Mahaffey told the Washington, D.C.,-based newspaper he plans to make his decision by Labor Day.

The former state Republican Party chairman suggested that family considerations had deterred him from again pursuing a seat in Congress since his try in 1996. But with his youngest son now going into his junior year in college, Mahaffey — a lawyer in the small city of Montezuma and part-time Poweshiek County attorney — said he is “seriously considering” challenging Boswell again.

He also noted that the momentous debates and decisions being made these days, following the 2008 election of Democrat Barack Obama as president, have piqued his interest in rejoining the political fray. “The thought of being part of that process has made me think about it again,” Mahaffey said.

The original Boswell-Mahaffey showdown was over a Congressional seat left vacant by Republican Jim Ross Lightfoot, who left office to unsuccessfully challenge Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin.

Boswell won 49.3 percent to 47.6 percent after a campaign that drew national attention in its early stages — more for its tenor than the substance. Mahaffey and Boswell  initially said voters were sick of negative politics and agreed not to attack each other on the campaign trail or on the airwaves.

As the race came down to the wire, though, there were complaints that voters were having difficulty distinguishing between the two and the race got significantly more abrasive, with Boswell trying to link Mahaffey to the then-unpopular U.S. House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, and Mahaffey charging Boswell was a traditional liberal who favored higher taxes and bigger government.

The race took place before a round of redistricting that saw Iowa lose a Congressional seat and Boswell forced to move to Des Moines in order to run for re-election. In 1996, the 3rd was a sprawling 27-county, mostly rural district that ran the entire southern part of the state across but also included college towns Ames and Grinnell. The district had about 118,000 registered Democrats and about 113,000 registered Republicans.

Today, the district is made up of only 12 counties and includes the state capitol and Democratic stronghold of Des Moines. More than 65 percent of the district’s voters live in Polk County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 40,000 registered voters.

Mahaffey’s name has also been mentioned as a potential gubernatorial candidate in 2010.

Sort of.

With a cardboard Boswell cutout in hand, Schmett discusses gas prices, the closure of the Maytag factory in Newton and the mortgage crisis, all the while insisting the Democrat is running on a platform of “it’s all Bush’s fault.”

Schmett has $28,769 cash on hand as of his last filing with the Federal Election Commission on June 30. Boswell has  $393,852. So don’t expect to see this ad air during your nightly newscast. But, as he points out in the ad, Boswell wouldn’t debate his opponent in the Democratic primary, so Schmett won’t likely get a chance to debate Boswell before election day. If that’s the case, this might be as close as he gets.

So far, YouTube statistics indicate that Schmett’s Web video has been viewed only 123 times.

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.”