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.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) might have cultivated a reputation for himself as the tech-savvy grandpa of the U.S. Senate, but once you look beyond his prolific Tweets, there isn’t a whole lot there. In fact, Grassley’s campaign does not even have a Web site.
Sure, Iowa’s senior senator has an official government Web site, but he has no Web site to build an email list or raise money for his reelection bid next year. In 2009, that’s significant: While online organizing is not the be-all, end-all of Iowa politics (yet), if you listen to new Republican Party of Iowa chair Matt Strawn and many of the party’s other leading voices, GOP candidates have to spend resources reaching out to Internet users or they risk missing votes they would otherwise have been able to count on.
So it’s telling that Grassley, who has more than $3 million in campaign cash, has made essentially no effort to raise any of that money online.
As the campaign heats up, I fully expect Grassley to have a Web site. A political consulting firm called Emotive LLC. registered the domain name Grassley2010.com in January, so you will probably find the site there eventually. But in the meantime, Grassley has not been building an email list or accepting online contributions. This with only a year before his reelection campaign really gets going.
While a campaign Web site will certainly serve him well when it does eventually go live, it could arguably make the most difference to him right now, when he has no TV ads up and his supporters are not being asked to help any other campaigns.
Now is the time to build activist databases and to cultivate that forward-looking, tech-savvy reputation that he wants without it costing much money, and Grassley is squandering it.
(And just for the record, Grassley’s one official Democratic opponent, Bob Krause, does have a site.)
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