WELCOME to the debut of “The Truth Is!”, a blog of reporting and commentary that aims to be informative, thoughtful and provocative. At least initially, the blog will have a strong heartland flavor by virtue of the connection of a number of us to Cowles family journalism. I am former editor of the Des Moines Register’s opinion pages. Another contributor, Michael Gartner, is former editor of the paper; he later served as president of NBC News. Another former Register editor who has agreed to contribute, Geneva Overholser, is director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of journalism. Followers of the blog will have access also to the work of Herbert Strentz of Des Moines, a close Register and other newspaper watcher who once headed Drake University’s journalism school. Bill Leonard, a longtime Register editorial writer, will add insights.

“The Truth Is!” will be supervised by my daughter, Marcia Wolff, a communications lawyer for 20 years with Arnold and Porter (Washington, D.C.). Invaluable technical assistance in assembling and maintaining the blog is provided by my grandsons Julian Cranberg, a college first-year, and Daniel Wolff, a high school senior.

If you detect a whiff of nepotism in this operation, so be it. All of it is strictly a labor of love. —Gil Cranberg

Friday, August 9, 2013

Herb Strentz: OF POETS AND POLITICS -- THE IOWA FOLLIES

Rudyard Kipling never would have penned the opening line of his poem “If” were he in Iowa when the press ballyhoos the state as “The center of the political universe” — as it does so routinely today.
 
Kipling begins his celebrated 1895 poem with the line “If you can keep your head when all about you (a)re losing theirs….” But that is well nigh impossible in Iowa in August 2013.
 
Subjected to the farce that Iowa makes of the presidential campaign in particular and sanity in general, Kipling would have returned his pen to its inkwell, forgotten about “If” and possibly seen the wisdom in Edgar Allan Poe and the line “Nevermore.”
 
The more Iowa botches its role in the presidential campaign, the more the press trumpets Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status as a bellwether, oracle and fount of wisdom. It’s almost insane.
Here we are 27 months from the 2016 election and we’re in mid-campaign form. Iowa and GOP candidates do dumb things and the press dutifully records it all; just as the press must have done in rave reviews of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” — to invoke a third literary giant, Hans Christian Andersen. 
 
How can one “keep your head” when, like water-drop torture, these items drip, drip, drip?
 
• News accounts routinely refer to the need for candidates to cater to the Republican Party “base.” But, at least in Iowa, the GOP “base” and “lunatic fringe” are one and the same. The press does not acknowledge that, although a lot of former Iowa Republicans do.
 
• One hopeful sign of sanity -- that the Iowa Straw Poll might be reformed -- has become an absurdity, if not a political obscenity.  The Iowa Straw Poll is a fundraiser held by the Iowa GOP in August of the year preceding a presidential election.  Whichever candidate contributes the most money to the Iowa GOP is crowned as the front-runner of the Republican Party presidential nomination.  The press embraces this scam by sagely noting that whoever can commandeer the most yellow school buses to ferry supporters to the Straw Poll plainly has demonstrated fitness to fill what Harry S. Truman called “the most important office of government in the history of the world.”  The Straw Poll process resulted in U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann winning the crown in 2011.  This spurred efforts toward reform. So who has offered to fill the gap should the Straw Poll be junked? Well, the Iowa Christian Right says it can screen candidates even better than the Straw Poll. The organization willing to do that, the evangelical non-profit Family Leader — which spearheaded the campaign to oust three Iowa Supreme Court justices for recognizing the right to gay marriage — has the apparent blessing of Republican Gov. Terry Branstad. The GOP nominee would not be the biggest spender, but would be the one who grovels best before the GOP “base.”
 
• The Iowa caucus and campaign process puts the emphasis not on issues or debate, but rather on who is ahead in the polls.  You see, it’s all a horse race, even though the horse race approach has long been criticized as a flaw in political news coverage.  So a measure of hope wafted into Iowa recently when the respected, but now retired, Associated Press political reporter Mike Glover created a website to offer some needed and solid insights and substance to the caucus folly.  His website?     http://www.iowahorserace.com
 
How do you “keep your head” amidst all this and still worse to come — even if you are in the center of the political universe?

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