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.
[Commentary] The presidential candidates converged on Iowa aren’t the only ones to sense opportunity here. Interest groups across the political spectrum see Iowa as the place to meet, greet and lobby the candidates for one cause or another. Even the Des Moines Register wants to capitalize on Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses to plug for an editorial position. The paper declared recently, “Iowans have the opportunity to play a special role in resolving the immigration crisis by pressing presidential candidates for solutions-oriented debate on the proposed reform legislation.”
Modify the language a bit, substitute a different issue for immigration, and the appeals echo across Iowa.This week it’s Lance Armstrong making a full-page splash with an ad for back-to-back forums for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in Cedar Rapids in a bid to force them to pay attention to cancer: “The 2008 presidential election will offer Americans a unique opportunity to push for a national strategy for fighting cancer. The LIVESTRONG Presidential Cancer Forum will provide an opportunity to detail their respective policy plans for fighting cancer, a disease that kills 560,000 Americans every year.”
Unless a candidate is prepared to endorse cancer this may be the least controversial event of the campaign.
Whether the opportunity is “special” or “unique,” the interest groups do have the candidates where they want them: trolling for votes. The hope is that they will make commitments, on a record, that can be cited to hold them to it.
Thus, a team of young people from Jewish World Service has been dispatched to Iowa to buttonhole the candidates on the three issues on their agenda: Darfur, AIDS and early universal childhood education. They say that persistent questioning by their cohorts put John Edwards on record in support of a $50-billion five-year effort to fight AIDS.
Tactics vary. One outfit, Caucus4Priorities.org, distributes cookies at candidate appearances with the message on one side, “When candidates say what they will accomplish, ask ‘How you will pay for it.’ Tell them to cut Pentagon waste and create sensible budget priorities.” The other side of the cookie bears a colorful pie chart with the Pentagon taking up a big chunk of it.
AARP has joined with labor and business groups in a “Divided We Fail” campaign to “improve health care and financial security.” Campaign volunteers are difficult for the candidates to overlook when they show up at events wearing bright red “Divided We Fail” tee shirts and seat themselves prominently in front. AARP’s state president, John Hale, says, “Our vision is that each candidate visiting Iowa will hear the voices of AARP members.”
But so do the folks who believe “the 2008 campaign to change WAL-MART begins right now in Iowa,” and the “coalition of the United Steelworkers and America’s major steel companies” pressing “our presidential candidates to do more than just talk a good game and sit on their hands while China and other countries cheat on our trade laws with illegal subsidies, currency manipulation and dumping,” not to mention the inter-faith group that wants to know, “What civil rights would you ensure for people who are gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender.”
With all of that cacophony, you have to wonder if the messages cancel each other out and whether the candidates really listen. In any case, soon after the Jan. 14 caucuses, if not sooner, candidates will be dropping like flies and whatever promises they left in their wake may not be worth much. The head of one presidential candidate’s campaign told me that, in any event, unless an interest group is willing to supply workers for his campaign he pays little attention.
My own hunch is that efforts to piggy-back on the caucuses produce scant lasting pay-back, but it’s probably too much to expect activist Iowans to squander their “unique opportunity” to bask in the political spotlight and not try to throw their weight around.
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Gil Cranberg is a retired Editorial Page Editor of the Des Moines Register and Tribune.
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