With campaign behind him, Fallon looks ahead

Around 10 p.m. on June 3, disappointment finally set in for Ed Fallon. After months of working to unseat U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell in the Democratic primary, the voters had finally spoken, and Fallon’s run ended in defeat.

Despite a defeat in the Third District Democratic Congressional primary, former state Rep. Ed Fallon said he is proud of the campaign he ran.

But that wasn’t the hardest part.

“The next day, I had brunch with my staff as a big sendoff,” Fallon said. “It was really hard. It felt like I was sending my kids off to an orphanage.”

Throughout the campaign, Fallon and his staff had grown close, even making sure they took a break every evening to sit down and have dinner together.

“It became like a big family,” said Lynn Heuss, Fallon’s campaign manager for his run for the Third District Congressional seat. “We really miss seeing those people every day.”

But now he turns to the future, working to pay off his campaign debt that totaled around $37,500 shortly after the primary was over. Since then Fallon has managed to raise a little more than $23,000.

He’s also kept busy, along with Heuss, moving the campaign offices into storage and updating the 9,000-strong e-mail list he put together during his campaign.

“When the caucuses ended, a couple of the presidential campaigns were just going to toss all their equipment into the landfill and move on,” Fallon said. “We got a lot of our stuff that way. But this campaign isn’t the end. We see it as a step to build momentum for a progressive movement.”

On primary night, when Fallon said he wasn’t going away, he meant it. He has no intentions to run again for office any time soon, but he also has no intentions of “sitting back and letting politics as usual go on.”

“I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do, but I want to continue to work for Iowa,” Fallon said. “I know I’m going to continue to be politically engaged; it’s just a matter of figuring out where to focus our energies.”

Fallon and Heuss said they will return to work in the organization they founded after Fallon’s gubernatorial run in 2006, An Independence Movement for Iowa (I’m for Iowa), with a focus on state issues like campaign finance reform and local control, as well as broader issues like combating global climate change.

“We’re being approached by a lot of Democrats looking to see if we can help them on certain issues,” Fallon said. “There are plenty of opportunities to get involved.”

Fallon’s primary challenge of incumbent Boswell was bruising affair, a campaign Fallon calls “the ugliest I’ve ever been a part of.” Boswell questioned Fallon’s loyalty to the Democratic Party, and the media called into question the Fallon campaign’s ties to I’m for Iowa and in the process called into question Fallon’s campaign finance ethics.

“I know what it’s like to get swift-boated,” Fallon said, referring to the negative campaign tactics used against Sen. John Kerry in his 2004 presidential run. “They took something that was a strength of mine and turned it into a weakness.”

Heuss said one of the biggest mistakes the campaign made was in budgeting. The prolonged presidential campaign sapped a lot of the political energy from many in the progressive community who would have supported Fallon, which hurt the campaign’s ability to raise money.

“We built a big staff very quickly, but then we weren’t able to raise the money we thought we could,” Heuss said. “In retrospect we should have built the staff more slowly and utilized more paid media.”

Because Fallon was outspent 5-to-1, Boswell was able to frame the debate, not to mention frame Fallon as someone who could not be trusted, Heuss said.

“It was a learning experience,” Fallon said. “But I’m proud of our campaign. We got 39 percent of the vote against an incumbent after being outspent 5-to-1 and having the entire apparatus of the Democratic Party work against us. We made some mistakes, but I think we ran a good, positive campaign that we can be proud of. It felt good not to sink to their level and go negative.”

Fallon is also proud of the staff he built, many of whom had never been involved in politics before.

“That’s very rewarding,” he said. “To me that’s a win.”

So what does the future hold for Ed Fallon?

“I will continue to focus on public service,” he said. “I figure I’ve got at least another 30 years of service left in me, and I’m not weary at all.”