Dave Nagle is my kind of guy: old Irish labor lawyer, former congressman and state Democratic Party chairman from Waterloo, and foremost defender of the Iowa Caucuses.
Nagle called the other day after reading our editorial sticking up for Iowa going first in the presidential nominating process, as The Tall Corn State has for a half-century. The Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws subcommittee is hatching a plan to shake up the early process, and perhaps have five states go first on a rotating basis.
Nagle doesn’t trust the DNC as far as he can throw them.
He says the Iowa Democratic State Central Committee must stand firm and go first, eight days ahead of New Hampshire. This is the one thing he has agreed with Republicans about during his career.
If the DNC doesn’t like it, go ahead and sanction Iowa. Don’t seat Iowa delegates to the national convention. It nearly happened in 1984 when Nagle was state chairman and Nancy Pelosi held the gavel for Rules and Bylaws.
Vermont tried to jump ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire with a straw poll, threatening to shred the nominating calendar. Iowa and New Hampshire jumped ahead of Vermont, and Nagle got sued.
The DNC said Iowa was not welcome at the national convention.
“We couldn’t get hotel rooms in San Francisco,” Nagle said.
Nagle phoned Walter Mondale and told him he might win Iowa if the delegates were seated. Mondale called off the dogs. They got their hotel rooms. The Iowa Caucuses remained first. (Mondale did not win Iowa, but it was his fifth-best performer, Nagle notes. Reagan won every state but Minnesota and Massachusetts.)
Nagle is trying to gird State Party Chairman Ross Willburn. Nagle says the votes are there on the central committee to run caucuses unsanctioned by the DNC.
“If we lose it, we never get it back,” Nagle said. “The biggest problem is our own people — the Candy Dems — who wring their hands over this stuff. There’s no way the DNC is ever going to reverse themselves. Iowa is going to have to stay outside and take a stand.
“If they won’t seat our delegates, so what? Fifty Iowans have to stay home.”
The reason for taking up the fight were stated in the editorial: Iowa is among the most literate states, it demands retail politics where politicians are forced to undergo interrogation by informed voters, and it allows underdogs like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama to emerge using grassroots organizing. Iowa narrows the field, from 25 candidates in the last cycle down to a half-dozen. It sharpens campaigns for New Hampshire and South Carolina. It is a test of organizing skills. Iowa is not determinative. New Hampshire and Iowa both have fairly clean political cultures, although money has coarsened our civic debate.
Iowa and New Hampshire emerged from the smoke-filled back-room process that blew up at the 1968 national convention in Chicago. The idea was to put people, not politicians, in charge. By 1976, the media ordained that Iowa was declarative, and we have warmed ourselves in January under the klieg lights since.
We also have been doing battle that long with elites who say that we are too White, either too liberal or too conservative, too inaccessible (even though we had caucuses in nursing homes and workplaces and Arizona for snowbirds). Well, yes, we are pretty White except for Storm Lake. Yet Iowa vaulted Barack Obama past Hillary Clinton (which the Clintons never forgot or forgave). Jesse Jackson gave the establishment a scare with his strong Iowa showing.
Nagle says Scott Brennan, another former state party chair, is just the man to have on the DNC forcefully pleading the Iowa case. He can’t withstand the assault on his own. New Hampshire is with Iowa. Other states like Nevada that lust for the money and attention are doing all they can to take it away. They can have the money — it’s been a cancer on our politics and culture. They can have the attention, too — the national image of Iowa portrays us as rubes who probably couldn’t hack the Dan Ryan Expressway. If Iowa gets rolled, it will further disconnect power from rural America. It will deprive the nation of a fairly savvy Democratic caucus crowd. It will deny dark horses any light.
Nagle thinks it is worth taking a last stand. Maybe it will get their attention, that rural America deserves a voice, too.
“What have we got to lose? F—- ’em.”
Art Cullen is publisher and editor of The Storm Lake Times Pilot, where he won the the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017. He is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, was broadcast in November 2021 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2022
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us