Nichols: Iowans Have Power to Shape Nation’s Future

John Nichols is a pioneering political blogger; writer for The Nation, The Progressive and In These Times; and the associate editor of the Capitol Times in Madison, Wis. This Friday, he will be the keynote speaker at Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement’s statewide convention, where he will talk about the importance of Iowans flexing their electoral power this election.

Nichols said active and growing progressive groups are standing up to power and winning more consistently than pundits and politicians want you to know.

He took the time to talk with the Iowa Independent by phone Monday afternoon about politics, the media and Iowa’s role in selecting the next president.What will your speech Friday evening focus on?

What I’ll be saying is what I’ve said a lot in the states of the upper Midwest, but especially in Iowa, and that is that Iowans actually created the current presidential race. They recognized the remarkable nature of Barack Obama’s presidency on the Democratic side, and they saw through the Bush administration’s efforts to put up [Massachusetts Gov.] Mitt Romney as a candidate. They rejected him and went for [Arkansas Gov. Mike] Huckabee, which kept [Sen. John] McCain alive to ultimately win the Republican nomination. So to a larger extent in many years, Iowa has defined this presidential race.

The interesting thing is that it’s going to come back to Iowa. In fact, Iowa will be a critical battleground state throughout the race. It’s important that Iowans don’t just let this happen to them. They should be pressuring the candidates and continuing to define this race. They have the power to do so because it is a battleground state, but more than that, I think the three upper Midwest states of Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, all of which were essential to Obama winning the Democratic nomination, voted for him because he was a progressive. They voted for him because they saw him as clearly the most anti-war of the candidates, but also because they saw him as a break from Bush-ism. Arguably, the way to understand the 2008 presidential election is that everybody is trying to get away from Bush, and I think it’s very important that folks in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin don’t lose sight of that and don’t let Barack Obama let them down. If he starts to waiver on the war, civil liberties, trade policy, campaign finance, as he has and has disappointed some people, then Iowans should give the message that they expect more from their candidates than just boring centrist politics.

Are you getting a sense that progressives around the country are getting worried of late with Barack Obama?

The [The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] vote especially concerned a lot of people. I hear that, but I don’t hear an outright abandonment by progressives. It’s not like I hear “Oh, we’re not going to back Obama now.” It’s just a matter of how excited they get about him and also has some impact on his ability to draw people to the polls.

The goal of Republicans is going to be to make Obama look like just another politician. If they can succeed in doing that, they are going to succeed in depressing turnout in November. That’s something the Obama people have to be very cautious about.

One of the things I’ll be talking about this week is my sense that the problem here is that people on the East Coast and West Coast do not trust the Midwest. They don’t understand us. They refer to the Midwest as “flyover country.” They think that Midwesterners are a bunch of ignorant, easily duped quasi racists. That’s the image of the Midwest a lot of East and West Coasters have. The reality is that people in Iowa on Jan. 3 went to the polls and essentially made it possible for an African American to be president. Far from being the dupes that Midwesterners are portrayed as, we can be more ahead of the curve than most folks. We’ve sorted out most of the complexities and controversies of this race.

Yet one of the big dangers is that political strategists from New York and Washington, D.C., will say to Obama that he has to dumb himself down and become a boring centrist in order to appeal to the battleground states in the upper Midwest. The fact is, nothing could be further from the truth.

Here’s a question for you. Since 1964 when Lyndon Johnson had his landslide election, who did the best as the Democratic nominee for president in the Midwest?

Bill Clinton?

Nope. Not by a long shot. Bill Clinton barely got 50 percent in the Midwestern states. It was Mike Dukakis. He had some of his best finishes in the upper Midwest. But he was dismissed by the folks on the East Coast as this intellectual elite, but Midwesterners voted for him without batting an eye. They prefer somebody who is smart and talks to them in a realistic and progressive manner. When Democrats abandon progressive messaging is when they run into trouble. The progressive message goes back to the roots of the Midwest. Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin became primary backers of the Republican Party prior to the Civil War, when the Republican Party was a radical party. These states at the turn of the last century were hotbeds of populist, progressive activism. These three states, back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Democrats were having a terribly tough time winning Senate seats, bucked the trends and backed progressive candidates.

Iowa elects Tom Harkin, defeating a conservative Republican incumbent. Then, Minnesota elects Paul Wellstone, defeating a conservative Republican opponent. Then in 1992, Wisconsin elects Russ Feingold to the Senate, again defeating a conservative Republican incumbent. Here’s where it gets really interesting. Harkin, Wellstone while he was alive and Feingold have kept getting re-elected, even though they are consistently accused of being too left-wing, too dangerous, too scary for the Midwest and the Democratic Party. There is a terrible misinterpretation of these states by campaign strategists, and the biggest danger they have this time around is if they make Barack Obama too boring and too centrist. If they do, he will suffer the fate of Al Gore and John Kerry.

What do progressives in Iowa need to do to make sure that doesn’t happen?

Look at the recent congressional election cycle. Who won? Bruce Braley and David Loebsack. What did they do? They ran to the left in their primaries and during the general elections. The answer in Iowa is not to dumb it down and go centrist. It doesn’t work in Iowa, and it doesn’t work in other states, either. The pollution of our political process has been that so much of our national media and national political crowd have so much disrespect for the Midwest and the middle of the country and have convinced a lot of political activists that the folks in the middle of the country are a bunch of yahoos. The fact of the matter is, if the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington had come up with a candidate to run against [former Iowa First District U.S. Rep.] Jim Leach, it wouldn’t have been anybody like David Loebsack. There’s no way they would have let him run. In fact, they didn’t get excited about him until they realized he might win.

It’s important for Iowans to realize their own genius. To figure out that they’ve got it figured out. They have to stop bowing to some consultants and strategist from somewhere else. They know how to win.

With that in mind, how important is it to keep the Iowa Caucuses first in the nation?

I’m for Iowa being first. And I’m a big fan of reforming the political process around the country in a bunch of ways. I’m not the biggest fan of caucuses. I think they have a lot of problems. They don’t get the turnout that primaries do, even in Iowa where you have the most popular caucuses in the country. That, in my opinion, is a serious issue. That’s something I would like people to think about seriously, not just in Iowa, but across the country. It’s better to have the maximized turnout.

But, that said, I like the idea of Iowa and New Hampshire going first. These states are serious about the political process, and the people in these states are often able to see beyond and break through the spin that comes out of Washington. They vote for a candidate that’s not supposed to have a chance, and that sends a powerful message across the country. They also reject candidates who are just PR put-up jobs. I don’t think you want to lose that political wisdom.

Look at what Iowa did this year. Against all the expectations, Iowa voted for an African American guy and a preacher from Arkansas. That was not how this race was supposed to go. I think any time that a state is able to not only think for itself but break pattern and do things the political process doesn’t like, that’s something we ought to wrap our arms around and embrace. We should say, “Thank you, keep doing it.”

Do you have an opinion on who would make the best running mate for Obama?

Tom Harkin. He would be a great vice-presidential candidate. Russ Feingold would be an absolutely fantastic candidate. Only the screwed-up thinking of Washington and New York, where I spend a lot of my time, so I don’t hate these places, but only the screwed-up thinking of strategists who don’t come out to battleground states would imagine for a second that those would not be good choices. A fiery populist who could go out and deliver a great speech, that would be someone great to put on Obama’s side.

Here’s one of the realities of politics that doesn’t get mentioned enough: When you pick a vice-presidential candidate, the most evil thing imaginable is the idea of balancing the ticket. Obama has a liberal image, so people say he has to pick a conservative to run with him. The problem with that strategy is that we have a disproportional amount of vice presidents who one day become presidents. Or at the very least become the next nominee of the party. Balancing the ticket is not a very healthy strategy, because it’s almost saying that “I want to win this time, but I’m going to cede the future. I’m going to guarantee that the future belongs to someone who isn’t like me and doesn’t share my values.”

How well do you think the mainstream media has done covering the presidential race?

A lousy job. I don’t call it mainstream media anymore because they’ve so botched their franchise that now increasingly people are turning to places like the Iowa Independent for their information. People are rejecting what was once the mainstream and are looking for new ways to get information.

Our major media in this country does a rotten job of covering politics. It gets more excited about rumors and stereotypes than it does about issues and practical challenges for this country. Our media in this country would rather do anything but look at the serious issues in this campaign.

We are at war in Iraq today not because of George Bush and Dick Cheney but because the media in the U.S. did a lousy job of covering the run-up to the war in Iraq. Bush is president today because major media did a lousy job of covering the Florida recount in 2000. They actually allowed James Baker to say that recounting votes is somehow too difficult to do. The fact is, we’ve been recounting elections since the founding of the republic. The race in 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams was filled with recounts, at least 36 recounts. We don’t have a problem with recounts in this country — we have a problem with media that are so inept, so incompetent that it relies more on spin than on going out and doing real journalism.

Media in this country have replaced civic and democratic values with commercial and economic values.

The newspaper you work for, the Capitol Times in Madison, Wis., has gone through quite a transition in recent years. How has the change from a daily, print paper to an online-focused publication changed the way you and your staff operate?

It’s definitely changed things a lot. The Cap Times still puts out two weekly print editions, so it hasn’t quite made the whole leap into the digital age, but it’s not there in the traditional, daily form any longer. The afternoon daily newspaper is a disappearing reality. It was getting to the point where, though the Cap Times had one of the highest proportional circulations of any afternoon daily in the country, it was still just not growing or expanding. A tremendous amount of energy was being put into trying to stay above water circulation wise as an afternoon daily.

Because the morning space was not open to us, the choice was made to try going online and really pouring resources into a digital reality. Really covering stories like you would for a daily newspaper, but putting them up instantaneously, updating them, having a lot more commentary, and it seems to work very well, especially for those of us who still cling to some of the old print realities. There is a lot of traffic on the Web site. It seems to be influential, and politicians seem to take it seriously.

The goal was to continue and maybe expand its influence and its ability to speak out, and that seems to be working. I’m not going to say everything is working, and you know full well that it is hard and sometimes challenging to know what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.

As long as the Cap Times can remain a strong, progressive voice in the upper Midwest as it has been since 1917, then I’m pretty happy about it.

Do you see this as the model newspapers will one day have to follow?

I do. I’m not saying that I’m happy about it. I’m a big fan of the daily newspaper. If I go to a town, I pick up the newspaper. It’s something I’ve always done, and I don’t like the idea of moving away from print. But the rapidly declining circulations of daily newspapers, the diminishing of their own size and the decreasing in the amount of coverage they’ve done is troubling.

A great example is the Des Moines Register, which remains one of the better regional dailies in the country, but it has certainly pulled itself in. When I was a kid, it went to every county in Iowa, and it covered every county in Iowa. In Wisconsin, with the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel, they covered the entire state. That doesn’t happen anymore. It’s not because editors and journalists don’t want to cover things. It’s because it’s getting harder to do, certainly economically.

Going digital is going to become more common, but I want to emphasize that simply going digital without providing the resources isn’t going to work. Going digital costs a lot of money, because while you don’t have cost of printing and distribution, to do what you need to do and to cover all of a community, region or state, you have to have people and you have to pay them a decent wage. The reality is that ultimately we can’t have really good quality journalism without some sort of long-term compensation for the people that produce it.

When all this does sort out, advertisers are going to go to sites and bloggers that attract a lot of interest, and that’s going to be done with quality coverage. Quality is going to be the deciding factor.

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement will hold their statewide convention Friday and Saturday at the Hotel Fort Des Moines. Tickets are $15 in advance and $20 at the door.