Tag: politics

BIG GROVE TOWNSHIP — On Tuesday a neighbor hosted presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard at his home.

On a large patio facing Lake Macbride, about 40 people gathered to hear what the candidate from Hawaii had to say. That is, 25 regular people along with sundry staff, volunteers, journalists, photographers, and videographers.

I invited the editor of our local paper, The Solon Economist, and he attended.

What’s newsworthy is it was the only presidential campaign event to be held in Big Grove Township, and one of only two in the Solon area this cycle.

As a neighbor, I baked an apple crisp to serve at the event using Northern Spy, Macoun, and Red Delicious apples picked at home and at the orchard. My neighbor supports Gabbard because of her views on defense department spending. I was recognized for my apple work.

I met Gabbard the summer of 2016 at Congressman Dave Loebsack’s Brews and BBQ fundraiser a few miles away. She has yet to make a memorable impression, although I don’t feel negativity toward her as I did when I met Bernie Sanders in 2014. The brief speech under sunny skies was not enough to have me remove the Elizabeth Warren bumper sticker from my car.

It was a unique event in our neighborhood and I was glad to be part of it. Any time a sitting member of congress shows up here it is worth the time to listen and learn.

James Q. Lynch of the Cedar Rapids Gazette posted an article about the event here.

Now that Elizabeth Warren’s presidential candidacy is gaining traction among Democratic voters, in fund raising, and in a number of political polls, the knives are out.

The arguments against her seem without merit, although, like it or not de-bunked arguments often drive our politics in the 21st Century.

There are two main arguments advanced to harm Warren’s candidacy, the first is she is a woman.

Who will be the first woman elected president? None of us knows the answer and if the results of the 2016 election mean anything, it was a triumph of male dominance and an American patriarchy of moneyed interests that elected our current president. People often say Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate, however, I disagree. Whatever flaws her campaign had, she did the work and won the popular vote. Campaigns are always clearer in the rear-view mirror. If she’d approached a few states differently she might have won the Electoral College as well as the popular vote. There are no do-overs in national politics so the results of 2016 were the results.

I spend part of my time discussing politics with progressive Democrats. What gets said in private conversations is the United States is not ready to elect a female president. In both women and men it is a deeply held belief. My retort is if Democrats don’t run a female candidate we’ll never elect a woman president. Is Elizabeth Warren electable?

Johnson County Supervisor Rod Sullivan, a Warren supporter, laid out the argument de-bunking the idea a candidate is “electable” in an Aug. 20 letter to the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette titled “Electability is a Sham.”

“’Electability’ is not real,” Sullivan wrote. “It is a creation of pundits — pundits whose predictions are about 80 percent wrong. ‘Electability’ can only be measured after the fact — did the person in question get elected? Anyone who pretends to know something about ‘electability’ before an election is simply a fraud.”

It is time for Democrats to get over the idea a woman can’t be elected president by picking the candidate most closely aligned with our values regardless of gender.

The second argument often advanced to damage Warren’s candidacy is she is too liberal, another media-driven piece of buncombe.

I recently had coffee with David Redlawsk, Soles professor of political science at the University of Delaware. According to his official website, Redlawsk’s expertise includes being a political psychologist who studies voter behavior and emotion. He focuses on how voters process political information to make their decisions. He’s teaching this semester at the University of Iowa while studying the Iowa caucus process.

I’ve known Redlawsk since he was treasurer of Democrat Dave Loebsack’s first congressional campaign. What he said over coffee last week was similar to what he said back in 2006. The majority of liberals and conservatives will vote for the Democratic or Republican nominee for president respectively regardless of the nominee. This leaves a small slice, maybe 10 percent, who are persuadable and could determine the election outcome. This is a mainstream belief about elections and while Redlawsk was more nuanced, there is relevance to the 2020 presidential contest.

Enter the media. Over the weekend the Washington Post published an article by Michael Scherer and Matt Viser titled “Uncertainty takes over the lead in the Democratic presidential race.” In it, they quote former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu on Warren:

“She has a plan for everything except for how to beat Donald Trump. That needs to get tested,” Landrieu said. “She says she can do all these things. There’s a thing called political reality. . . Aspiration is wonderful, but you can’t eat aspiration for lunch and send your kids to college on it. That’s a fundamental decision that Democratic primary voters need to make a decision on.”

As Redlawsk mentioned, liberals and Democrats will vote for Warren in substantial numbers in a match up with Donald J. Trump should she be the nominee. Most politically aware voters recall that Barack Obama struggled to get parts of his agenda done despite the brief period when Democrats held a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Whatever plans Elizabeth Warren has, and one of her taglines is “I have a plan for that,” there is a political reality as Landrieu mentioned. That’s not significant because it would be true for any Democratic nominee as it was when Obama won the presidency in 2008.

If someone came up with a reasonable argument when Elizabeth Warren should not be the 2020 Democratic nominee for president, I’d listen. In the meanwhile, I’ll persist in supporting her.

Lest my silence be interpreted as acceptance of the 45th president and his administration’s actions in the run up to the 2016 election and during his tenure as president, let me make it clear.

Donald J. Trump should be removed from office as soon as is practical.

I don’t know if the current news about his work to get Ukraine to “do him a favor” will prove to be impeachable. What is certain is if it isn’t, he will do or has done something else that is.

The man has taken a wrecking ball to society and our government and I don’t believe our lives will be the same post-Trump. We’ll make the best of it when Democrats inevitably return to power, although some of the damage is permanent. Removal from office can’t come soon enough.

It isn’t just the president. He has the backing of moneyed interests to accomplish the agenda they want and have wanted since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in office. The president is not skilled enough to come up with such a detailed, well-coordinated agenda on his own. He continues to be the yes-man for all that right-wing conservatives have asked in return for helping him rise to power.

The road back to power is difficult for reasonable people, including Democrats. Most I know seek out common sense in what the president is attempting to do. There is no sense to it. What we find is the incoherent raving of a man subject to right-wing power beyond his control. To make sense of it is also to unintentionally make a case for his actions when there seldom is one, at least one perceptible from the media circus.

There has been so much news this month I haven’t been able to keep up. I remember feeling this when Watergate began to break. I’ll do now what I did then: Let sh*t fall for a while and hope reporters and elected officials do their work. The main question I have is whether Congress will produce meaningful Articles of Impeachment from the coming Ukraine investigations. I hope so but it’s not assured and the president will fight them as best he can.

The pace of breaking news prevents me from processing it before the next brick falls. What else can I do?

What will convince enough people to remove the president from office? How will dissatisfaction with his performance register on the national agenda? What can rank and file voters do to raise meaningful awareness of this pressing need?

I don’t have answers yet, but behind my food and politics posts, I’ll be working on them.

SOLON, Iowa — Without fanfare I signed a caucus commitment card for Elizabeth Warren at a friend’s home last night.

The occasion was a meet up with our area’s new Warren organizer, Allison Hunt, with whom I’ll be meeting one-on-one later in the week.

I don’t want to make a big deal of it, but it is important to lay out why.

We need the strongest possible candidate to take on the Republican nominee in 2020. I believe that is Elizabeth Warren because she understands the the problems of money and corruption in our governance, she knows how to address it, and has the will and drive to do so.

I will support the eventual nominee at the July 2020 Democratic National Convention. I respect most of the people running for different reasons, especially the U.S. Senators who threw their hat into the presidential ring. Signing the card for Warren means I will work to make sure she emerges from the Iowa Caucuses on Feb. 3, 2020.

Elizabeth Warren is a woman and I’m not sure the American electorate is ready to elect a female president. We will never have a female president if we don’t elect one, so that is a non-issue for me. Her qualifications are as good as or better than any of the ten candidates who appeared in last week’s Democratic National Committee debate. We have to base our decision on qualifications and experience which Elizabeth Warren has.

Elizabeth Warren has organized for the early states as well as anyone since I became active again in 2004. With compression of the primary schedule between our caucuses and Super Tuesday on March 3, 19 states will hold presidential preference caucuses or primary elections. That means a candidate must scale up immediately, and campaign everywhere to capture a winning number of supporters. Early voting in California begins the Monday after the Iowa caucuses. The Warren campaign in Iowa set the standard and seems scalable.

Thursday, Sept. 19, Elizabeth Warren is holding an event in Iowa City near the Iowa Memorial Union. Hunt said Warren would stay until everyone who wanted to speak with her individually had an opportunity to do so. I won’t be in that queue, but I don’t need to be.

The challenge will be supporting Warren without disenfranchising Democrats who support another candidate. Like most everything, where there’s a will, there’s a way. The process begins by picking a candidate.