U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin says he’s an unabashed supporter of U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., as Barack Obama’s running mate. Meanwhile, Harkin, who ran for the presidency himself in 1992, says “realism” holds that Hillary Clinton has little chance of making the cut for vice presidential candidate as “latent” sexism and racism would give such a ticket perhaps too steep a cultural hill to climb.

Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois and the Democratic presidential candidate, has yet to make the vice presidential candidate decision, but with the Democratic National Convention starting in a week, the choice is imminent. Harkin elaborated on his pitch for Dodd during an interview with Iowa Independent over the weekend.

“Dodd is my No. 1 pick but I don’t know where it’s going,” Harkin said.

During the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines in late 2007, the Iowa Independent noticed the connection between Dodd and Obama and listed Dodd at the top of a running mate ranking story.

Harkin said veteran legislator Dodd knows how to move bills through Congress, which will be important to an Obama administration facing international issues.

“He’s going to need a vice president that can help him get his legislative package through the Congress,” Harkin said. “And I can’t think of anyone who can do it better than Chris Dodd.”

Another big consideration, Harkin said, is that Dodd is well-liked by Republicans and Democrats.

“He knows how to work across party lines as evidenced by the fact that he just got this big foreclosure bill done,” Harkin said.

Harkin said Dodd also would be a major asset for the Obama campaign in the Latino-rich Southwest — a region many analysts believe will be decisive in the presidential race.

“He (Dodd) speaks fluent Spanish,” Harkin said. “The Hispanic community loves him. That would be a great outreach for Barack Obama.”

Dodd developed his Spanish-language skills during a stint in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic as a young man. During one campaign stop in Carroll as a presidential candidate last fall, Dodd conducted a video-taped bilingual interview with the Daily Times Herald and La Prensa, a Carroll-based Western Iowa Spanish-language newspaper.

In terms of other candidates thought to be in the Obama veepstakes, Harkin said he strongly doubts U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton will be the vice presidential selection.

“It’s realism,” Harkin said. “I know full well that if Hillary had gotten the nomination she would never have picked Obama, and if he gets it, he’s not going to pick her for a very simple reason: there’s a lot of latent racism and sexism in this country. It’s hard enough for a woman to win. Then if you add an African American on the ticket, or vice versa, if you have an African-American running and you add a woman on, you add racism and sexism together. That’s a pretty steep hill to climb.”

Tanya Austin was an Arab linguist in military intelligence serving with the U.S. Army. Describing the situation in Iraq, she said, “It’s not a war anymore; its an occupation.” She is a student at Illinois State University pursuing a degree in Middle Eastern studies.

After blowing out her knee, Austin described the treatment she was given from the Veterans Health Administration (also known as the VA). Because she was denied orthopedic care, she paid for knee surgery out of her own pocket and was eventually medically discharged.

Austin said she had thoughts of suicide during her subsequent treatment and said, “The VA way of dealing with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is to drug you.”

She served from 2002-04 and testified at the recent Winter Soldier hearings in Silver Spring, Md.

Iowa City native and Iraq War veteran Andrew Duffy suffers from PTSD, but that didn’t stop him from founding the Iowa City chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Duffy is still serving in the Iowa Army National Guard and said he has taken some abuse for opposing the War in Iraq. He filed congressional complaints for harassment he said he has received.

Duffy served as a medic at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison from 2005-06. He listed many factors that have led to his opposition to the war,including improper equipment, insufficient training, bad intelligence, poor cultural training and overt anti-Iraqi racism.

In this video, he discusses the racist terminology and attitudes used by fellow soldiers stationed in Iraq:

The event was part of the University of Iowa Anti-War Committee’s “Peace Week,” which continues through Saturday.

Also on the panel were Navy vet Nathan Peld and Air Force vet Jason Munford, who raised a conscientious objection to military service and was discharged.

Our congressman the other day revealed very clearly the prejudice and cowardice behind his positioning on immigration.

Steve King is a racist.

There’s no doubting this anymore.

There’s no questioning it any longer.At a Washington, D.C., meeting with The Greater Des Moines Partnership — an event attended by Carroll Daily Times Herald General Manager Ann Wilson — King offered up a plan for a worker shortage that will ensue if the Iowa congressman and his jackboot clone from Colorado, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, get their way and deport anyone in America who has ever had a taco.

How would we deal with the worker shortage in the western Iowa towns that have relied on Hispanics since the Farm Crisis of the 1980s?

More Iowa babies are the solution, King told the Greater Des Moines Partnership, according to the reporting of longtime Des Moines Register D.C. journalist Jane Norman.

“What about the `grow your own’ plan,’” King said.

In other words, white people need to have more kids. Let’s get busy, congressman. Puncture all the condoms between the Missouri and Mississippi and lower the age of consent to 14 for anyone with skin prone to sunburn. As for the darkies, give them some extra hours in the packing plant and bad Viagra.

King’s racism is now in plain view, naked in the stark light of day.

In the event with the Iowa group, the Kiron Republican added that the birthrate is so low in Europe that “western Europeans themselves are not having babies fast enough to keep their population up, and because they created ethnic enclaves, as opposed to assimilation, Europe isn’t going to be the same Europe we knew,” reports the Register.

This is not about economics and the rule of law for King. This is about white and brown.

If the Hispanics, many legal, many not, who have played a role in western Iowa’s economy were white German Catholics here without papers, King would stamp their fast-tracked citizenships himself.

King isn’t worried about the illegal immigration. He fears a Latinization of Iowa in much the same way Protestants detested his Catholic forefathers.

But rather than stand with brown-skinned Catholic brethren, King has appropriated the 19th-century American Protestant playbook of hate and language of exclusion.

This isn’t the first time King has sounded like an early 20th-century proponent of eugenics. I’m sure if given the chance King would eagerly measure the head sizes of various races and meticulously chart out the inches with his thoughts on their shortcomings. Perhaps he may even craft a model with action figures similar to the child’s play that was his embarrassing display in an immigration speech on the U.S. House floor last year when he designed his own wall for the Mexican border — complete with electrical cattle wire to charge any colored climbers.

Last year, in interviews and during a speech before the Carroll Rotary Club, King said Iowa needs a “fertility” plan.

Former Republican Lt. Gov. Art Neu of Carroll asked the visiting King to elaborate on references the GOP congressman has made in the media to a “fertility” program King contends could plug a void now filled with immigrant labor.

“I gave them a whole list of things that we could do,” King said. “There are nations out there that encourage a greater birthrate.”

King singled out Singapore, a nation King said has had some privacy issues at the root of its birth-rate problems.

He said the government of Singapore came up with the following plan to increase pregnancies: “We think you ought to put newspapers in your car (windows) to get more privacy.”

Added King, “I remember those things when I read them. They kind of stand out in my mind.”

King repeatedly insisted that race doesn’t play a role in his thinking about immigration or anything else. That’s in spite of King’s not-so-subtle messages that more of the right kind of people need to be having kids — people, ironically, who are a lot like me: white, Protestant, former fraternity guys who can break 80 on a lot of golf courses.

In fact, King once told me he’s so colorblind that he tells his staff not to be racist.

That’s sort of like telling someone to be funny. If you have to say “be funny or be tolerant,” it’s safe to say there won’t be many laughs — or much human decency either.

I speak, of course, of the ugliest term in the English language: the N-word.

The slur is freighted with our history, carrying with it centuries of subordination and cruelty and just about all that is bad with man.

It's one of those words that, once spit, can't be taken back. Using it is like having unprotected sex: after the N-word is in the equation there's no subtracting it.

Having been raised in a mixed-race home in which intolerance was considered something of an original sin, and having read and worked and opined on issues of race, I thought I "got it," for the most part.

I've always known my white skin is armor against the slings and arrows visited upon those with darker hues. Still, I thought, I could understand a little, feel their pain, if not totally, then in some sense.

But, several days ago, I learned again what the N-word really meant, the power it holds, the fear it inspires, the ugliness it ushers into an evening, a lifetime even.

Click here to read the rest of Iowa Independent fellow Douglas Burns' column in the Carroll Daily Times Herald.