Category: Living in Society

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren suspended her campaign to become the Democratic nominee for president yesterday.

I will support the party’s nominee as he emerges from the summer convention. It chokes me up a bit to use the pronoun “he,” but I will support him.

More to the point, it became tiring to say the same thing over and over again during the last six months: “If Democrats don’t nominate a woman for president, we’ll never have a female president.”

While the statement is true — I don’t see Republicans nominating a women this cycle or for the foreseeable future — inherent misogyny among women and men prevented any of the highly skilled and credentialed female U.S. Senators from garnering the nomination.

To refresh our memories, they were (in the order in which they dropped out) Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. I had issues with each of them, and that’s to be expected. The good news is they all returned to the senate, and their senate seats were never in jeopardy in their current terms.

There were and are good reasons to consider the men in the race for the presidential nomination. There are also reasons why two men advanced beyond Super Tuesday unrelated to misogyny. There is something there though. An attitude, belief, outlook, or whatever, that informed people this cycle was not a woman’s turn to get the nomination. Maybe I have some of that inside me and just can’t recognize it.

So we go on.

Here’s the email Warren sent to me and countless others yesterday morning. I felt sad as I read this in the break room at the home, farm and auto supply store. I was sad enough to recognize the feeling. Elizabeth Warren won’t be president in 2020, or probably ever. It is reassuring she will be in the U.S. Senate and has never stopped working for us.

Paul,

I’m going to start with the news. I wanted you to hear it straight from me: today, I’m suspending our campaign for president.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything you have poured into this campaign.

I know that when we set out, this was not the news you ever wanted to hear. It is not the news I ever wanted to share. But I refuse to let disappointment blind me — or you — to what we’ve accomplished. We didn’t reach our goal, but what we have done together — what you have done — has made a lasting difference. It’s not the scale of the difference we wanted to make, but it matters — and the changes will have ripples for years to come.

What we have done — and the ideas we have launched into the world, the way we have fought this fight, the relationships we have built — will carry through for the rest of this election, and the one after that, and the one after that.

So think about it:

We have shown that it is possible to build a grassroots movement that is accountable to supporters and activists and not to wealthy donors — and to do it fast enough for a first-time candidate to build a viable campaign. Never again can anyone say that the only way that a newcomer can get a chance to be a plausible candidate is to take money from corporate executives and billionaires. That’s done.

We have shown that it is possible to inspire people with big ideas, possible to call out what’s wrong and to lay out a path to make this country live up to its promise.

We have shown that race and justice — economic justice, social justice, environmental justice, criminal justice — are not an afterthought, but are at the heart of everything that we do.

We have shown that a woman can stand up, hold her ground, and stay true to herself — no matter what.

We have shown that we can build plans in collaboration with the people who are most affected.

This campaign became something special, and it wasn’t because of me. It was because of you. I am so proud of how you fought this fight alongside me: you fought it with empathy and kindness and generosity — and of course, with enormous passion and grit.

Some of you may remember that long before I got into electoral politics, I was asked if I would accept a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was weak and toothless. And I replied that my first choice was a consumer agency that could get real stuff done, and my second choice was no agency and lots of blood and teeth left on the floor. In this campaign, we have been willing to fight, and, when necessary, we left plenty of blood and teeth on the floor. I can think of one billionaire who has been denied the chance to buy this election.

And we did all of this without selling access for money. Together, you and 1,250,000 people gave more than $112 million dollars to support this campaign. And we did it without selling one minute of my time to the highest bidder. People said that would be impossible. But you did that.

Together, we built a grassroots campaign that had some of the most ambitious organizing targets ever — and then we turned around and surpassed them.

Our staff and volunteers on the ground knocked on over 22 million doors across the country. We made 20 million phone calls and sent more than 42 million texts to voters. That’s truly astonishing. It is.

We also advocated for fixing our rigged system in a way that will make it work better for everyone.

A year ago, people weren’t talking about a two-cent wealth tax, Universal Child Care, cancelling student loan debt for 43 million Americans while reducing the racial wealth gap, breaking up big tech, or expanding Social Security. And now they are. And because we did the work of building broad support for all of those ideas across this country, these changes could actually be implemented by the next president.

A year ago, people weren’t talking about corruption, and they still aren’t talking about it enough — but we’ve moved the needle, and a hunk of our anti-corruption plan is already embedded in a House bill that is ready to go when we get a Democratic Senate.

And we also did it by having fun and by staying true to ourselves. We ran from the heart. We ran on our values. We ran on treating everyone with respect and dignity. But it was so much more. Four-hour selfie lines and pinky promises with little girls. A wedding at one of our town halls. And we were joyful and positive through all of it. We ran a campaign not to put people down, but to lift them up — and I loved pretty much every minute of it.

I may not be in the race for president in 2020, but this fight — our fight — is not over. And our place in this fight has not ended.

Because for every young person who is drowning in student debt, for every family struggling to pay the bills on two incomes, for every mom worried about paying for prescriptions or putting food on the table, this fight goes on.

For every immigrant and African American and Muslim and Jewish person and Latinx and transwoman who sees the rise in attacks on people who look or sound or worship like them, this fight goes on.

For every person alarmed by the speed with which climate change is bearing down upon us, this fight goes on.

And for every American who desperately wants to see our nation healed and some decency and honor restored to our government, this fight goes on.

When I voted on Tuesday at the elementary school down the street, a mom came up to me. She said she has two small children, and they have a nightly ritual. After the kids have brushed teeth and read books and gotten that last sip of water and done all the other bedtime routines, they do one last thing before the two little ones go to sleep: Mama leans over them and whispers, “Dream big.” And the children together reply, “Fight hard.”

So if you leave with only one thing, it must be this: Choose to fight only righteous fights, because then when things get tough — and they will — you will know that there is only option ahead of you: nevertheless, you must persist.

You should be so proud of what we’ve done together — what you have done over this past year.

Our work continues, the fight goes on, and big dreams never die.

Thanks for being a part of this,

Elizabeth

I’ve been saying for some time that Super Tuesday — the day 14 states, American Samoa, and Democrats Abroad hold presidential primary elections and caucuses — is the decider for who is viable and who is not in the Democratic presidential primary race.

After mixed results in four early states, the field is down to four main contenders: Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. After today’s voting we’ll see if Bloomberg and Warren remain viable. We’ll see if Bloomberg’s late entry coupled with spending hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money will get him in the game. We’ll also see if Warren’s ground game of political organizers is relevant to our modern politics. The expectation from national media and polling is the race will sort into a confrontation between so-called establishment or moderate Democrats backing Joe Biden, and the non-Democrat progressive Bernie Sanders. I suppose readers know all of that by 4:20 a.m. on Super Tuesday when I’m writing this. I hope there is a clear winner after votes are tabulated.

My plan for Monday did not include dealing with friends and neighbors freaking out over the possibility of a Sanders nomination. What I’m hearing in Big Grove Township is mostly fear that if nominated, Sanders would lose the general election, that he wouldn’t gain the support needed to prevail. Folks were urging support for Joe Biden, who is an equally flawed candidate. My chips were all on the table long before yesterday. The Iowa Caucuses are over and I stood with Elizabeth Warren with no regrets. I made another financial contribution to Warren’s campaign last night and drank a shot of whisky over ice cubes made from the Silurian Aquifer. What a day!

If we review who’s left in the Democratic primary, the top tier is comprised of septuagenarians I ruled out early in the process. I felt we needed new faces to breathe fresh air into the meandering beast the Democratic Party had become. Regretfully, none of the new faces who entered the race had staying power. Some of them, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke, rallied around Biden last night in Dallas, Texas.

In addition to it being freak out Monday by the lake, a number of high profile Biden endorsements were released in advance of today’s voting, including Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer and Susan Rice. Biden is winning the endorsement game with eight current U.S. Senators, 21 former senators, and more than 50 current U.S. Representatives. A question we have to ask ourselves is how much do endorsements matter in 2020? They certainly contributed to the freak out phenomenon going on around here.

When asked, my friends said they would support and work for whoever is the Democratic nominee at the national convention this summer. If it’s Biden or Sanders, they are concerned about losing the general election. Nontheless, to a person they will support our nominee. I don’t know if I talked any of them off the ceiling yesterday because this freak out is not about reason or logic.

What was disappointing was the statement one person made that this was not the year for a woman to win the presidency. If not now, then when, I asked. If we don’t nominate a female for president, there will never be a female president. Their arguments, based on fear of losing the general election, did not hold water.

Maybe Trump was right to focus on Biden in the first place. If that’s who we choose over reasonable and serious objections, Republicans have a well developed plan to win against him. That’s not a case for nominating someone else, I’m just saying.

Today voters will decide who moves forward. It’s now or never for Bloomberg and Warren, assuming Sanders and Biden have reasonable showings. The worst that could happen is the electorate is not of a single mind about who should be the nominee. That would drag the process out for the rest of March when we could be consolidating around a candidate. That’s a flaw in Iowa going first: in 2016 and 2020 we did not produce a clear winner.

I’m ready to get beyond Super Tuesday as soon as the votes are counted. There’s a lot to be done in the coming months and we need to get after it. Hopefully the freak out will abate and we’ll know where we stand. Perhaps that’s too reasonable a wish in the new era of politics.

On Saturday, Feb. 22, I met with U.S. Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield at a coffee shop in Coralville, immediately after her appearance at the Linn County Phoenix Club. She arrived on time and was thoughtful in her answers to my questions. She got the job done. The following interview is transcribed from an audio recording. Any mistakes are the author’s. Greenfield began with an opening statement.

THERESA GREENFIELD: I worked my entire career in small business from being a community planner for about fourteen years with neighborhood groups, planning commissions and city councils — helping in that local government office.

I worked for a civil engineering company and was a consultant for either a township that didn’t have staff, or maybe a city that had extra projects they just didn’t have enough staff to get that work done. I loved it.

From there I went into home building and eventually became the president of a small home building company in Iowa. That was fun through the recession, until it wasn’t any more fun. We sold the assets at the end of 2011.

I became unemployed like a lot of people in the recession, then hired on with a commercial real estate company. I most recently was their president. I recently resigned to focus full time on this U.S. Senate race.

I’m pretty excited we just kicked off two things, beginning with our “Hear it from the heartland tour.”

We have been intentional about going places. The number one topic I hear about is health care. We began at Boone County Hospital which is an independent hospital, not part of a big system. We just learned a lot about their challenges, the cool things they are doing too, and how they are integrated into their community. Health care is the number one issue that I hear about and they just reiterated all of that.

We also then just put out the first of what I call our “jobs to get done” agenda. Because I grew up on a farm, and that’s what my parents always said, “No boy jobs, no girl jobs, just jobs to get done.” I think we need to think about some of this work in those kinds of terms.

The first job that needs to get done, for me kind of the root of what’s wrong with Washington and the difference between Senator Ernst and myself, is big money in politics. Our first job to get done is end political corruption and end dark money in politics. Bring some transparency to it, end Citizens United, stop the revolving door of lobbyists. If you’re a senator you can’t sit on a corporate board at the same time. It might seem like natural things that we should be doing as pubic servants, but codify it and try to bring an end to that.

BLOG FOR IOWA: How do you view your prospects for beating Joni Ernst?

GREENFIELD: I view them as really good.

BFIA: Why is that?

GREENFIELD: First off, I grew up rural and I think Iowans want Washington to work like our home towns work. You know, we come together and get something done. There’s a lot of frustration.

Senator Ernst ran to be independent, and different, and she was going to make ‘em squeal, and she’s just taken a real hard turn to the right and votes 90-plus percent of the time with Mitch McConnell and party leaders, really leaving Iowans behind on issues that we care about whether you have an R or a D behind your name, or an N, or you don’t vote.

Things like health care. Voting to end and take away your protections for preexisting conditions. Prescription drug costs haven’t come down. Voting to end the ACA which by the way, allowed Medicaid expansion, which we did here in the state… and that has kept so many of our hospital lights on.

Now I grew up rural and with my parents, we got caught up in the farm crisis. My parents had to sell their hogs and their crop dusting business and never farm again. After that the school closed, grocery store closed, these are stories that we hear around the Midwest, and they drive 20-30 minutes to a grocery store, faith community, hospital, health care. If their little hospital closes they’re going to be going 50 miles, who knows? Or they won’t get the health care they need. These are real issues. You need health care? It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat.

BFIA: Would you say that’s your sharpest contrast with Ernst, on health care? I mean would you really make a difference?

GREENFIELD: Yeah. I will go back to the reason about winning. Her favorable rating is now down to about 39 percent in the state. So for me that just says Iowans aren’t loyal to her, and they are going to take a look at a good, strong Democratic candidate. That tells me Iowans are very open and this race is wide open. She does not have a lock on the race.

You know our differences definitely will (make a difference). I’m a “get ‘er done” person who has gotten things done. I want to focus on the things that most Iowans worry about. Health care is number one. Education. Folks worry about the economy and jobs here in Iowa. With net farm income being down 75 percent since 2013, I’ll tell you what, as I travel around this state, people have concerns. And you put on top of that the 85 ethanol wavers. Our farm economy, our manufacturing, our main street folks are very worried and I hear about that.

BFIA: What is your reaction to the president’s recent announcement that he would create additional subsidies for farmers hurt by trade policy? What are you hearing on the campaign trail from farmers who may have gotten some of that money?

GREENFIELD: Farmers I talk to want their markets back, that’s what they want. They want the future. They don’t want to leave a legacy of liability for their family with high debt. They want to leave a legacy of prosperity. They see continuing to get the markets back and grow those markets is what they want to do, and I get it. I grew up hard-working on the farm and that’s what farmers like to do: get up early, stay late, get the job done, and they want to earn a fair profit to do that.

BFIA: So you don’t see the impact, you see a different picture. What you see is the guarantee by the administration not having the desired effect because people want their markets back, people want to do the work, get paid for the work. Did I get that right?

GREENFIELD: Yes they do. But I’ll tell you what, the situation we’re in: bankruptcy rates are at an eight year high right now. It’s personal for me. When my parents had to sell the crop-dusting business, their hogs, and get out of farming, I went to auctions where families’ contents of the farm were put in boxes on hay racks and auctioned off for a buck or two, and no farm family should have to go through that again. Particularly when we can make a difference. That’s where I’m at.

BFIA: How did you decide to get into politics?

GREENFIELD: That’s a great question. I grew up in a little town, Bricelyn, Minnesota, right on the Minnesota/Iowa border. My parents were DFLers Democratic Farm Labor members. My Mom was the one who always marched in parades, went to county meetings, we door knocked. We didn’t phone call back then though because we had a party line… no robo calling. So it’s always been in my blood to be active in a certain way.

But then I got busy raising a family. I had some hope-stubbing experiences for sure. As my kids got a little older I was able to spent more time phone calling, door knocking. I’ve been a little active.

Remember I spent about 14 years working in community planning at the local legislative level — so planning commissions, neighborhoods, city council meetings, all of that. I saw potholes that needed to be fixed and filled — they aren’t Republican or Democratic — there was a problem that needed to be solved communities come together to do that. I’ll tell you I just decided we need some new leaders.

People talk to me all the time about wanting to end the divisiveness in Washington. We do it by making decisions like we do in our home towns, you know, where we come together. So it’s motivated me.

I really got into this race for hard work and family. I carry their struggles, their heart, and their effort to earn a living wage and provide for their families and have their American dream. For me it comes from being widowed at the age of 24. My first husband was a lineman for the power company. He was an IBEW member… we’re a union family. I will always stand tall with the unions. That’s for sure. They built the middle class and I don’t forget why my lights come on and who delivers my mail. I know those are union jobs.

When Rod died of a work place accident and I became a single mom — a 13-month old and another one on the way — I wouldn’t be here today without Social Security Survivor Benefits and hard-earned union benefits. I didn’t get here by myself. I certainly had family and friends and my home town and community.

Today people are struggling. They need leaders that know and appreciate what hard-working families are going through. That’s not what Senator Ernst does. She stands up and goes in line with her large corporate donors and leaves Iowans behind. So I got in the race.

She also talks about wanting to privatize Social Security and cut Medicare and Medicaid. The current Republican budget is very hard on those programs. I’ll tell you what. I wouldn’t be here without them. So this feisty farm girl, I’m getting in the fight.

BFIA: What were the lessons learned from your race in Iowa’s Third District?

GREENFIELD: What I already knew, but it became clear to me with the campaign for congress, is that there is a moral element to leadership. Voters and Iowans they want leaders who will do it right and they won’t look away from what’s wrong and they won’t put their own political gains first. And that’s what I did. When my campaign manager came to me a told me he had forged signatures on my petitions to be on the ballot I knew what the right thing was to do and we did it. I didn’t get a chance to be on the ballot at the end of the day but I can hold my head high and live in my community and respect and uphold our Democracy and election system. You continue to learn, and doing what is right is always right.

BFIA: Why does your experience best qualify you to win the primary?

GREENFIELD: Well it’s a combination of experience. It’s also a combination of doing the work and being able to build the team. Nobody wins by themselves; I say that every time I’m asked. I am running to do a job which is to represent people. When you bring them into my campaign with me and listen to them, that’s how we’re going to win. We have built an incredibly strong team in house but then have earned the endorsement of many, many of our unions AFSCME, IBEW, and others representing 65,000 union members in the state. We earned the endorsement and partnership of so many elected leaders around the state, including Christie Vilsack, Sally Pederson, Congressman Loebsack, and Congresswoman Finkenauer.

What I’ve done is really kept my head down and focused on building that team. I do it by going out and telling my story. Because I think Iowans want to vote for somebody, they want to see themselves in that person. They want to trust that you’ll do the right thing for them. May not always agree on a policy decision, but they know my character and they know my integrity, and they’re going to vote accordingly. We’re going to go out and compete in every county, in every precinct for every vote.

BFIA: If you lose the primary or the general would you consider a run against Senator Grassley if he runs again?

GREENFIELD: Oh boy! I haven’t even thought about that. Here’s what I can tell you though. If I lose the primary I will do everything I can to get our candidate elected.

(Editor’s note: The interview covered additional issues, including Greenfield’s approach to the climate crisis, auditing the Pentagon, foreign policy, and the 2020 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference. For more information about Greenfield’s views on issues, click here).