Tag: politics

I am tired and borderline sick.

Tired because I didn’t get to sleep Monday night until 1 a.m. Tuesday morning, messaging back and forth at midnight with a local reporter.

Sick because a good friend was sick, came to our Democratic precinct caucus, and spent a few minutes with me.

The Big Grove Democratic precinct caucus was some fun and a lot of what I expected. I will provide analytics in a future post but here’s what was important: attendees were engaged and respectful. While everyone didn’t get the outcome they wanted, many did.

This was my first time as caucus chair for a large group. In 2016 I was Hillary Clinton’s precinct captain. In 2012 I was chair of Cedar and Graham precincts in a consolidated caucus. In 2008 and 2004 I was caucus secretary. Because of years of public speaking experience dating back to my time in the military I felt comfortable at the microphone and dealing with issues that arose during the event.

I had a great team of volunteers for secretary, registration and crowd control. We started registration a little after 6 p.m. and the line was gone a couple of minutes before our 7 p.m. starting time. I estimated 50 minutes for check in during my planning, which was about right.

Many pixels have been spilled about the new reporting application used by the Iowa Democratic Party. It took me a couple of days to figure out the process, however, by Monday morning I was running test scenarios to familiarize myself with it. I reported our results using it at about 10 p.m. without any issue.

Tuesday I was contacted about a potential on-air interview about the reporting application. MSNBC Field Producer Dan Gallo had obtained a copy of an email thread in which county caucus chairs discussed the application and I was on it. I phoned and told him my story. It turned out to be a nothing burger because from a user standpoint, it worked as expected. That’s pretty boring for television and the on-air interview didn’t happen.

Most of my friends who were caucus chairs in other precincts were tired Tuesday as well. The six and a half hours from arrival at the high school to returning home from turning in my materials to the county party weren’t long. They were intense. Recovery will take a few days.

Tuesday I gave an interview to a student from Northwestern about the caucus. He asked a couple of questions about the application which I said worked from my end. He asked about all the news stories and the then unreported results. I said it’s not my fault the national media had plane tickets booked to New Hampshire and a filing deadline they couldn’t meet. They may have planned to write about the outcomes, but the outcome they decided to write about became there were no results. The narrative was a bucket of malarkey.

People said they wanted more transparency with what went on at the Iowa caucuses. The state party worked toward that end. The new process was complicated and is taking more time for state-wide results to be tabulated. It is transparent. What do you want? This isn’t Burger King where you can have it your way.

The count of presidential preference groups was accurate. We counted four times in our precinct, and reported results in the application and on paper. If it takes more time to report aggregated results accurately, so be it. Accuracy and the paper trail are what matters more than feeding a media narrative.

Attendees in our precinct watched the process unfold and when it was finished, ratified the numbers and slate of delegates to the county convention and our new central committee members. To a person people with whom I spoke left caucus with a feeling they had contributed to the Democratic process. In the end that’s what the Iowa caucuses are about and will continue to be about for as long as we hold them.

I’m feeling better as I write. This campaign is finished and another has already begun as our eyes turn toward the general election. Being tired and sick will pass, it is passing as a new day begins.

I spent most of the last three days understanding and preparing for my role as chair of our 2020 Iowa precinct caucus tonight. I’m ready.

According to the voter rolls we have 462 registered Democrats in Big Grove precinct. More are expected to register at the caucus. Our party affiliations will likely decline from the 562 we had in 2008.

We never know who will show up. In 2008 we had 247, a record number. With the loss of Democrats in the precinct I expect less. We won’t know until registration closes after everyone in line at 7 p.m. is checked in.

I’m seeing a couple of articles saying you shouldn’t “vote” for Elizabeth Warren because then Biden wins. Malarkey!

Reasons people support Elizabeth Warren as I do are complicated. For one night we should stand with our candidate, the one we want to advance in this way too long nomination process, and let the chips fall.

By mid March we’ll know who are the contenders for the nomination. Iowa will have faded into the background. If our candidate is not viable tonight, that’s another thing… one that will be decided in the dynamics of those rooms.

Since I began preparation for my role I’ve been thinking about what Obama said: Respect. Empower. Include.

Those are my guideposts in the crazy politics of the Iowa caucuses.

When Eddie Mauro is campaigning around Iowa he considers the communities in which he finds himself.

“Every time I drive into a community I look at places where I say we help insure that,” Mauro said. “We help insure that restaurant; we help insure that daycare…”

As president and chief executive of UIG, a Des Moines-based insurance company he founded, Mauro and his team of 70 people provide property and casualty insurance to businesses in all 99 Iowa counties. He’s also one of five candidates for U.S. Senate in the June 2 Democratic primary election.

On Thursday, Jan. 16, Blog for Iowa interviewed Mauro at a coffee shop in Coralville. When I arrived he was standing at a table with his hands on his hips. He appeared to be stretching after sitting in his vehicle for a while. He had another stop in Waterloo after our interview so it would be a long day of campaigning. This post reflects a transcription of his responses to my questions.

In addition to running a successful insurance company, Mauro spent a lifetime in community organizing and activism. Mauro is a founding member of AMOS (A Midwest Organizing Strategy) which “seek(s) to channel individual action into a responsible and powerfully organized force for the common good,” according to the AMOS website. He also worked as a coach in a number of small Iowa towns.

BFIA: What does being a community organizer mean to you?

MAURO: I started doing service work back to (when) I was 14 years old. Catholic Worker in Des Moines was forming then. I started getting involved with the homeless at an early age and have been involved with the homeless community ever since. As a teacher we used to take kids out in the mornings. We would crawl under bridges, and abandoned buildings, or wooded areas, and we would serve the homeless. We had a Saturday program as well with the produce in the impoverished neighborhoods of Des Moines. I’m still doing homeless work.

BFIA: In terms of community service, what are you most proud of?

MAURO: Proud of?

BFIA: What do you look at and say, “boy this was really good.”

MAURO: I’m not proud of any of it. I feel good that God’s given me the wherewithal to step up and help. I do a project in Tanzania called Water Systems of Tanzania. I go over there usually a couple of times a year. It’s a phenomenal project. We created a non profit called the Purify Project. We have some water quality issues here in this country for sure. People are dying every day in Africa. So it’s a good project.

BFIA: Why are you running for U.S. Senate?

MAURO: There are a lot of reasons for running. Primarily that Iowans deserve a leader today to address the problems facing this country with the urgency and the courage that’s demanded in this moment in history. We don’t get that out of Joni Ernst. We have a United States Senate that is broken and under performing.

BFIA: How do you deal with Joni Ernst’s popularity? She was popular in 2014, she continues to be popular.

MAURO: First of all her popularity has been sliding as people are starting to sense that a lot of that was a ruse. She’s been doing a good job of talking, misleading, and conning, and tricking people. It’s starting to become evident that she hasn’t done anything meaningful for Iowans. In fact, she hasn’t even been a senator for Iowans, (but) a senator for special interests and big industry, for her buddies the Koch brothers who created her, who she’s fiercely loyal to. The people in the state deserve better than that. I don’t think she’s overly popular here. I think there’s a lot of holes in that popularity. We are going to talk about she’s voted to take health care away from Iowans five times.

BFIA: I’m seeing people who don’t care about that and are willing to set her voting record aside and say, “she’s our girl.” There’s a plain acceptance of her votes on issues.

MAURO: Those issues are real, Paul. To go out to people and say, ‘Yep, you really like her. Well why do you like her?’ Are you aware of what she’s done for the healthcare? Are you aware of what she’s done to women’s rights? Are you aware what she’s done to turn her back on vulnerable women who are domestic violence survivors? Are you aware of what she’s doing to our public schools, the future for our kids and our teachers? Are you aware of what she’s done for rural Iowa, of the lack of courage that she’s displayed when it comes to the renewable fuel standard, and how she’s cow-tied to the president?

It’s not enough to say all the bad things she did, you have to very well stand for something. So I’m out preaching what I think are strong progressive bona fides while I talk about what we can be doing in rural Iowa. What we can be doing on Main Streets and town squares that I do business with now for over twenty years. What we can do with rural farmers to really give them a strong P&L and balance sheet, something they are yearning for. While at the same time tackling climate change. So we’re going to go out and communicate that we deserve better and we can do better than what we’ve gotten out of Joni Ernst who has not been a senator for this state.

We go out and sell that message wide and far, we’re convinced our strategy shows us that we win this race by five to seven points.

~ First published on Blog for Iowa

It was one degree below zero when I woke at 4:30 a.m.

It has now been 24 hours of freezing temperatures and perhaps the beginning of an extended streak. If this pans out I can prune fruit trees assured of their dormancy.

That’s what winter is about here in Big Grove Township.

The Iowa precinct caucuses are coming up on Feb. 3. I’m not ready to chair my precinct yet but will be in the coming two weeks. It’s surprising how much my view of the caucuses has changed since I became politically active again.

Our family walked into the 2004 caucuses together but weren’t sure John Kerry was the right choice. Our daughter brought along a copy of the local newspaper with a candidate comparison in it. In the end we all stood in Kerry’s corner.

After Kerry lost the general election I decided to do my part to regain the presidency for Democrats in the 2008 general election. I met Barack Obama in the rope line at the 2006 Harkin Steak Fry and wasn’t impressed. I ended up devoting many hours to supporting John Edwards, beginning with an October 2006 event at the public library. On caucus night Obama had the most people in the room. Hillary Clinton and Edwards had the same number so the caucus chair flipped a coin to determine who would get another delegate. Team Hillary won the game of chance.

Edwards placed second in the statewide delegate count and his staff dispersed to three other early states: New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. Edwards ended up with one elected delegate when the decision reached the second district convention. It was clear then he would not win the nomination. When Obama formally won the nomination at the Democratic National Convention I supported him.

In 2012 Obama was the presumed nominee and I ended up leading the caucus for two precincts in nearby Graham and Cedar townships instead of my own. I remember we watched a closed circuit television address from the president. There was dissent in supporting Obama but in the long run nothing came of it.

In 2016 I again worked hard, this time for Hillary Clinton. She easily won our precinct caucus with enough people in our group to send 14 of them to make Martin O’Malley viable and deprive Bernie Sanders of a second delegate to the county convention. It was a close race and Hillary prevailed in Iowa just barely getting more than 50 percent of the delegates at the state convention.

This year is different with a slate of many great candidates. I support Elizabeth Warren for president but haven’t been campaigning for her like I did for my candidates in 2008 and 2016. It’s not that I don’t care because I do. It’s that whoever wins Iowa, the nomination will be decided in other states, maybe as soon as March 3 Super Tuesday.

Whoever is the nominee, Democrats will mostly be united to defeat the expected Republican candidate. The trouble is Democrats (or Republicans for that matter) aren’t the deciders. In Iowa, Democrats make up 30 percent of the electorate according to January 2020 numbers from the Secretary of State. Republicans comprise 32 percent. It’s been clear all along that factors besides political party affiliation will decide the outcome of the 2020 general election.

For now, the Iowa caucuses are first in the nation. I’ll note that Vermont and Minnesota have already started early voting so it’s not a clean first. We still have a lot of media attention, and people are deciding for whom they will caucus. My hope is someone else will step up to the Democratic central committee to fill the two slots at caucus so I don’t have to. My political work this year will begin in earnest once we have a nominee this summer.

In the meanwhile, I have a garden to attend as soon as spring arrives. There are also fruit trees that need pruning.

The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote — and How to Get it Back by Thom Hartmann is a quick but important read for people who want or need to review the history and origins of today’s concerted, well-organized campaign to make it more difficult to vote for some while making it increasingly convenient for others.

It answers the question what can we do to ensure everyone has a voice in our democracy? It’s a page turner intended to teach us things we didn’t know about voter suppression.

Hartmann takes readers through the founders’ reasons for curbing the right to vote for Native Americans, women and slaves, the growing influence of moneyed interests beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court case Buckley vs. Valeo, the impact of Brown vs. Board of Education on voting, and more. The final section of the book offers solutions in the form of points of action to protect our fundamental right to vote.

“But isn’t Hartmann preaching to the choir?” engaged readers might ask.

What’s important about this book is it retells the story of voting in America from an actionable perspective. It is easy to read and understand with a focus on how to increase voter participation, eliminate political gerrymandering, end “voter caging,” and more.

Many of us are familiar with Ari Berman’s 2015 book Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. It is a history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act which people interested in politics should read if they haven’t. What Hartmann adds to the discussion of voting rights is the history of voter disenfranchisement that is baked into our constitution, along with what readers can do to protect and restore voting rights going forward.

In the final section of the book, Hartmann puts potential solutions to voter suppression efforts in high relief. Many may understand aspects of his narrative already. The benefit of reading the book is its long-form and coherent narrative.

So often our ideas about voter suppression are formed by snippets of information in various media about specific aspects of the overall effort. Increasingly social media is a key driver for informing our opinions, yet it presents an incomplete picture. It is not enough. What has been lacking is a more comprehensive look at voter suppression efforts and how to combat them in easy to understand language. Hartmann delivers that and more.

I found the book empowering. Last week I met a woman advocating for D.C. statehood for a group called Iowans for D.C. Statehood. I signed up as an endorser yet told her D.C. was not enough and explained the logic Hartmann put forward in his book about adding additional states. The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote — and How to Get it Back well prepared me for the conversation.

Below is a clip of Thom Hartmann reading from his book. It will be available on Feb. 11, 2020. Click here to order your copy.

~ First published on Blog for Iowa

Yesterday a political canvasser rang our doorbell and was halfway down the street before I made it to the door. I can hardly hear the doorbell from my writing table. She came back to talk.

“I noticed your Elizabeth Warren bumper sticker,” she said hopefully.

I asked her to whom she had talked and reviewed the status of a few neighbors with her. We live in a bedroom community for larger urban areas surrounding Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Coralville. More weren’t home than were on a Monday. Those who were are retired or work from home.

“There are some Trump supporters in this neighborhood registered as Democrats,” she exclaimed.

No surprise. It’s a free country and in this white enclave in rural Iowa we get separated from labels like party preference that seem more relevant in urban areas. I didn’t ask her who it was.

There is no guarantee Democrats will win key federal offices in the 2020 general election. Even if we do, the rips in society seem beyond mending.

At a local level, regardless of party, voters can find common ground and get things done to improve our governance. Once we get beyond our rural school district borders, finding common ground becomes more difficult. The divisions and animosity that culminated in the election of this president seem likely to continue for years after the next general election regardless of who wins in November.

On Dec. 9, a white, 42-year old woman went on a crime spree near Des Moines, striking two people with her vehicle in separate incidents, and allegedly shoplifting and displaying public intoxication afterward at a local convenience store. She drove her vehicle on the sidewalk to hit a 14-year old girl walking to see a basketball game. The woman did it because the girl was Hispanic, she told police. Earlier in the day she struck a 12-year old black boy. The woman is charged with attempted murder.

Maybe this is an isolated incident. Justice will take its course as we expect in a society with laws. Yet maybe it isn’t isolated, but a sign of what’s to come, especially if President Trump loses the 2020 election. The steady escalation of tension in the Middle East by our government is sure to divide Americans even as it served to unite the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I admire people who persist in political organizing in our current social environment. They haven’t given up. They inspire hope. Although I signed up for six shifts of door knocking and am the temporary chair of our precinct caucus, I want to do more. At the same time I know my limits and want political work to be meaningful to our community. I want it to endure beyond the Feb. 3 precinct caucuses.That makes me a rough gear in the machinery of precinct-level political organizing.

I asked our local organizer what they were doing after the caucuses. They are sworn to secrecy. To be honest, they may not know what’s next other than brief respite before New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and then Super Tuesday on March 3. By then the Democratic presidential candidate field will be winnowed to a couple of candidates. There is little doubt who will be the Republican nominee.

The challenge is the broad context of the society in which we seek to live. Presidential politics is part of it. Yet as Barack Obama’s administration demonstrated there is little permanency unless the electorate hands the new president an enduring mandate. As divided as we are, that seems unlikely. Somehow we must navigate our lives out of the tar pits in which we find them. It will be sticky and messy. It will take generations to clean up. All the same, we must persist. If we don’t, what would be the point?