Wednesday, October 08, 2008

House District 66 in the spotlight

The Des Moines Register published a profile of my legislative race today with a feature article that covered a solid portion of page 2 of the Metro/Iowa section. I was tickled with the size of the story and the reporting was solid and accurate, though the editor's headline was pretty plain and probably didn't grab much attention from online readers.

Naturally, there are things I wish hadn't been omitted from my interview with Daniel Finney. A $10 minimum wage is not a radical idea... because, factoring inflation, it's equal to the federal minimum wage in 1968, a very prosperous economic period in American history. Voters today have little perspective on how far workers have fallen behind in claiming their share of the pot, and that comparison to a wage level forty years ago doesn't even factor in the rise in measured productivity in the period since.

The incumbent was given the last word in the article-- oh well, but the candidate Q&A, which didn't appear in the out-of-town print editions of the paper, had my written, emailed reponses published without edit, for which I'm slightly surprised, and the text of that section is almost three times larger than the actual article so we covered some ground there.

I fared much better in my treatment by the Register than the poor Libertarian Party candidate running in House District 60 in the western suburbs. Russ Gibson wasn't even invited to the joint meeting between the major party candidates and the newspaper's editors and political reporters. It's hard to believe the same thing wouldn't have happened to me if there had been a Republican candidate running in District 66, even though I could wipe the floor with a GOP candidate head-to-head in this district. Gibson should be boiling over his exclusion, but others should be also. At least 50 residents of District 60 signed a petition this summer in support of Russ Gibson's name appearing on the ballot November 4th. There has been no polling, organized or otherwise, that indicates he's a less viable candidate than two favored schmucks touting the same shallow rhetoric about lower taxes, higher standards for schools, and help for small business. If there was an objective standard used to arrive at the decision of Gibson's exclusion, the Register should tell us what that was.

4 Comments:

At 4:09 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

C'mon Chris! stick it to the "took classes at DMACC" political/educational empire.

 
At 7:02 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Chris, you can say whatever you want about Ako, he can't find any any evidence of what was said. I doubt he could find proof of his own existence. Ako is another Des Moines liberal crook who should be in jail.

 
At 10:05 PM, Blogger CM said...

I'm a Des Moines liberal!

 
At 10:52 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

But, you are not a crook.

 

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