Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Democrats and their advocates may be disenchanted with Gov. Chet Culver’s 2008 veto of labor legislation. They might even be disappointed with the inability of the Iowa House Democratic Caucus to sound a unified voice during this session. And the battles between “Obamacrats” and “Democrats” are already well under way.
U.S. Rep. Steve King
But all that could vanish with a single sentence: “I’m Congressman Steve King and I want to be Iowa’s next governor.”
The Democratic salivating began in February when King, a Republican from Kiron, refused to rule out a gubernatorial run on Iowa Public Television. It’s escalated to full-frontal lip smacking with news that King, whose congressional district covers western Iowa, plans to headline an anti-abortion event in eastern Iowa next week.
Residents of eastern Iowa, who have never had an opportunity to cast a ballot based on their displeasure of King’s extreme social conservative viewpoints, are especially relishing the idea of being able to vote against “the state’s cancer,” as King has been referred to on more than one occasion.
“It’s never enough to just limit cancer,” explained Allan Hale, a resident of Ely. “You have to eradicate it. You have to destroy it. If you don’t, it will fester and spread. Even if I’ve never had a chance to vote against him, his policies and his stupidity impact me.”
Those that believe such statements to be too inflammatory for proper political discourse need look no further than King’s own statements.
“What kind of a nation are we if we can’t have open dialog?” King asked members of the Sioux City Rotary Club last year while defending his own controversial rhetoric.
Mike Carberry, a Johnson County Democrat, likens the Democratic want of a persona like King on the 2010 gubernatorial ballot with the same push Republican pundits gave to then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.
“They saw her candidacy as an opportunity to motivate their base because of all the negative bias against her,” Carberry said. “This is the same principle.
“Steve King never misses an opportunity to embarrass himself or Iowa. While our state used to be known as the place of corn and hogs, now we are nationally associated with ignorance and intolerance because of King. The bottom line is that Iowans will line up to vote against him.”
Even within the predominantly conservative counties that make up Iowa’s 5th Congressional District, some residents have not only voted against King, but created a Web site declaring that King does not represent Iowa values. The group points to King’s continued quest to raise his congressional pay, his inability to pass a major federal bill, and even his possible quest at a gubernatorial run as reasons King should be known as an ineffective lawmaker and an embarrassment to the entire state.
When King described military service members who married foreign spouses as drunks on binge — in addition to saying that foreign widows of fallen U.S. soldiers exploit the U.S. immigration system — the former president of the Reserve Officers Association of Iowa said that King “wraps himself in the flag at every opportunity, and yet has chosen to malign the loved ones of deceased service members.”
Such statements, which King himself has described as calculated, have drawn to his side a negative national following as well. When he declared in March 2005 that “Congress created all of the courts” and that “whatever Congress gives, they can take away,” he came under intense scrutiny.
Nearly every feminist in the world tied King to a verbal whipping post in June 2006 when he said that deceased terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi probably wouldn’t have “72 virgins in the hell he’s at,” but, “if there are, they probably all look like Helen Thomas,” referring to the legendary White House correspondent of more than five decades.
From describing the events at Abu Ghraib as “hazing,” to describing war-torn Iraq as safer than Washington, D.C., to equating immigrant people with livestock, to proclaiming that terrorists and their sympathizers would be “dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11,” 2001 if Barack Obama was elected president, King has touched nearly every public interest group with a sharp tongue.
Although the eastern Iowa event featuring King is an anti-abortion “educational” meeting hosted by Linn Area Pro Life United at the Crowne Plaza in Cedar Rapids on April 6, King even has his dissenters within that community.
“He takes every opportunity he can to put down the poor and the oppressed and expresses only what we consider contempt for the people whom Jesus said ‘are the least of these,’” Frank Cordaro, a former Catholic priest and human rights activist, said in February when King spoke at the statehouse on behalf of a Catholic-backed gathering of anti-abortion activists. “It humiliates Catholics who work among and struggle for the poor and disenfranchised in this state.”
When looking at King’s motivations for wanting to headline an event on the opposite side of the state from his congressional district, there is no denying the possible longer term impact of reapportionment and redistricting, which will almost certainly include the loss of one of Iowa’s federal representatives in 2012. While it is much more likely that Democrats Bruce Braley, who represents the 1st District, and Dave Loebsack, who represents the 2nd, will be placed in the same congressional district, there remains a possibility, depending on how the new four districts are drawn, that King and fellow Republican Tom Latham could reside in a newly drawn district.
It would be close to impossible, however, to draw a district that would include King’s home in Kiron with Cedar Rapids, the site of King’s upcoming appearance. Given that, there is no reason to place King’s visit in connection with redistricting concerns.
“The chances of seeing a district slice across the center of the state like that are extremely slim,” said David Redlawsk, a political science professor at the University of Iowa. “The code charges that districts should be compact, and although the exact meaning of ‘compact’ has been debated, I think that a district spanning from one side of the state to the other would clearly not meet that goal.”
Any political capital King might garner from his upcoming eastern Iowa visit could only be spent on a statewide race — which can only be described as music to the ears of Iowa Democrats.
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