Tag: politics

My life in politics is winding down as I turn to long delayed tasks and projects. When I returned to politics at the end of George W. Bush’s first term, I devoted time to everything political. I won an award as an activist. Hopeful candidates continue to see, in the database that tracks such things, I donated sizable amounts to congressional candidates. None of that time and money remains for politics as I stride down the inevitable path toward life’s end. There is too much else to do.

We Iowa Democrats were beaten hard during the last few general elections. While 2010 didn’t kill us, the return of Terry Branstad as governor that year was the beginning of the end. 2022 was the end with Republicans taking all but one statewide office, all four seats in the Congress and increasing their already large majorities in the state legislature. I support what Rita Hart, Zach Wahls and Jennifer Konfrst are doing to resuscitate the Democratic body politic, yet time and money are things of which I have little extra to spare. Basic living has to come first.

Unless we nominate a corrupt, lazy bastard, I expect to vote Democratic.

A generic life expectancy table says I have plus or minus 13 more years to live. It seems like a lot of time, yet if I engage in political campaigns, the days, months, and years will fly by like songbirds migrating back to Iowa in spring.

What is all this stuff that needs doing? I don’t know… we made a list. The bigger problem is thrill is gone from politics. When you get beat down three elections in a row, it is time let go of it so the next generation can make the world they envision. William Butler Yeats summed up where we are in a 1920 verse that continues to resonate:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Editor’s Note: The Iowa legislature is considering a law that requires our county and two others where state universities are located, to divide into districts where each district elects only one county supervisor. Currently, we elect all five supervisors at large. I tried to persuade my State Representative Brad Sherman to vote no should leadership bring this bill up.

Brad,

It is in every Johnson County voter’s interest to vote no on SF 443.

The population of Johnson County is such that creating districts would lock in Democratic supervisors in all five districts, which is exactly the opposite of what proponents of this bill want. I don’t know about you, but I want the freedom to vote for the best candidates for all five supervisor seats as the current at-large elections enable. Don’t impinge on my freedom!

The one recent supervisor election won by Republican John Etheredge was won by Republicans getting out the vote in the entire county in a low turnout election. So, there’s another reason to favor the at-large system. It elected the first Republican supervisor in many years.

Maintaining the current at-large supervisor election process is in our best interests. Republicans have the votes to do almost whatever they want. In this case, voting no on SF 443 is the right choice. Do what makes sense and is right if leadership brings the bill up for a vote. Vote no.

Thanks for reading my email. Make it a great day!

Regards, Paul
Paul Deaton
House District 91 Constituent

A letter-to the editor writer in the Cedar Rapids Gazette admonished readers this morning.

Wake up, Iowans, and get off the sidelines — because the next freedom they take away could be yours.

“LGBTQ+ bills in Legislature a sign of what’s to come,” by Karen Butler, Cedar Rapids Gazette, March 20, 2023.

Wake up call noted, yet it wasn’t really needed. For people who still follow local news, we are quite aware of Republican hegemony in our state government. We are aware of political attitudes toward trans-gender surgery and support because our state legislators quote chapter and verse from the New Testament in support of their belief God assigned biological sex at birth. Describing something they call “gender fluidity” as a political movement, Republicans oppose it. As they remind us, they won the 2022 midterm election. As the recent Selzer poll found, “Majorities of Iowans support Republican legislation to restrict instruction on LGBTQ topics in schools and ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.”

What are we going to do besides wake up since most of us never went to sleep?

The Iowa Democratic Party elected Rita Hart as chair on Jan. 28, and she has been steady at it answering that question. She appeared on the March 10 edition of Iowa Press where she outlined her plans to stay in conversations about presidential preference during the 2024 Democratic caucuses. She approached the party’s future in a thoughtful manner typical of her management style.

She recently sent a letter outlining what’s been happening since her election as Chair. Hart wrote, “My focus is squarely on how we can start winning elections again.” She introduced a “Mandate for Change” to facilitate winning elections:

• Reconnect with folks on the ground.
• Rebuild our fundraising base — and make it sustainable.
• Organize everywhere, all year.
• Improve our data and technology.
• Hold Republicans accountable in the media.

As part of the rollout of this new Democratic mandate, Hart appeared on Sunday, March 19, at Terry Trueblood Park in Iowa City at a fundraiser. Also speaking were Iowa Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls and Iowa House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst. I discontinued donating to political causes because with the increases in utilities, groceries, property taxes, and other retirement expenses and living costs, the $50 requested donation was more than our budget could afford. Wahls posted two photographs of the event on social media, so we know it happened. The event was lost in the noise of the Iowa Women’s Basketball team advancing to the Sweet Sixteen in the NCAA championship. I hope they raised a lot of money.

The problem Iowa Democrats have is we need to change how we relate to other members of society. While the five-point mandate Hart outlined includes essential requirements for the party infrastructure, we have missed the boat on messaging in media, and in relating to our neighbors. The latter is more critical, although media, especially radio and television, influences the electorate of which pollster Ann Selzer is taking the pulse.

Most of the people with whom I interact every day are Republicans. This is Iowa, and for the most part, that’s to be expected. I learned that lesson after the 1960 presidential campaign when Richard Nixon won Iowa. For those historically challenged, John F. Kennedy became president after that election. We Iowa Democrats took refuge in our national politics, not unlike what we did after the 2020 general election that brought us President Joe Biden. National politics doesn’t adequately help us win local elections.

I plan to do what I can to support Rita Hart in her newest role as party chair. She said, “I’ll level with you, we have a lot of work to do, and building up the infrastructure we need to win is not going to be easy…” We knew that, the same way we heard the wake up call from Karen Butler in her letter. There are limits to what we can do as individuals. There are few in my area interested in spending any time on politics, let alone building the Democratic Party. This doesn’t bode well for electing Democrats here, yet we Iowa Democrats are a tenacious bunch. I haven’t given up on Iowa, nor should readers.

Three bond measures on yesterday’s ballot passed with required majorities. 18.51 percent of registered voters participated in the election, according to preliminary results released last night by the county auditor.

A curious fact about the election was that 530 people signed the petition for the bond referendum and 632 voted for the bond. One presumes those 530 signers all voted for the ballot measures and made up the majority of votes that resulted in passage.

Based on following local elections for many years, I submit those 530 voters make up the core constituency in school board elections. Without those voters on board, no school board candidate is likely to win an election. While there have been challenges to the school board status quo during the last two cycles, the core constituency candidates won the elections. If an anti-establishment candidate does not recognize this basic aspect of school district politics, and develop a campaign to counter it, there is little chance they can beat the establishment.

Next up is a school board election in the fall when Adam Haluska and Jami Wolf’s current terms expire.

Here are the preliminary results of yesterday’s election. Click on the image to enlarge its size for better reading:

There is a school bond election today and I’m voting yes to the $25.5 million the school district wants. The bond might not have been necessary if Republicans in the Iowa legislature had been doing their job to support K-12 public schools instead of ditzing around with which bathroom people use and restricting access to books. I expect the bond to pass with a low-turnout vote.

Today in the Iowa Senate 11 bills are on the debate schedule released yesterday by Republican Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver. The governor’s education and state government reorganization bills are on the list. So are the bills with restrictions on which bathroom a person can use, and prohibiting trans-gender medical procedures for minors. There is also a ban on “woke” investing of public funds. I intend to lay low after we vote, run a few errands, and let the shit show commence and run its course. Republicans have the votes to pass whatever they deem appropriate, logic and compassion be damned. They are expected to pass most of these bills.

In the meanwhile, I plan to write until we have to leave. Like many people, I don’t see what benefit can be derived from our politics. At least, today that is true.

The monthly central committee meeting was followed by the off-year caucus. The evening was intended to start us toward re-organizing the county Democratic Party to win in 2024. It was a somewhat chaotic meeting. We are Democrats, so that’s to be expected.

The best part of the meeting was the reunion with people met during previous campaigns. We talked about our work to elect Royceann Porter as the first black county supervisor. We talked about walking the walk. We talked about shared experiences. It was good.

I have no illusions about what is possible. The meeting was a chance to get out of the house and discuss politics with others. For a while, I’ve been participating via video conference rather than in person. There was a different dynamic to being there. If we did something to make a difference in our politics, that would have been a surprise benefit.

Conversations in person remain difficult after a long withdrawal from society beginning during the coronavirus pandemic and continuing as I write my book. As the engines of conversation ignite, I’m not sure we are at our best when we converse in person with strangers.

One person ranted about doing more door knocking to activate people to work on politics. They had what I would describe as a driving personality. Drivers tend not to be the listening type and just want to assert their point as gospel. That never goes well.

Why did Democrats perform so abysmally? The answer was at the doors, for those who were listening.

I door knocked during the midterm campaign and found people home. They didn’t want to get involved with politics. Some weren’t even interested in voting. I called it apathy at first, but that’s not right. People are dealing with complex lives and pressure from all parts of society. It is work enough just to deal with getting by. Politicization of schools during the pandemic was particularly on people’s minds. Politics seems unlikely to resolve situations like this. So people turn their back on politics, even if it goes against their self-interest, even if it means striking out on their own. Political organizing in that environment was challenging. Little seems to have changed less than a year later.

Much was made at the meeting of an “aggressive plan to rebuild the Democratic Party in Iowa under the leadership of our new chair, Rita Hart.” Here’s the problem: Hart lost her last two elections. The race for the Congress was a nail-biter and our best chance to hold the First District Congressional seat. We came up short. No question Hart is a decent person and a loyal Democrat. It will take more than that to turn this Republican state around. There’s little hope with Christina Bohannan either. She lost the first Congressional race in the district 46 percent to 53 percent. She should have won. The Democratic Party needs winners to lead us out of the woods. They are in short supply.

I have confidence in Zach Wahls and Jennifer Kofrst who are our senate and house minority leaders. They are two people when we need a legion of activist leaders.

By the end of the caucus, we talked about building infrastructure to activate people to work on campaigns. We have large geographies of the county represented by Republicans. It seems like we should learn about those precincts and do what it takes to turn them Democratic. For Pete’s sake, Democratic voter registrations in the Johnson County part of House District 91 outnumbered Republicans. We still lost that half of the district. Consensus was lacking in our group about this focus.

People talked about how Johnson County goes blue every election and how we might help people in the rest of the state with our excess capacity. We too quickly take the winning portions of the county for granted and project that on conservative areas like ours. I mean, I worked on campaigns outside the county before. While we try to be helpful, we don’t always know the turf or the culture of those foreign canvasses. When it’s all hands on deck to win a special election, not all hands are of equal value. It makes me gag when I hear and read of the reference to Johnson County as being solid blue.

We are supposed to follow up with our conversation via video conference in a couple of weeks. I’d like to find a replacement for myself on the central committee. Even the most active in my precinct want no part of that. At the end of the day, now is the time to finish my book and that will have to be my focus for the next 18 months. Good news is the first in the nation Iowa precinct caucuses were cancelled and that will free up my time.

We have to start somewhere and off we go.