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.
Every driver along the Avenue of the Saints should pause while passing through Waterloo and think about the man who shepherded that highway through Congress during an all-too-short six-year tenure.
Waterloo was the last city of its size connected to the Interstate. In large part that was because the area’s 26-year congressman (1949-74) H.R. Gross was a Republican so conservative that he voted against virtually every bill that spent money. To heck with you, then, said his colleagues, and the pork did not flow to Waterloo.
Dave Nagle, who today is in the headlines for sadder reasons, was the first Democrat to represent Waterloo’s congressional district, then numbered the 3rd, since the New Deal when he won in 1986.Nagle had already made his mark on the national scene as Iowa Democratic Party chair during the 1984 caucuses. It was really the first time the Democratic campaign in Iowa had been front and center in the national press; Jimmy Carter flew under the radar in 1976, and ran a phantom Rose Garden campaign against Ted Kennedy in 1980. But in 1984 the full media circus came to town, and Nagle was the state party’s face to the nation.
Nagle got really lucky with the map; Iowa’s non-partisan redistricting system had placed heavily Democratic Johnson County in with Waterloo. And that’s how I got mixed up with Dave Nagle in the first place, in my first journalism career in public radio in the early 1990s. Nagle was a great source, who sometimes called me up, himself, out of the blue, leaving me scrambling for tape.
But that map which helped Dave Nagle so much in 1986, and had him running unopposed by 1990, was his undoing in 1992. Iowa hemorrhaged population in the 1980s and lost a seat in the House. The cold calculations of the map put Nagle together with cartoonish freshman Jim Nussle, who was best known at the time for wearing a paper bag on his head on the House floor.
Despite the retrospective memory that 1992 was a banner Democratic year, it really wasn’t in Iowa, except for Bill Clinton. A fair share of the Ross Perot vote went Republican the rest of the way down the ballot, there were several losses both big and close, and Nagle lost to Nussle by one percent.
Jim Nussle went on to chair the House Budget Committee and help build a record deficit, work he is now continuing in the Bush Administration. Dave Nagle came home to Waterloo. In his post-Congressional career, Nagle has been the very definition of an
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