Subterms
Images of mayhem from the heart of Washington shocked many supporters but others felt extreme action was justifiedEven some of Donald Trump’s enduring supporters have had enough. Continue reading… More
We are stuck in this interregnum, between a maladroit trying to burn down the Republic and a Normal Joe, wondering what sort of rabbit someone might pull out of a hat, waiting on a vaccine, trusting it will pass.Control of the US Senate hangs in the balance, as Georgia voters head to the polls this Tuesday. It took 10 days to get presidential results out of the Peach State. Now we are again awaiting word, this time of whether Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell will control the 2021 calendar. In the meantime, the economy teeters alongside our constitutional order.On Wednesday, Congress is set to consider certifying election results. A dirty dozen of Republican senators – plus 140 members of the House of Representatives – have said they will contest the results from certain swing states, despite Mitch McConnell’s urgings not to do so. They called this sedition in Abe Lincoln’s day.You could ignore it all by immersing your head in football games you don’t care about any more. Some drink – these are the holidays, after all, and there is nothing else to do, hasn’t really been anything to do since March, so why not?All the experts say we should remain calm and stay safe. But Normal Joe doesn’t raise his right hand and pledge on the Bible until January 20. A lot of weirdness gets sucked into the vacuum in the interim. On Saturday, Trump threatened to criminally charge the Georgia secretary of state, a Republican, for not cooking up the 11,780 ballots that the loser needs to win. Even Rudy Giuliani couldn’t dream up this kind of scheme.The good folks at the nursing homes are in the dark about when they might get vaccine doses. We old folks at home are in the dark with them. We have no idea how to find out when or where we will get the jab. The state is working on it, we are told. So we sit here and drink anxiety with our morning toast.During more ordinary times, these quadrennial weeks leading up to the inauguration are supposed to be a celebration of the world’s longest-running experiment in democracy. Instead, the president has called assorted wingnuts to Washington to protest what they believe is the Big Steal. “It’s going to be wild!” the tweeter in chief tweeted. Wild is not what democracy needs right now.Then there’s Congress’s so-called Covid relief. The out-of-work bartender currently forced to choose between paying rent and paying for medical prescriptions probably needs a lot more than $600. Maybe Biden can wrangle some more, depending on how that Georgia vote count goes, followed by recounts and court filings. Maybe the bar owner can get a second swing at a payroll protection grant, but maybe not. It all seems out of our hands.The Iowa legislature says its priorities are tax cuts, not supplementing unemployment benefits. You don’t know what will happen in one-party government. How far will Republicans go? There appear to be no limits when our congressman is calling to repudiate our electoral process.Everything should clear up by 20 January if it all doesn’t blow up in the next week or two. The vaccines will show up sooner or later. Local budgets and property tax rates will get nailed down, not without pain. The Fox propaganda machine is cracking under pressure from the rest of the rightwing looneysphere. The Republican party is morphing by the day. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska says Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri is playing with fire, one young Republican Ivy League midwesterner to another.Are these the death rattles of a discredited movement of narcissism and fear, or the birth of something worse that endures? The November election suggests the former but we are going to play hell getting there.Until the Bidens are sleeping in the White House and not in a Delaware bunker, we sit in this helpless tumult of between. It’s about to turn. I believe this will pass. Let’s pray that hope will prevail.Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland More
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#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPolitical MemoBiden’s Iowa Bus Tour Is Headed for a D.C. ReunionA year ago, Joe Biden was on a grim bus tour through Iowa, joined by many old friends, including Tom Vilsack and John Kerry. Now Mr. Biden wants to bring some of the crew back to Washington with him.Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry traveled through Iowa on a bus tour in December 2019. Last month, Mr. Biden, as president-elect, named Mr. Kerry to a top climate post.Credit…Calla Kessler/The New York TimesSydney Ember and Dec. 12, 2020, 10:01 a.m. ETJoseph R. Biden Jr. wasn’t the main event, and he knew it.As he trudged from one small Iowa town to the next on a cold, grim bus tour last winter, trying and failing to generate even a spark of enthusiasm for his presidential candidacy in the leadoff caucus state, he had a habit of quietly delivering his stump speech and then welcoming a more formidable closer.“Thank you for listening,” Mr. Biden said at a campaign stop in Storm Lake last December before ceding the spotlight to Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa.“I’m going to turn this over to a guy who’s forgotten more about farm and rural policy than I know about foreign policy,” he quipped.It was a lonely road for Joe Biden in Iowa a year ago. As his rivals enjoyed big crowds and splashy surrogates, friends of Mr. Biden’s who had retired from elected office — including Mr. Vilsack and John Kerry, the former secretary of state — suited up once more to lend their support in what looked at times like a last hurrah as Mr. Biden plummeted toward a fourth-place finish.Yet those frosty days in Iowa have now led somewhere more glamorous: Mr. Biden’s administration, or so he hopes.In recent weeks, Mr. Biden — now the president-elect and unquestionably the next main event in Washington — rewarded Mr. Vilsack and Mr. Kerry with nods for prominent roles, alongside others who championed Mr. Biden during the roughest stretches of the primary campaign. The early Iowa surrogates embraced his comparatively modest pledge of a return to normalcy — and his relentless focus on the fuzzy concept of electability — when party activists in the leadoff caucus state seemed more captivated by new faces like Pete Buttigieg or the ambitious ideas of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.One year later, Mr. Biden is again facing skepticism from activists and officials alike. This time, it is around whether the administration he is assembling reflects the racial and generational diversity of the party and the nation — something he has promised to achieve. And Mr. Biden’s elevation of Mr. Vilsack has sparked considerable backlash from progressives and from some civil rights leaders.The expected nominations, however, are a vivid illustration of how central personal relationships are to Mr. Biden’s view of governing. Selections including his chief of staff and his nominee for secretary of state are people who have known the former vice president for decades and often bear extensive Washington credentials.Not to mention, in some cases, extensive Iowa credentials.For Mr. Vilsack, Mr. Kerry and other former politicians who braved the frigid expanse of Iowa before Mr. Biden’s bid caught fire with the support of Black voters in South Carolina, the possibility of a significant role in the incoming Biden administration is a vindication of their efforts during the bleakest days of the caucuses, when their alliance with Mr. Biden was viewed by other teams more as a vestige of long-ago politics than as a winning strategy.Mr. Biden’s winter bus tour failed to generate even a spark of enthusiasm for his presidential candidacy in the leadoff caucus state.Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesEven Mr. Biden’s friends realized his campaign was not doing well at the time.“When I got there, we were going door to door in a blizzard,” said State Senator Dick Harpootlian of South Carolina, joking that he had developed post-traumatic stress disorder “as a result of my experience in Iowa,” where he volunteered and where he recalled running into Biden allies like Mr. Vilsack. “Those folks that were there in Iowa and stuck with it, those are the folks who basically bought into Joe Biden,” he said. “The politics of it at that point were not particularly bright.”None of that dampened their zeal for the task at hand. For some of his surrogates, campaigning for Mr. Biden back then meant advocacy for a man who, they believed, could defeat President Trump. It also meant a return to the campaign trail — and perhaps renewed political relevance.Several top surrogates had run for president themselves, including Mr. Vilsack and Mr. Kerry, and their enduring support for Mr. Biden afforded them another turn in the spotlight, complete with rallies in school gyms and coaxing of voters at coffee shops. Other allies (and former candidates) like former Senators Christopher J. Dodd and Bob Kerrey were also on-hand sometimes.They had staff members shepherding them again. They received news media requests. They hobnobbed with friends and ran into rival candidates at Des Moines hot spots.Mr. Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee, joined a diverse, rotating slate of other Biden endorsers on a seven-day bus tour across Iowa 16 years after he had won the state’s caucuses.As the tour’s headliner, Mr. Kerry’s moves and snack cravings were captured by the Biden campaign on Instagram as he attested to Mr. Biden’s foreign policy experience.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 11, 2020, 9:07 p.m. ETCongress might ban surprise medical billing, and that’s a surprise.Biden is considering Cuomo for attorney general.‘Our institutions held’: Democrats (and some Republicans) cheer Supreme Court ruling on election suit.There was some occasional rust, and some anxiety, too.At an event in Des Moines last November as he promoted his endorsement of Mr. Biden, Mr. Vilsack admitted that he “woke up at 4:30 this morning pretty nervous about this speech.”And Mr. Kerry, on the day before the caucuses, tweeted and then deleted a profane message rebutting a news report about his own presidential ambitions — and reaffirming his support for his friend.Mr. Biden visited a farm with Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, in November 2019. Mr. Biden nominated Mr. Vilsack to be his agriculture secretary this week.Credit…Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesMr. Vilsack in particular was viewed as an important endorsement in the state at the time. But some of Mr. Biden’s rivals, including Mr. Sanders, Ms. Warren and Mr. Buttigieg, were enjoying boosts from celebrities like Mandy Moore and young progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — which contributed to the sense that Mr. Biden, with his stable of silver-haired white men, was out of date.“Circulating in Iowa at the time was ‘Biden’s too old,’” said Mr. Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska who was among the friends who campaigned for Mr. Biden during the primary race. “That was the conversation that was going on — he’s yesterday’s business. He’s too moderate.”Mr. Kerrey allowed that the Biden lineup might not have been the most dynamic.“If you think Vilsack was boring, you should have been with me!” said Mr. Kerrey, who is in his 70s. (He did, however, bristle at the suggestion from a reporter that Mr. Biden’s supporters were not seen to be quite as youthful or hip as those of his now-vanquished opponents. “You are suffering from ageism,” he said. “I called you out. I’ve become woke!”)As it turned out, traditionally conservative-leaning senior citizens would help propel Mr. Biden to the presidency, and he had stronger appeal in the primary campaign among Black voters than any of his rivals did.Now on the verge of entering the White House, Mr. Biden has signaled his intent to gather his faithful squad together again with the alacrity of a coach rallying his team for one last game. This past week, he named Mr. Vilsack as his choice for agriculture secretary. He has picked Mr. Kerry for a top climate post. And Antony J. Blinken, a longtime top aide to Mr. Biden who was spotted in Iowa with him, is now his choice for secretary of state.If Mr. Biden’s selections so far underscore his experience and his deep bench of long-lasting relationships, it is also a stark reminder of his roots in an older, whiter generation that has at times seemed at odds with the energy in the current Democratic Party.He may not have won over youthful crowds a year ago, but he is, his team insists, committed to empowering the next generation of Democratic leaders.At a briefing with the news media on Friday, the incoming White House press secretary, Jennifer Psaki, made a point of highlighting younger members of Mr. Biden’s team. Mr. Biden has also named a number of people of color to major cabinet positions, including helming the Pentagon and the Homeland Security Department, even as he faces intense pressure from some in his own party who believe he needs more people of color in senior positions.Not everyone who assisted him, even in Iowa, is so far an administration choice, including Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, who joined Mr. Kerry on the bus tour.Mr. Kerrey also said he was not on Mr. Biden’s list.“There are a lot of people that have endorsed Joe Biden that aren’t going to be in his cabinet,” he said. “You’re talking to one.”Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
Going on 40 years I’ve been writing columns about giving thanks, and this year I mean it: thank God that America stood up for democracy again.
This year is among the worst. Pandemic is our parlance. Covid runs wild over Iowa while its government stands back and does little. The president thumbs his nose at the virus and at the rule of law, skirted impeachment thanks to feckless senators, and would steal a win through a faithless electoral college, if he could.
But he can’t.
The people spoke. They elected Joe Biden with the most votes ever, and by a convincing margin, as a rebuke to it all. It was a vote for Biden – made by millions, in hopes of good will – but it was as much an act of revulsion for what Donald Trump represents.
Biden promised to govern with fairness and decency. People endorsed a middling approach with a split Congress. They demand that government gets along somehow. Fair enough. There’s wisdom in that vote.
It was a record turnout. So many have lamented a lack of civic engagement for good reason. Our local school board elections typically muster 10% turnout. This year, however, the people were engaged. Especially in Iowa, where they came out in awful weather, young and old, to hear Julián Castro or John Delaney campaign during the run-up to the caucuses. Dr Jill Biden, first lady in waiting, talked education to a handful of folks at Better Day Café. It was something to behold. We had a ringside seat.
Trump and company tried to keep people from voting. They tried to slow down the mail. They tried to sow fear that the system was rigged. But the people came out the first day they could and stood in line for hours, if necessary, to make sure their vote counted. County election officials, no matter their politics, tried to make it as safe and smooth as possible and it was, for the most part. That, too, was something to behold.
The judicial system worked. Judges appointed by Republicans threw out Trump’s efforts to suppress or overturn the vote. A score of lawsuits filed following the election, claiming unspecified fraud, were dismissed. Chief Justice John Roberts has held the center and protected the judiciary’s independence under great trial over the past year.
None of this was destined. It could have gone the other way. The attorney general tested whether there were limits and discovered them when his field offices told him no fraud was to be found in the balloting. The military brass wanted nothing to do with any of it.
The Republican secretary of state in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, stood up for the integrity of the system. So did the FBI and CIA directors and the head of cyber-security, who got the boot from Trump for vouching for a safe vote. So did the Republican governor of Maryland. If only Republican senators would have stood up with them to get Trump to move on. Democracy isn’t perfect. But when Trump personally asked Michigan Republican legislative leaders to rig their electoral college delegation, they refused. When it counted, people stood up. That is no small feat.
It should never have gone this far. Now we know. About a third of Americans think Biden stole the election and that Rudy Giuliani should be allowed to practice law. Many of us were suckered by Trump and wised up. Most of us voted for sanity and a little bit of respect.
Mainly, the people demonstrated that liberty means something. They knelt in the park for Black lives that are not fully free. They objected to caging families at the border. They demanded their franchise as citizens. It could not be denied.
From time to time this year, I had my doubts. Iowa voted for Trump, after all. It was too close for comfort in Wisconsin. The rants and ravings still echo in the crazy chambers of social media. Pray Biden will have a way of defusing things. Actually, he already has. Reporters asked the president-elect the other day about Trump refusing to allow an orderly transition. Biden stopped and thought, and just said that Trump is reckless. He left it at that. Lord, what a relief in restraint. I give thanks. Democracy prevails.
Art Cullen is editor of The Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland More
After Republicans won big on election night in the state of Iowa, in America’s heartland, Governor Kim Reynolds claimed vindication for her light-handed approach to the coronavirus pandemic.
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“It was a validation of our balanced response to Covid-19,” Reynolds said of the vote. “One that is mindful of both public health and economic health.”
That was two weeks ago. Since then, the trajectory of the pandemic in Iowa, as elsewhere in the American midwest, has taken a sharp and tragic turn.
Daily confirmed cases of Covid-19 and hospitalizations are up 100% in Iowa since election night, and daily deaths are up more than 50%, hitting 41 on Tuesday. Nationwide, the United States has passed 250,000 confirmed deaths – about twice as many as any other country.
Like other Republicans torn between fighting the pandemic and fighting the culture wars, Reynolds spent months dismissing the need for a mask mandate in her state, calling it a “feelgood” measure. But new warnings from local hospitals of a dangerous overload finally drove Reynolds to reverse course this week.
“The pandemic in Iowa is the worst it has ever been,” she said. “No one wants to do this. I don’t want to do this.”
The reluctance to “do this” is not exclusive to Reynolds – but it is exclusive to one of America’s two major political parties.
mask mandates
Since the start of the pandemic, Republican officials across the country, cowed by Donald Trump, conspiracy-swayed constituents and lesser political calculations, have resisted asking voters to take personal action to stop the spread of Covid-19. Until recently, many of those states had escaped the worst consequences of the official dereliction, enjoying some luck in the mysterious dynamics of the virus’s spread.
But with the arrival of cooler temperatures, an increase in indoor activity and widespread pandemic fatigue, that story has changed terribly this fall, as public health experts predicted it would. With each passing week, the unwillingness of elected Republicans to act against the virus is taking an increasing toll, health experts say.
And the mistrust in basic public health guidelines that Republicans have sown has a further, potentially destructive cost yet to be paid: the climate of mistrust seems likely to hamper the country’s imminent effort to escape the virus’s clutches through universal vaccination.
“It’s not just that the anti-mask, anti-distancing, anti-testing Republicans are wrong as a matter of public policy,” tweeted Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative anti-Trump Bulwark. “It’s not even that they lack empathy for those who suffer. They relish their lack of empathy. They glory in their callousness. They are proud of their inhumanity.” More
Just a few months ago, Neil Shaffer thought Iowa was lost to Donald Trump.
“I was worried. We were in the midst of Covid and the economy wasn’t doing so good and Trump wasn’t handling the Covid interviews very well, and I was thinking this is gonna be a bloodbath,” said the farmer and chair of a county Republican party in the north-east of the state.
But on election day, rural Iowa turned out in force for Trump. He not only beat Joe Biden decisively in a state that opinion polls consistently predicted would be close, but the president significantly increased his vote in counties that put Barack Obama into the White House and which then flipped to Trump.
Howard county, where Shaffer lives, swung from Obama to Trump by a massive 42 points in 2016, the largest shift in the nation. This year, support for the president increased by another seven points to the horror of Democrats who hoped to reduce Trump’s share of the vote even if they did not expect to take back Howard.
In 2008, Obama won half of Iowa’s 99 counties. Two weeks ago, Biden took just six. That was a pattern repeated across midwestern farmlands as Trump solidified support in America’s rural heartland, deepening a divide with the region’s cities that delivered victory to Biden in key swing states.
“Out here, I think 2016 was less a vote for Trump than a vote against Hillary,” said Shaffer. “A lot of people were not sold on her and so they were willing to roll the dice on Trump. Now they are Trump people. They believe in him. They came out in force.”Shaffer said Trump commands a loyalty among a core of rural voters that he has not seen for a president before, and that it isn’t going away even when he leaves office. More
America’s rural heartland stuck firmly with Donald Trump on Tuesday, dashing Joe Biden’s hope of a decisive victory that would have allowed him to claim he had reunited the country, as well as undercutting Democratic expectations of winning the US Senate.
Results across the midwest showed the US still firmly divided as Trump again won a solid victory in Iowa, a state that twice voted for Barack Obama, and the Republicans held on to crucial Senate seats targeted by the Democrats.
Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, a close Trump ally, proclaimed that the Democrats were now history in her state as the president’s base turned out in force.
“We have proven without a doubt that Iowa is a red state,” she told a rowdy victory rally in Des Moines where few Republicans wore masks.
Trump was ahead in Iowa by more than seven points with over 90% of the vote counted, a victory just two points short of his 2016 win.
In Iowa and Missouri, Trump’s support in rural counties generally held up or strengthened. In some states that delivered him victory. In others, such as Wisconsin, Biden triumphed after a surge of urban votes.
But the president’s solid performance in rural America could cost the Democrats control of the Senate after what the party regarded as its best shot at two midwestern seats in Iowa and Kansas flopped.
Iowa’s Republican senator, Joni Ernst, beat her Democratic rival, Theresa Greenfield, by more than six points in a race that opinion polls for many months said would be closer. Ernst won the seat from a Democrat in 2014.
Results showed that the president dominated in rural counties that he took from the Democrats four years ago. Opinion polls said that in recent weeks voters’ primary concern shifted from coronavirus to the economy which helped swing independent voters the president’s way to supplement his core support.
“The economy was doing well before coronavirus. That was a big thing for me, said Elysha Graves as she clutched her toddler after voting for Trump in Urbandale, Iowa.
“They tried to blame him for the pandemic. I don’t know how anybody else would have handled it. It’s a hard situation. He just seems real. He’s not a politician. He’s more relatable. I trust him more than I trust Biden.”
Left: Elysha Graves and her son Parker Peters of Urbandale Iowa pose for a photo after Graves cast her vote on election day in Urbandale, Iowa. Right: A sign informs residents of a voting location on election day in Urbandale, Iowa on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Photographs by KC McGinnis/The Guardian
Democrats disappointed
Iowa is not a crucial state for Biden but his failure to significantly reduce the size of Trump’s 2016 victory there is evidence that the Democrats failed to persuade swaths of rural America that the party had much to offer them or was even paying attention to their communities and concerns.
Biden was counting on the president defeating himself with his style of governing and handling of coronavirus as the economy collapsed. But large numbers of midwestern voters were prepared to forgive Trump his hostile tweeting and other sins because, in a widely heard refrain, “he is not a regular politician”, a quality they regard as central to their support of him.
They also did not blame Trump for the economic downturn, saying it would have happened no matter who was in the White House. While the president’s handling of coronavirus was widely scorned in other places, there is a popular view in the rural midwest that Trump got it right when he opposed lockdowns as too economically damaging. More
