24 Hour (Democratic) Party People
One of my thoughts was that after the Caucus was over, I would throw together a couple of pieces of commentary of how it was to be part of the Caucus process.
I didn't expect, we would have seemingly bungled results and would want to take a break from talking Caucus.
Anyway, a thought I had was that I could take a 24 hour time period with a lot of activity, and work in a lot of my opinion and observations. I would wait until after the Caucus because I was focused on more serious stuff. Then I would write my Unanswered Prayers and name names and throw all caution to the wind (as you will see, that's not my nature).
Interestingly, the Des Moines Register did something similar on January 26, in a special pullout section called 10 Hours on the Trail. It's an interesting piece with some of the mundane things you might have in a day's work like campaign event audio issues, the 12 degree weather, catcalls at Candidate events ("No Malarkey!"), brokedown buses, and John Delaney eating soup.
It's a good piece, with my only criticism being the Register's Caucus coverage was noticeably lacking this cycle. This piece appeared two weeks before the Caucus, and is a mostly fluff piece . I would suspect something of more substance might have been a better use of space.
All of the big names we have known from the last decade of the Register are gone (Obradvoich, Jacobs, Noble, Yepsen).
Now, if I am picking a 24 hour period to talk about (we will use 6:00pm on Saturday to 6:00pm on Sunday of that same weekend), and of course, OF COURSE I am still reading the Sunday Des Moines Register, but the newspaper landscape has changed.
Iowa still has some great local papers that resemble the great smaller town papers I grew up with. The Storm Lake Times got a national spotlight last year because of its iconic Pulitzer-winning editor Art Cullen. The Carroll paper and its editor Douglas Burns have given me some insights over the years I never would have read elsewhere.
These two immediately come to mind, but there are many great local papers spread out the state. I might find myself on the site of Muscatine, Oskaloosa or Knoxville papers' websites at any given moment, or say, KNIA radio in the Southern part of Iowa.
As I relied less on the Register, I found the Cedar Rapids Gazette required daily reading. Here were the stories I wanted to know about. There are of course, both local and college papers in towns like Iowa City and Ames. All of these were constant reading for me.
In the Des Moines TV market, the CBS affiliate really stepped up this time and was a real go to for me. The NBC affiliate of course has had a reputation for strong political news too. Iowa Public TV of course, is still top notch.
There are a few websites dedicated to Iowa Politics, and Iowa Starting Line is a great resource. Now, for me, as my blog changed from comments on others' observations to more original material, I stopped checking ISL to focus on what I was doing, but they are still the best at what they do.
Saturday evening, I get a text from a friend who had been part of a Joe Biden ad. It had been a running joke, but sure enough, there it was and it was fantastic. Of course, they were fairly apolitical to the point that I don't know that they could tell the difference between Biden and Sanders, but there you go, all is fair in love and politics.
They were not the only person I knew who wound up in ads on social media or fliers. I had a friend who was very active in the Buttigieg campaign who made the Facebook ad. I had another friend who attended a Tom Steyer event and made his Facebook ad. He has got a killer We The People arm tattoo, and he will see any presidential candidate who comes to his town, but at the end of the day, he would tell you to vote for Jacob Hornberger.
I know of one other who appeared on a Steyer flyer. A Democrat elected official who wanted to check out Steyer. I think he worried that appearing would be taken as an endorsement. In any case, there are cameras everywhere, and if you go see a candidate, don't be surprise if you show up in their media feed.
Speaking of fliers, I don't know if I got one that day, but I was getting a lot of Steyer ads in my mailbox. So many, that I kept track, In the six months leading to the Caucus, I received 14 fliers from Tom Steyer. This averaged to one about every 12 days. In comparison, I would have received four to six fliers from Yang, Warren and Biden.
Yang, Warren and Buttigeig "wrote" personal letters to me in the last few weeks. Hard to imagine if they really are actually signed, but nice mementos.
That weekend, I also learned that Bernie Sanders would be making a stop at his local office. This was a short stop between two huge rallies. It would be a chance to get a good glimpse of feeling the Bern.
I didn't go. Will that be a decision that I regret?
On one hand, perhaps. It seems increasingly likely he could be President (It is just as likely the Democratic Party will oppose him at every turn).
Perhaps it's arrogance, ennui, or something else that explains why I didn't go see Bernie or even Joe Biden, where others might have to drive hours to get a faraway glimpse to see.
So, I will explain myself. First of all, like everyone, I have a family and competing investments for time. There are only so much time in a day, and anytime with a candidate is time away from the family. The blog is a hobby, and my intention has been to keep it that. I have made decisions to this point that family comes first, at this point in time.
Now, that's all well and good, but there's another reason.
These Campaign Office stops are really for the volunteers and staffers. Not only would I be there like a fish out of water, I would be soaking up time that belongs to someone more deserving.
It's an unique part of the Iowa Caucus. Though, I don't know anyone who worked that extensively on the Sanders campaign, I do know people who did for the Warren and Buttigeig campaigns,
Of those two, they had quite a bit of face time with the two candidates respectively. It is a level of access that might ping notes of jealousy.
But that only tells half of the story. These two worked for the campaign as volunteers as much as a second job. In some cases, using Paid Time Off to put extra work for the campaign, instead of saving those days for a Spring Break vacation.
n short, they worked their asses off.
For kicks, if I ever talk to anyone who worked for those campaigns, I bring my friends' names up and am greeted with smiles. Yeah, they were nonstop workers.
2020 brought some changes, and one of the biggest was grown out of Bernie's 2016 campaign. The addition of paid staffers in the mix of volunteers. I am reminded of a story of a friend who went camping on the July 4th weekend to "get away from it all" and sure enough were even canvassed there by paid staffers.
I won't forget the Warren staffer who strolled past my Yard Sign for a competing candidate and still tried to canvass me, and when that didn't work, went to work on my wife.
Whatever its future, the Caucus provided an unique side to politics. It's my favorite, of course. Everyone's an optimist and everyone is going to fix everything.
It's Baseball Opening Day right?
To Be Continued....
I didn't expect, we would have seemingly bungled results and would want to take a break from talking Caucus.
Anyway, a thought I had was that I could take a 24 hour time period with a lot of activity, and work in a lot of my opinion and observations. I would wait until after the Caucus because I was focused on more serious stuff. Then I would write my Unanswered Prayers and name names and throw all caution to the wind (as you will see, that's not my nature).
Interestingly, the Des Moines Register did something similar on January 26, in a special pullout section called 10 Hours on the Trail. It's an interesting piece with some of the mundane things you might have in a day's work like campaign event audio issues, the 12 degree weather, catcalls at Candidate events ("No Malarkey!"), brokedown buses, and John Delaney eating soup.
It's a good piece, with my only criticism being the Register's Caucus coverage was noticeably lacking this cycle. This piece appeared two weeks before the Caucus, and is a mostly fluff piece . I would suspect something of more substance might have been a better use of space.
All of the big names we have known from the last decade of the Register are gone (Obradvoich, Jacobs, Noble, Yepsen).
Now, if I am picking a 24 hour period to talk about (we will use 6:00pm on Saturday to 6:00pm on Sunday of that same weekend), and of course, OF COURSE I am still reading the Sunday Des Moines Register, but the newspaper landscape has changed.
Iowa still has some great local papers that resemble the great smaller town papers I grew up with. The Storm Lake Times got a national spotlight last year because of its iconic Pulitzer-winning editor Art Cullen. The Carroll paper and its editor Douglas Burns have given me some insights over the years I never would have read elsewhere.
These two immediately come to mind, but there are many great local papers spread out the state. I might find myself on the site of Muscatine, Oskaloosa or Knoxville papers' websites at any given moment, or say, KNIA radio in the Southern part of Iowa.
As I relied less on the Register, I found the Cedar Rapids Gazette required daily reading. Here were the stories I wanted to know about. There are of course, both local and college papers in towns like Iowa City and Ames. All of these were constant reading for me.
In the Des Moines TV market, the CBS affiliate really stepped up this time and was a real go to for me. The NBC affiliate of course has had a reputation for strong political news too. Iowa Public TV of course, is still top notch.
There are a few websites dedicated to Iowa Politics, and Iowa Starting Line is a great resource. Now, for me, as my blog changed from comments on others' observations to more original material, I stopped checking ISL to focus on what I was doing, but they are still the best at what they do.
Saturday evening, I get a text from a friend who had been part of a Joe Biden ad. It had been a running joke, but sure enough, there it was and it was fantastic. Of course, they were fairly apolitical to the point that I don't know that they could tell the difference between Biden and Sanders, but there you go, all is fair in love and politics.
They were not the only person I knew who wound up in ads on social media or fliers. I had a friend who was very active in the Buttigieg campaign who made the Facebook ad. I had another friend who attended a Tom Steyer event and made his Facebook ad. He has got a killer We The People arm tattoo, and he will see any presidential candidate who comes to his town, but at the end of the day, he would tell you to vote for Jacob Hornberger.
I know of one other who appeared on a Steyer flyer. A Democrat elected official who wanted to check out Steyer. I think he worried that appearing would be taken as an endorsement. In any case, there are cameras everywhere, and if you go see a candidate, don't be surprise if you show up in their media feed.
Speaking of fliers, I don't know if I got one that day, but I was getting a lot of Steyer ads in my mailbox. So many, that I kept track, In the six months leading to the Caucus, I received 14 fliers from Tom Steyer. This averaged to one about every 12 days. In comparison, I would have received four to six fliers from Yang, Warren and Biden.
Yang, Warren and Buttigeig "wrote" personal letters to me in the last few weeks. Hard to imagine if they really are actually signed, but nice mementos.
That weekend, I also learned that Bernie Sanders would be making a stop at his local office. This was a short stop between two huge rallies. It would be a chance to get a good glimpse of feeling the Bern.
I didn't go. Will that be a decision that I regret?
On one hand, perhaps. It seems increasingly likely he could be President (It is just as likely the Democratic Party will oppose him at every turn).
Perhaps it's arrogance, ennui, or something else that explains why I didn't go see Bernie or even Joe Biden, where others might have to drive hours to get a faraway glimpse to see.
So, I will explain myself. First of all, like everyone, I have a family and competing investments for time. There are only so much time in a day, and anytime with a candidate is time away from the family. The blog is a hobby, and my intention has been to keep it that. I have made decisions to this point that family comes first, at this point in time.
Now, that's all well and good, but there's another reason.
These Campaign Office stops are really for the volunteers and staffers. Not only would I be there like a fish out of water, I would be soaking up time that belongs to someone more deserving.
It's an unique part of the Iowa Caucus. Though, I don't know anyone who worked that extensively on the Sanders campaign, I do know people who did for the Warren and Buttigeig campaigns,
Of those two, they had quite a bit of face time with the two candidates respectively. It is a level of access that might ping notes of jealousy.
But that only tells half of the story. These two worked for the campaign as volunteers as much as a second job. In some cases, using Paid Time Off to put extra work for the campaign, instead of saving those days for a Spring Break vacation.
n short, they worked their asses off.
For kicks, if I ever talk to anyone who worked for those campaigns, I bring my friends' names up and am greeted with smiles. Yeah, they were nonstop workers.
2020 brought some changes, and one of the biggest was grown out of Bernie's 2016 campaign. The addition of paid staffers in the mix of volunteers. I am reminded of a story of a friend who went camping on the July 4th weekend to "get away from it all" and sure enough were even canvassed there by paid staffers.
I won't forget the Warren staffer who strolled past my Yard Sign for a competing candidate and still tried to canvass me, and when that didn't work, went to work on my wife.
Whatever its future, the Caucus provided an unique side to politics. It's my favorite, of course. Everyone's an optimist and everyone is going to fix everything.
It's Baseball Opening Day right?
To Be Continued....
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