

But the flip side here: could Hillary Clinton replicate Barack Obama's high African-American turnout? The percentages will be there, sure, with Republicans making no serious effort at black outreach. (Their big winners this year either won despite black voters - Tim Scott - or in places with virtually no black voters - Mia Love.)

But will the raw numbers be there? Elias Isquith at Salon:

All the more so if we accept the premise that Clinton will appeal further to the kind of working-class whites who hate Obama, in no small part because of how they perceive his coalition (i.e., the people from whom we must “take our country back”).

And what does lower, even slightly lower, black turnout do to a place like Pennsylvania or Ohio?

Sports Analogy Sunday

I know sports analogies are overdone in politics. But it comes with the territory of competition, and maybe more naturally for me growing up in a coaching family.

And it's Sunday afternoon and I'm waiting for a 3:25 kickoff for the Packers and Eagles, with major implications for control of the Senate... I mean, the NFC, and old grudges (4th and 26) to boot.

There's that bipolar nature: two teams, two parties, one winner, one loser... oh, wait! We got a guy here with an easy plan to overthrow the two party system! So simple: just referendums, which don't exist in a majority of states, and two constitutional amendments, which require a consensus level super majority that would be hard to get in the current political climate on anything as controversial as Puppies Are Cute.

Football in particular has come on hard times, with this year's controversies over domestic violence and head injuries... though Jonathan Chait argues liberals get some of football wring (worth the long read).

The Great One, Hunter Thompson, was a football freak, and here he offers some gonzo writing tips:

The game had already started, but there was no score. I dumped my ale bottles in the styrofoam cooler, then opened one and sat down to watch the action and brood on Nixon’s treachery. But first I concentrated on the game for a while. It is hard to understand how somebody else thinks unless you can get on their wavelength: get in tune with their patterns, their pace, their connections… and since Nixon is a known football addict, I decided to get my head totally into the rhythm of this exhibition game between the Rams and Kansas City before attempting the jump into politics.

In any case, by the end of the first quarter I felt ready. By means of intense concentration on every detail of the football game, I was able to “derail” my own inner brain waves and re-pattern them temporarily to the inner brain wave rhythms of a serious football fanatic. The next step, then, was to bring my “borrowed” rhythms into focus on a subject quite different from football—such as presidential politics.

In the third and final step, I merely concentrated on a pre-selected problem involving presidential politics, and attempted to solve it subjectively… although the word “subjectively,” at this point, had a very different true meaning. Because I was no longer reasoning in the rhythms of my own inner brain waves, but in the rhythms of a football addict.

By half time, with the Rams trailing by six, I had established a firm scientific basis for the paranoid gibberish I had uttered, an hour or so earlier...

 But in the mood most Democrats are in this month, all I can think about is losing.

In 2002, Bill Simmons of ESPN wrote a classic column,  "The 13 Levels of Losing," which attempts to quantify The Agony Of Defeat. The highest level, That Game, is reserved for "Game 6 of the 1986 World Series... the most catastrophic sports loss of our lifetime."



Translate "Buckner" into "butterfly ballot" and you get the idea.

Bruce Braley's defeat definitely reaches the upper Levels of Losing. Which fits best?

Level VI: The Full-Fledged Butt-Kicking
Definition: Sometimes you can tell right away when it isn't your team's day ... and that's the worst part, not just the epiphany but everything that follows -- every botched play, every turnover, every instance where someone on your team quits, every "deer in the headlights" look, every time an announcer says, "They can't get anything going," every shot of the opponents celebrating, every time you look at the score and think to yourself, "Well, if we score here and force a turnover, maybe we'll get some momentum," but you know it's not going to happen, because you're already 30 points down ... you just want it to end, and it won't end ... 

Not quite, because until the very end the game seemed close.

Level IV: The Broken Axle
Definition: When the wheels come flying off in a big game, leading to a complete collapse down the stretch ...  

Sort of, but we felt the wheels coming off way before the 4th quarter.

Level V: The "This Can't Be Happening" Game
The sibling of the Full-Fledged Butt-Kicking ... you're supposed to win, you expect to win, the game is a mere formality ... suddenly your team falls behind, your opponents are fired up, the clock is ticking and it dawns on you for the first time, "Oh my God, this can't be happening." 

That feels about right. Was supposed to be an easy bout, against an unranked contender... and all of a sudden it's a damn fight.

Long Reads, Longer Range Problems

Now that the election's over - technically the formality of our canvass is tomorrow but we counted the last ballots yesterday - time for some long reads.

RIP the White Southern Democrat, 1865-2014. Rep. John Barrow of Georgia is the final casualty of a terminal illness that began in 1954, and has spread from presidential elections to the Senate to the House and now the statehouse and court house.

Much as this is a problem for white southern Democrats, it's a crisis for black ones. That’s because blacks in the South—who, notwithstanding the very compelling counter-example of Tim Scott, are almost invariably Democrats—have for decades relied on coalitions with white Democrats to increase their political power. Lacking white politicians with whom they can build coalitions, black politicians are increasingly rendered powerless.

But the Civil War ain't over, for politics in the South is still All About Race.

40 years of data from the General Social Survey — the gold standard of American public opinion research — tell us that Southern whites overwhelmingly blame blacks for their lower economic status, ignoring or denying the role played by discrimination, past and present, in all its various forms, and that the balance of Southern white attitudes has barely changed at all in 40 years.

It is only Democrats outside the white South who have dramatically shifted away from blaming blacks over this period of time, and the tension this has created within the Democratic Party goes to the very heart of the political challenge both Obama and Landrieu face — a challenge that is not going to simply go away any time soon.

So you can call it Obama Fatigue, but that great philosopher Gabby Johnson puts it concisely.


Never gets old.

But in the classic Some Of My Friends Are fallacy, Republicans will point to their counter-examples, most notably Tim Scott of Sourth Carolina, an appointed Senator who won the seat in his own right last week. But as Jamelle Bouie asks:

If Tim Scott speaks in terms of a distinctly black conservatism, then why is he unpopular with actual black voters, who overwhelmingly voted against him in last Tuesday’s election?

Part of the answer is partisanship. Black Americans tend to hold more liberal views on government and are inclined to support Democrats, even if Republicans have a black candidate. Barring an extraordinary turn in South Carolina politics, there’s little chance Scott will ever win a substantial number of black voters.

But like any other group, black voters respond to rhetoric as much as ideology, and there, Scott has a problem. Scott doesn’t just echo Booker T. Washington in his language, he echoes him in his hands-off approach to racial injustice. The black conservatism of Washington doesn’t have a critique of white society—it focuses inward on the concerns of the community.

Let's not just look South. No place is more polarized than my own native state:

Two modern-day trends have converged here in dramatic fashion: the growing divide between Democratic and Republican voters, which is more pronounced in Wisconsin than most other states; and the rise of politically one-sided communities, which is more extreme in Milwaukee than most other metropolitan areas.

"This Balkanization — it really goes beyond Democrat-Republican. It's really a difference in world view," says Robert Bauman, a Milwaukee alderman whose district includes the downtown area.

And no place is more bipolar, electing Tammy Baldwin one cycle and Scott Walker (my bet for the 2016 nomination) the next.

Yet the "moderates" worshipped by the mainstream media but moved more by "likability" than policy, expect compromise on key issues like immigration. How do you pull that off?

Fifty-six percent of voters who backed Republicans in the midterms said most immigrants in the U.S. illegally should be deported. On the Democratic side, 8 in 10 voters favored creating a path to legal status.

 (I still see a niche for a UKIP/Le Pen European style nationalist party in America...)

Expect more of this kind of standoff for the next several election cycles.And it's more than just "gerrymandering." Jamelle Bouie again:

The generational divide in partisanship, for instance, didn’t exist 25 years ago, or at least, not in the same way.

The main difference between young and old voters back then wasn’t whom they voted for as much as whether they voted in the first place. Grandfather and Grandson might vote for the same party, but the grandfather would show up for every election while his grandson was more likely to only vote every four years in a presidential election.

That divide still exists.  What’s different compared with the past is the partisan divide. Simply put, when young people go to the polls they vote for Democrats and when older people cast their ballots, they vote for Republicans. And the gap is huge.

But why is there a GOP midterm advantage now as opposed to 20 years ago, when the overall electorate was substantially whiter?

In the 1990s, a substantial number of older voters—if not most older voters—belonged to the Greatest Generation, the men and women who grew up in the Depression and fought in World War II. They were New Deal Democrats in their formative years, and they kept that affiliation through the rest of the 20^th century.

By contrast, the next oldest cohort of voters—those who “came of age” during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations—were substantially more Republican in most years.

That's just a taste. But the whole point of a Long Reads post is to steer you to those long reads.

Numbers Part 4: Very, VERY Different

Let's look at that Iowa map of gubernatorial results again.



I'm not showing this map again out of smug self-satisfaction: "See? Look how good WE did. It's everyone else's fault."

The Democrats are still in good shape here in the People's Republic. The official Democratic Central Committee structure is a dysfunctional mess (you should see the stuff I wrote and DIDN'T post), but the elected officials, donors, worker bees and field staff can still make things happen.

In Johnson County the leading Democratic candidates in competitive races met or came close to the targets statewide candidates need to get out of our county. Here's pre-election projections from Daily Kos on what an Iowa Democrat needs by county to win statewide, with the actual results added.

County	% of 2012 statewide vote	What we need to break 50% statewide	2012 Pres.	2014 Senate	Performance: Needed vs. Got
Statewide	100	50/48	52/46	44/52	-6
Polk	14.5	54/44	56/42	50/46	-4
Linn	7.5	56/42	58/40	51/45	-5
Scott	5.7	54/44	56/42	47/50	-7
Johnson	4.8	65/33	67/31	65/32	0
Black Hawk	4.2	57/41	59/39	52/45	-5
Dubuque	3.2	55/44	57/42	51/45	-4
Story	3	54/44	56/42	50/47	-4
Woodbury	2.8	48/51	50/49	38/56	-10
Pottawatomie	2.7	44/54	46/52	37/58	-7
Dallas	2.4	41/57	43/55	37/60	-4

Note that Braley's underperformance was worst in chronically low-turnout Woodbury. Also note that he did five points worse than he needed in his home county, Black Hawk - and that was his second BEST percentage in the state.

Bruce Braley underperformed everywhere else, but got what he needed (or should have needed) here. If anything, Johnson County is trending, in an almost defiant way, MORE Democratic. I've been saying it all fall, I'll say it again: Joni Ernst's folksy style that was successful almost everywhere else was met with visceral distaste and disbelief here."The Pig Lady can't possibly WIN, can she?" The rest of the state looks in the mirror and sees Ernst; we look in the mirror and see Dave Loebsack.

This ripples into solutions to our local problems as well.

It's a progressive mantra to think globally and act locally. And that's a big part of why we saw the two local ballot measures, for courthouse improvements and a local option sales tax, fail.

Set aside the automatic don't raise my taxes for any reason NO vote. the preferred solution to our local courthouse space system is Massive Fundamental Justice System Reform, with an element of drug law reform and an element of racial disparity issues. And the preferred progressive solution to the revenue drop we will see from state tax "reform" is a more progressive tax structure, such as a local option income tax.

The state and national election results have pushed these goals further away. We can think globally and act locally, but we can't act unilaterally. We are hamstrung by a state community and a national community that we have not persuaded.

Locals, we are not just different than the rest of the state. We are very, VERY different. Across the board, in the top tier races, Democrats performed 12 to 14 percent better in Johnson County than they did anywhere else in the state. And not only did our Democratic levels not drop in a very bad year, we actually increased our Democratic representation in Des Moines, we added to it with Kevin Kinney.

But that legislative delegation is not going to be able to make the changes we want to see.

Property tax law changes have uniquely hurt Johnson County. By changing much of our highest in the state level of rental property from commercial status to the lower taxed residential status, we took a harder revenue hit than anyone else. Those new laws won't change with this governor and this legislature. And in an environment of What Tax Can We Cut Next, any local option income tax is about as valuable as a platform plank: an empty statement on paper that goes nowhere.

Joe Bolkcom will continue his efforts to reform medical marijuana laws, which are to full legalization as civil unions are to full marriage equality: a starter step.  But while opinion is changing fast, this Iowa governor and legislature are not there yet. This is an issue that's still at the educational stage, not the action stage. And despite the arguments from the county attorney primary, we really can't engage in local level nullification.

No, our legislative delegation is on defense. Bolkcom and Kinney and Bob Dvorsky's job is to keep really really bad, Scott Walker kind of stuff from happening. On the House side, all Mary Mascher and Vicki Lensing and Dave Jacoby and Sally Stutsman can do is offer a few ideas to make bad bills just a little less bad.

The next best opportunity to act locally about our global problems come a year from now, in our city council elections.

It's a cruel irony is that the most "progressive" city in Iowa has had a good old boy, Chamber of Commerce dominated, low turnout elected city council for the entire 24 years I've lived here.

The same turnout problem that afflicts Democrats/liberals/progressives in off year general elections is exaggerated further in our off-off year local elections.  The student community has never truly participated, save for the cycles when the 21 Bar issue was on the ballot, and even then most voted only on the bar issue and skipped the council races. And a lot of faculty/staff liberals focus on state, national or international issues, and let the townies worry about ordinances and zoning and property taxes.

The townie-domainated city council electorate dislikes the demographic change of the last 20 years that had created our first significant racial minority population (other than graduate students from Asia).  They LIKE the crackdowns on the southeast side and downtown. The landlord community likes the state level property tax reform, and wants to tap into the students for sales taxes.

Elections are often won and lost at the candidate recruitment stage. It's not too soon to think about next year. Three seats are up in Iowa City. Jim Throgmorton was unopposed in the District C race in 2011; here's hoping he runs again. In the two seat at large race, Matt Hayek has already announced he's not running, and Mid-American middle manager Michelle Payne has been a cipher on the council.

Progressives moved the needle a notch in 2013, electing Kingsley Botchway to replace Connie Champion. We can move things another notch or two next year. That's not a panacea. Our local options are still limited by a hostile state and national climate. But it will help us use what local power we have.