Out in Greene County, Iowa

It was another fascinating day for Republicans in western Iowa (but one booed)

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
June 30, 2002
DENISON, IA.

Conservative Republicans in western Iowa are sure crowing now.

Meanwhile, as a more moderate and still new member of the Grand Old Party, I am looking for one of those brown paper bags to wear over my head. Don’t I remember that that is an acceptable method of protest among Iowa Republicans?

In a special convention here Saturday, State Sen. Steve King, the poster boy for the party’s right wing, won the Republican nomination for Congress from the new Fifth District.

I do give him credit for running one heck of a good campaign. “King for Congress” signs have been thicker than clover blossoms all over the 32-county district that makes up the western third of Iowa and then some. I’ve received more postcards, brochures and letters from him than I can count.

King, 53, is the legislator from little Kiron who had a campaign slogan that he is “Right for Western Iowa.” With a capital R, indeed! On Saturday, he must’ve told the crowd 10 times he is “a social and fiscal conservative.”

He is the author of the “Official English” bill, which becomes state law on Monday in Iowa. When he bragged about that in one of his speeches here Saturday, many if not most in the crowd applauded. I booed, loudly and all alone.

King also pushed the so-called “God and Country” bill in the last session of the legislature. It would have removed requirements in place for 12 years in Iowa that school children receive a multicultural, non-sexist and global education. Instead, King wanted them taught how the U.S. “is the unchallenged, greatest nation in the world,” and that it got that way because of free enterprise and biblical values.

But King had the numbers Saturday, and now he has the Republican nomination.

And since this Fifth District has 58,000 more Republicans than Democrats, his nomination means he will most likely go to Washington, D.C., after the November general election.

His Democratic opponent then will be a newcomer to state and federal politics, Paul Shomshor, of Council Bluffs, a 30-something accountant and a member of the Bluffs city council. Nobody I know has ever met him.

Because of the lopsided political demographics in the district, the race for the Republican nomination was a hot, 4-way contest. It included King; Rep. Brent Siegriest, of Council Bluffs, who has been Speaker of the Iowa House; State Sen. John Redwine, of Sioux City, and Jeff Ballenger, a Council Bluffs small business owner.

In the June 4 primary election, none of the four received the required 35 percent of the votes to win nomination, and thus the race was thrown to the special convention Saturday at Denison High School. It is only coincidental that Denison High is Steve King’s alma mater. Denison was picked as the host city because it is about as centrally located in the huge district as you can get.

It was bound to be a rare and fascinating form of democracy that would be happening, so I decided to attend, even though I was only an alternate delegate from Buena Vista County and thus would not be entitled to vote.

Think of it: Because there are so many more Republicans in western Iowa, the next Congressman to represent one third of the state would most likely be chosen at this convention, not by a vote of the general public but rather by the 558 eligible delegates.

My goodness, 558 people electing a U.S. Congressman!

The last time this happened in a Republican congressional race was in 1964 in the old Sixth District in northwest Iowa, and that convention dragged on for 18 ballots over two days before a nominee was determined.

Party rules are that successive votes are taken until one candidate receives 50 percent plus one vote. The low vote-getter drops out after each round, and his supporters are quickly wooed by the other candidates.

King led on all three ballots Saturday, and he reached the 50 percent-plus-one-vote threshold on the third one.

After the first ballot, Redwine dropped out. After the second, Ballenger was eliminated.

So on the third ballot it was King against the much more moderate Siegrist, and King’s victory was by a margin of 272 to 253 votes.

A 19-vote difference! That made the absence of 25 eligible delegates an example of poor citizenship that civics teachers can talk about for years to come.

That’s right, 25 delegates did not show up, and their county organizations did not have alternates on hand to replace them.

Who were the AWOLs?

Only eight of Clay County’s 16 eligible delegates were there, only 13 of the 17 Dickinson County delegates showed up, Ringgold County was missing one, Woodbury County was missing three and Montgomery County had only five of its 13 delegates in attendance! In addition, seven more Woodbury County delegates, who’d been for Ballenger, left the convention before the last and deciding vote, the Des Moines Sunday Register reported.

All those absentees and all the rest of us will now be dealing with Congressional candidate Steve King, and most likely Congressman Steve King.

King was introduced to the convention for the first time Saturday by Bill Salier. He is the ultra-conservative, former Marine and now north central Iowa farmer who was the unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate in the recent primary election. He was defeated for the Senate nomination by Congressman Greg Ganske.

The first words out of Salier’s mouth Saturday were straight out of his primary campaign.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Salier said, “the culture war continues.”

He told everybody the only way we are going to win “the culture war” is if “we work every day among our neighbors pursuing the Republican agenda, the Constitution of the United States and the Holy Bible.”

He then got around to saluting King as “another cultural warrior.”

I think I know which culture war Salier and King are fighting. They want to fight the oppressed people around the world who would like to come live in America’s freedom. They’re bothered by the newcomers here who speak in other languages while they try to learn English. They’re evidently on guard against people who follow holy books other than the Bible. And they go apoplectic about gays and lesbians.

I’m more worried right now about another kind of culture war, one which I think a Congressman King could ignite. And that is, what kind of impression is the rest of America going to have about our culture in western Iowa from the way he’ll represent us in Congress?

I mean, maybe he’ll turn out to be the greatest thing since hybrid corn, and hoorah if he does.

But what do we know about him, really?

He has been in the state legislature six years. He lives near Kiron and runs an earth moving business based in Odebolt. His biography says he attended college, but he has no degree – why? For all the flag waving he does, I’ve never heard about him having any military service. When is he so strident about our American way? Has he traveled much? What exposure has he had to cultures other than those around Kiron, Odebolt, Denison and Des Moines? Does he know anything about international affairs?

I hope there are good answers to all those questions, and that King will tell us what they are in the coming weeks of the campaign.

He is a go-getter. Even though his Congressional seat already seems assured, he told the convention crowd he will campaign in all 32 counties and, in fact, in all 286 towns in the district.

It will certainly not be a boring campaign, even if Democrat Shomshor can’t make it much of a contest.

The reason?

For as much as I oppose King’s politics, I will say that he is a riveting speaker, a good storyteller and, actually, an engaging personality. He’s quick and he can be funny.

It’s too bad he is also frequently mean-spirited and arrogant.

He boasted Saturday that the House seat he hopes to fill will be “a leadership position that will be used to move the political center in Washington to the right.” He said he will be “a loud voice and a strong voice,” and that “I won’t blink and I won’t check the temperature of the water.”

Well, you know, that’s always worked for him around Kiron and Odebolt.

RUNNING THROUGH ADVERSITY. King has a good looking family rallied around him. That includes his wife Marilyn and their three grown sons – David, 26, Mick, 24, and Jeff, 23.

The candidate said David “takes over King Construction Company tomorrow.”

He also told the crowd that it was a tough year of campaigning, especially since his mother and wife both had serious surgeries.

“I wondered at times if we could hold together under all that stress and keep this going,” he said. Then he smiled, mocking his own dogged spirit, and said, “But then I thought, ‘Well, if we’re going to be stressed anyway, we might as well be campaigning!’ ”

CONVENTION HIGHLIGHTS AND LOWLIGHTS. The Republican Party of Iowa did a nice organizational job of putting the special convention together. Party chairman Rep. Chuck Larson Jr. of Cedar Rapids, a lawyer and member of the Iowa House, served as convention chair. At 34 years old, he seems a young guy with a bright political future.

Best performance on stage? None of the politicans were as good in their presentations as Susie Schaaf was in hers. The young woman from Randolph in southwest Iowa was fantastic singing and playing guitar on several patriotic songs as the delegates were gathering, and especially on her a cappella version of the National Anthem that officially opened the convention.

Most promising Republican candidate I saw all day – Matt Whitaker, 31, of Urbandale, who is running for state treasurer. He is an Ankeny native who was an All-State football player in high school, a three-year starter for Coach Hayden Fry and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, becoming an Academic All-American. He is now a lawyer who is married with two small children.

“After I got out of law school, Marcy and I moved to the Twin Cities,” Whitaker told the crowd. “Then when we started having children, we realized we were part of the problem for Iowa – we were those young people who had moved away. We decided to move back and become part of the solution for Iowa.”

He said after moving back to the Des Moines area, “I got in touch with my old Law School buddy Chuck Larson and told him I’d like to get involved in Republican politics and asked him if there was anything I could do to help. He said, ‘Well, how about running for state treasurer?’ ”

And now he is.

Whitaker is a big guy, handsome and full of spunk.

You can look at him as a young Republican with a lot of promise, then think of 36-year-old Secretary of State Chet Culver, a bright young Democrat, and you can imagine we could have one heck of a race for governor building here.

Biggest winner Saturday? It may have been Heartland Marketing Group, the Early, Ia., company that has run the King campaign’s public relations, media and marketing operations.

It’s a 20-year-old company headed by Barb Determan, who just finished her term as president of the National Pork Producers. Most of Heartland’s work through the years has been for agricultural companies. Now they’ve scored a big success in their first try in a major political race. Having boosted a controversial candidate to a seat in Congress, if that’s how it turns out, could be a springboard for the company to do a lot more big time political work.

“No help from any Washington agencies, no big consultants, just us,” said Determan Saturday. “They say all poliltics is local. And we’re really local.”

FAREWELL AND THANKS TO A GREAT PUBLIC SERVANT. Brent Siegrist, who was my candidate in the race, goes back to private life in Council Bluffs now after 18 years in the Iowa legislature.

He came mighty close to winning the nomination for Congress – and who knows what might have happened had all the eligible delegates been there – but he didn’t seem a bit upset when King won.

“This may sound strange, but I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to go home to my family,” he told the delegates when it was over. He also pledged his support to King.

I don’t think Siegrist ever quite got his campaign in high gear. Part of that probably was that, as Speaker of the House, he was tied to the State Capitol so long during the legislative session. But part of it undoubtedly was fatigue after 18 years in office.

He has been a model of statesmanship and citizenship, and he’ll be missed around the Capitol.

TOP OF THE TICKET. This morning’s Des Moines Sunday Register reports that the Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Gross has come out of the blocks fast against incumbent Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat. The governor holds a scant, two percentage point lead in the Register’s latest Iowa Poll.

That’s an impressive start for Gross, and it surprises me.

Why? I’m still hearing people trying to understand something that came out in the GOP primary – that Gross made about $750,000 last year as a Des Moines lawyer and lobbyist and yet gave only two percent to charity.

And last week in the Register, he was quoted saying he’s not all that concerned about the lack of growth in Iowa’s population.

“I don't have a problem with Iowa not growing from a population standpoint,” Gross told the Register’s Lynn Okamoto. “Maybe we should be Switzerland, where we have a stable population with very high incomes.”

Leaders of agriculture, business, industry and higher education must’ve been as shocked as I was.

“Maybe we should be Switzerland?”

Gross grew up here in western Iowa, in those hills around the little town of Defiance, just south of Denison. But he should make no mistake – those hills are NOT the Alps, and Iowa is nothing like Switzerland.

Rick Morain, publisher of the Jefferson Herald, answered Gross in a strong editorial last week.

“…a stale population, in a state where urban and suburban population is growing and rural population is shrinking, means continuing decline for Iowa’s small towns and countryside,” Morain wrote. “Unless the urbanization of Iowa, which has been going on for many decades, comes to a halt, a zero-sum population game will continue to hollow out the state’s rural counties. How does that help Defiance, and hundreds of other Defiances across the state?”

Morain, formerly a member of the Republican State Central Committee, said the candidate needs to explain soon “how he would combat the state’s demographic trends without increasing its population.”

Gross, speaking to the convention delegates Saturday, indicated he may already have realized how ridiculous his Switzerland slip-up was.

In his speech, he said to those who contend Iowa can’t grow, “Hogwash!

“This state is just starting to realize its potential,” he said. “And it won’t be some areas that will grow, it will be all areas growing.”

That’s better.

What those advisors who have Gross’ ear need to tell him now is to tone down his anger. If he’s doing as well as today’s Sunday Register says he is, he doesn’t need to come across on the stump like he’s mad all the time.

And there is a cockiness that’s unbecoming, too.

Everyone should remember where that kind of demeanor got Jim Ross Lightfoot in the last gubernatorial election.

But the Gross camp may look at today’s stunning poll numbers, think everything they’ve been doing is wonderful and tell the candidate to keep the chip on his shoulder. I just don’t think that will work all the way to November.