Geraldine Ferraro died today at age 75, after battling multiple myeloma for 13 years, far longer than she was expected to survive when diagnosed. She became the first woman named to a major-party national ticket in the U.S. when Walter Mondale chose her as his running mate in 1984. Ferraro acknowledged that she would not have been Mondale’s choice for vice president had she been a man. The Democratic nominee was trailing President Ronald Reagan badly in the polls and needed something to shake up the campaign. Ferraro was supposed to turn the emerging “gender gap” in American politics to the Democrats’ favor.

I remember discounting the rumors that a woman might be nominated for vice president. The Reagan years had rapidly developed my cynicism. It was a big deal just to have a woman on the “short list,” so I figured that talking Ferraro was going to be the Mondale camp’s gesture toward women, and we’d have to wait another cycle or two to see a woman on a ticket. But after watching Ferraro’s speech at the national convention, this liberal teenage girl was so excited and inspired that I briefly forgot what I knew about Mondale having no chance to be elected.

Journalists covering the campaign picked Ferraro apart; you can read the gory details in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times obituaries. She wasn’t very experienced in terms of media relations, and she was a strong woman, so she was an easy target. One manufactured controversy after another dominated stories about her campaign, and I remember lots of speculation about her Italian-American husband’s possible mob ties. Meanwhile, media provided scant coverage when Reagan’s Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan was indicted in September 1984, six weeks before the presidential election. You’d think the first-ever indictment of a sitting cabinet secretary would be a bigger news story than some of the garbage being thrown at Ferraro, but you would be wrong. (Donovan was later acquitted.)

Bleeding Heartland readers too young to remember the 1984 campaign may know of Ferraro mainly because in March 2008, she asserted that Barack Obama’s race gave him an advantage in the presidential primaries against Hillary Clinton: “Sexism is a bigger problem [than racism in the United States] […] It’s OK to be sexist in some people’s minds. It’s not OK to be racist.” The ensuing furor prompted Ferraro to resign from Clinton’s presidential campaign fundraising committee, though she stood by her remarks. At the time, I felt many Obama supporters blew Ferraro’s comments way out of proportion. Her perspective was shaped by decades of personal experience with sexism, like law school professors who felt she had taken “a man’s rightful place.”

Representative Bruce Braley said in a statement today, “Geraldine Ferraro was a great leader and a remarkable woman. She not only made history, she inspired generations of women to do the same. She will be greatly missed, but her influence will live on.”  I will update this post with further Iowa reaction to Ferraro’s passing.

Share your own memories of Ferraro and her political career in this thread.

UPDATE: Senator Chuck Grassley posted to Twitter, “Geraldine Ferraro was an xtraordinary M of Cong. A person easy get along w. True abt my working w her”

Ferraro’s father died when she was eight years old. Here’s a reflection she wrote on how losing a parent so young affected her life.

LATE UPDATE: Joan Walsh’s reflection on Ferraro’s life and career is worth reading.

The U.S. Census Bureau released a ton of new Iowa demographic information yesterday.

Data for Iowa show that the five most populous incorporated places and their 2010 Census counts are Des Moines, 203,433; Cedar Rapids, 126,326; Davenport, 99,685; Sioux City, 82,684; and Waterloo, 68,406. Des Moines grew by 2.4 percent since the 2000 Census. Cedar Rapids grew by 4.6 percent, Davenport grew by 1.3 percent, Sioux City decreased by 2.7 percent and Waterloo decreased by 0.5 percent.

The largest county is Polk with a population of 430,640. Its population grew by 15.0 percent since 2000. The other counties in the top five include Linn, with a population of 211,226 (increase of 10.2 percent); Scott, 165,224 (increase of 4.1 percent); Black Hawk, 131,090 (increase of 2.4 percent); and Johnson, 130,882 (increase of 17.9 percent).

Click here to find the Iowa numbers and charts. I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to look through the data, but I’m posting a few starting points for discussion here.

Rick Smith’s piece on growth in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City corridor is worth a read. I’m not surprised Linn County grew substantially during the decade, especially in the suburbs, but the population growth in Cedar Rapids itself is impressive. I didn’t expect to see that after the 2008 floods destroyed whole neighborhoods in the city.

After the jump I’ve posted official 2010 population numbers for all 99 Iowa counties, along with a map putting the counties in different population categories and a map grouping counties by population gain or loss (percentage). Ten Iowa counties have populations larger than 65,000 people. Another 14 counties have populations between 25,000 and 64,999; 29 counties have populations between 15,000 and 24,999; and 46 counties have populations between 4,029 (Adams) and 14,999. Dallas led the 33 Iowa counties that gained population between 2000 and 2010.

Although I wasn’t able to reproduce this chart showing the racial and ethnic breakdown of the Iowa population by Congressional district, I did include those numbers at the end of this post. I was surprised to see that even though Polk County has the largest Latino/Hispanic population in Iowa, there are more Latino/Hispanic residents in IA-05 than in IA-03, with IA-02 and IA-04 not far behind. Meanwhile, IA-01 has the smallest Latino/Hispanic population but the largest African-American population. The largest Asian population is in IA-03 with IA-02 not far behind. View the chart here or scroll down for more details.

Share any thoughts about the census data or details that caught your eye in this thread. For example, the Newton Independent posted 2000 and 2010 numbers for Jasper County and area cities.

UPDATE: The Des Moines Register has lots of census coverage here. Statewide, Iowa’s population grew by 4.1 percent from 2000 to 2010. The Latino population was up by 83.8 percent, the Asian population was up by 44.9 percent, and the African-American population was up by 44.1 percent.

On his first day back in office, Governor Terry Branstad rescinded Governor Tom Vilsack’s 2005 executive order on felon voting rights as well as Governor Chet Culver’s 2010 order on project labor agreements. By prohibiting project labor agreements on public works projects involving state funds (executive order 69), Branstad will drive down wages and help contractors that don’t hire unionized workers.

Branstad defended his voting rights directive (executive order 70) as a way to protect crime victims while recouping more fines and court costs. However, the main impact will be to shrink the Iowa electorate. Follow me after the jump for more background and analysis.  

Representative Steve King rarely misses a chance to accuse the Obama administration of racism, but this week he seems uncertain about the best way to exploit the fiasco over USDA official Shirley Sherrod’s dismissal. King told Politico yesterday that he sympathized with Sherrod, having been misquoted himself.

King suggested Sherrod has changed her views over the past quarter-century and should get her job back.

“Also, I think it’s interesting that we don’t have it clear whether [U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom] Vilsack fired her or the White House fired her,” King added. “The president was going to be the first post-racial president but his whole presidency is becoming about race.”

But in a talk radio appearance, King took a different tack, saying Sherrod’s hiring by the USDA should be investigated. He noted Sherrod was a claimant in the Pigford case (a discrimination lawsuit black farmers brought against the USDA). Apparently King wants Americans to believe the Pigford case settlement resulted in too much money going to too many black farmers.

In other recent King news, to no one’s surprise he joined the new Tea Party Caucus that Michele Bachmann founded in the U.S. House of Representatives. Bachmann and King are ideological soulmates who share a press secretary. To see who else became a founding Tea Party caucus member, check this list on the Mother Jones blog. You’ll find some famous loudmouths (Joe “You Lie!” Wilson) and “big idea” folks like Paul Broun, who wants to repeal the constitutional amendments that permit the federal income tax and the direct election of U.S. senators.

The Tea Party caucus isn’t just a haven for fringe-y House wingnuts, though. Bachmann’s group attracted GOP leaders including National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions and House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence. Whether they’ll manage to harness tea party energy for the bulk of GOP establishment candidates remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, heavy rain continues to batter Iowa this week. I see King joined Iowa’s other U.S. House members in asking President Obama to “quickly approve Gov. Chet Culver’s request for a disaster declaration for Iowa counties” affected by flooding. However, I can’t find any press release from King’s office explaining his vote last week against extending the federal flood insurance program.

UPDATE: King tweeted around 1:30 on Thursday afternoon, “Shirley Sharrod was involved in a collective farm in Georgia. Nation’s largest ($13 million) recipient in Pigford Farms($2 billion) fraud.” He got that information from talk radio host Ben Shapiro.

SECOND UPDATE: King notes in a press release that he has signed on to a “friend of the court” brief defending the state of Arizona’s new immigration law. The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against that law. On Fox News yesterday, King gave a theological justification for his position on immigration:

God gave us rights. Our founding fathers recognized that. It’s in our Declaration [of Independence]. It’s the foundational document of America, and God made all nations on earth and He decided when and where each nation would be. And that’s out of the Book of Acts and it’s in other places [in the Bible]. So we can’t be a nation if we don’t have a border, and if we grant amnesty, we can’t define it as a border any longer or ourselves as a nation as a border any longer.

Rarely are secretaries of agriculture near the center of attention in Washington, but Tom Vilsack is in the hot seat after abetting the right-wing noise machine’s latest attempt to undermine the Obama administration. On Monday an African-American US Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, was sacked because a right-wing website made her appear to have discriminated against a white farmer.

Sherrod, USDA’s rural development director for Georgia, said she was ordered to resign on Monday after a video, posted on one of Andrew Breitbart’s conservative sites, showed her saying she had not given a white farmer her “full force.”

The NAACP later posted the full, unedited video of Sherrod speaking at an NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner, and it showed the remarks had been taken out of context in the version posted by Breitbart. Breitbart had said that he had posted the full version he was given. The farmer, Roger Spooner, now 87, appeared on CNN from his Georgia home and said Sherrod had been “helpful in every way – she saved our farm.”

Vilsack should know better than to validate a phony right-wing narrative, but he’s never been a happy partisan warrior. I’m not surprised he kicked a USDA official to the curb instead of waiting to hear all the facts. He probably hoped to kill this “news” story before it gained momentum. The problem is, he has created more incentive for Obama’s opponents to gin up fake scandals. Vilsack also damaged his own reputation. Lots of people will want answers to the questions Greg Sargent asks today:

Now that the full Shirley Sherrod video has been released, vindicating her completely, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is  promising to undertake a review of her firing. So maybe he will re-instate her after all.

But it isn’t enough for Vilsack to reinstate her. People should demand that his review include an explanation for his own decision to fire her. We need to hear his justification for the decision to ax this woman before all the facts were in, on the strength of nothing more than an Andrew Breitbart smear.

Did Vilsack make any effort to learn more about her speech before giving her the push? If not, why not? Sherrod says she told top USDA officials that the full speech would vindicate her. Did anyone at USDA give her protestations even a passing listen? Did anyone try to obtain video of the full speech? If not, why not? Why was Breitbart’s word alone allowed to drive such a high-profile decision?

People should also demand that the White House weigh in publicly on what happened here. The White House has only discussed this via anonymous leaks, and this morning, officials are conveniently leaking word that the White House prodded Vilsack to reconsider Sherrod’s firing. That’s nice, but was the White House told in advance that the firing was about to happen, and if so, why did it allow the firing to proceed?

The White House looks bad for supporting Vilsack’s rush to judgment, then backing off when the full video of Sherrod’s remarks appeared. But ultimately, this was Vilsack’s mistake. Let’s hope he learned the right lessons from it.

UPDATE: Charles Lemos posted the full video of Sherrod’s speech and his reaction to it. It’s worth a read.

SECOND UPDATE: Vilsack has apologized and offered Sherrod another USDA position. I’ve posted the video after the jump. Good for him; it’s not always easy for politicians to admit a mistake. TPMDC reported today,

In response to a question from TPMDC, Vilsack called the debacle “a teachable moment for me.” He admitted that Sherrod had received advance notice of Breitbart’s intention to (mis)use the clip and had attempted to inform her superiors, including Vilsack, by email — but the email did not get through, and thus her superiors’ first contact with her regarding the incident was after Breitbart’s release of the clip.

Democratic Congressional candidate Matt Campbell has challenged incumbent Steve King to a series of three debates this year. Campbell’s press release notes that King “has never formally debated an opponent” since his first election to Congress in 2002.

Don’t expect this year to become the exception that proves the rule. King ignored Campbell’s request that he apologize for making racially polarizing remarks about President Barack Obama, and he’s probably going to ignore Campbell’s request for debates on the issues.

Why would King agree to take questions from a panel of journalists while Campbell points out how little the incumbent has accomplished for his fifth district constituents? The status quo is very comfortable for King. Conservative interest groups pay to fly him all over the country. He gets one softball question after another from right-wing talk radio hosts. Even when sensible Republicans are embarrassed by his presence, he can find a receptive audience for his wrong-headed comments.

Douglas Burns put it well at the Carroll Daily Times Herald:

In evaluating employees one of the more important measures is time management. […]

We can debate whether King is accurate with his portrayal of Obama as a closet black militant. But, really, is this the sort of business we want Mr. King, our $174,000-a-year employee, doing for us on the job?

The time King spends on this matter is time he’s not devoting to the great sweep of land that is the 5th Congressional District. A self-described insomniac, King can claim that he has time to be a right-wing talk-show darling and a reliable piñata for MSNBC’s liberal commentators whose eyes light up like kids seeing candies and other sweets every time they see the Kiron Republican’s lips jiggle into their default position of flapping about.

But at the end of the day, there’s no getting away from the fact that it takes time and energy and political capital to play the role of Congressman Steve King as he’s written the part. […]

More important, when King is chasing the lights, cameras and action of the spit-scream arena of modern political talk entertainment shows what is he neglecting in Cherokee or Carroll or Creston or Council Bluffs? What agricultural or economic-development issue is getting less attention than it would otherwise have?

The most important choice we make in life is how to use our time. It is a limited commodity. King is on our clock and he’s spending our time in ways that have little to do with real life in western Iowa.

I would bank on Campbell’s handshake with King at the Storm Lake 4th of July parade being the only meeting between the two candidates this year.

In related Steve King news, this week he claimed the closure of a voter intimidation case in Philadelphia proved he was right to claim the Obama administration has a “default mechanism” favoring racial minorities. For context about the New Black Panther Case dropped by Obama’s Justice Department, read this piece by Zachary Roth at TPMMuckraker. Conservatives like King are making “whistle-blower” Christian Adams out to be a hero, but Josh Marshall reminds us how this guy got his DOJ job in the first place:

Adams was one of the attorneys US Attorney firing scandal luminary Bradley Schlozman hired when he was purging the Civil Rights Division of female, minority and non-right wing attorneys and replacing them with “good Americans.”

Basically, Adams was one of the guys who got in during the bad old days when the crooks and bamboozlers then running the DOJ were purging career attorneys and replacing them with right-wing activists like Schlozman himself. And remember, Schlozman’s role at the Bush DOJ was getting US Attorneys to bring bogus ‘vote fraud’ cases to further the effort to suppress minority and low-income voter turnout.

Let’s see, what else was one of the 10 worst members of Congress wrong about lately? Oh yes, King agreed with a right-wing talk show caller who claimed Obama’s not helping Louisiana cope with the BP oil spill because that state’s governor is a Republican. In the process he falsely accused the president of failing to waive the Jones Act. Pat Garofalo explains here why the right-wing Jones Act talking points are false.

Representative Steve King won’t cancel his planned trip to Colorado this weekend, even though the conservatives he had planned to help don’t want to be associated with him. Via Swing State Project’s morning news roundup I found this Loveland Connection article following up on the controversy over King’s recent comments on race. King is not backing down on his claim that President Barack Obama’s “default mechanism” on race “favors the black person.” As I discussed yesterday, the comments prompted Colorado Congressional candidate Cory Gardner to cancel a fundraiser King was supposed to headline and got King uninvited from a Northern Colorado Tea Party rally to be held in Loveland. From the Loveland Connection piece:

King said he called both [Northern Colorado Tea Party director Lesley] Hollywood and Gardner on Tuesday after their cancellation announcements.

“I have spoken with her and Cory Gardner both, and neither one of them disagreed with what I said or the position I have taken,” King said in an interview.

Gardner’s campaign manager, Chris Hansen, flatly rejected King’s characterization of his conversation with the Northern Colorado congressional candidate: “That is not an accurate reflection of Representative Gardner’s views,” he said in an e-mail.

Hollywood was interviewed Tuesday morning but couldn’t immediately be reached for comment after King’s interview.

The Iowa congressman said he told Gardner and Hollywood he’d be in Colorado on Saturday.

“I pointed out to them that I’m coming to Colorado, that’s in my schedule and they’ll have to figure it out from there,” he said.

He declined to elaborate on his weekend plans: “We will make some arrangements so that works out to be effective.”

A spokesman for Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck, a Republican Senate candidate who also will speak at the Loveland rally, also rejected King’s statement.

“His comments do not represent the Tea Party,” Buck spokesman Owen Loftus told The Associated Press.

Stay tuned–this could get interesting over the weekend if the rank and file Colorado tea partiers stand by King. He typically gets a warm reception from tea party crowds, as Joseph Morton noted in this story for the Omaha World-Herald:

King said that the controversy over his comments had been drummed up by liberal activists and that he was surprised both the Gardner campaign and the local tea party leadership “caved” in the face of that controversy.

“That’s not the kind of people I want guarding my back,” King said. […]

King has spoken at numerous tea party rallies, including one in Washington in April. King was introduced to the enthusiastic crowd as a “tea partier on the inside” and a congressman who is “tea party tested and tea party approved.”

He also hung one of the “Don’t Tread On Me” flags popular among tea party regulars outside his Capitol Hill office. He said at the time that the flag has become “the symbol of taking our country back.”

Obama and race also were mentioned in a speech made last month by King.

“When he had an Irish cop and a black professor, who’d he side with?” King asked. “He jumped to a conclusion without having heard the facts. And he ended up having to have a beer summit.

“The president of the United States has got to articulate a mission. And instead, he’s playing race-bait games to undermine the law enforcement in the state of Arizona and across the country.”

Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn clearly wants this controversy to blow over, but King would rather stand his ground, even if he embarrasses fellow Republicans in the process.

UPDATE: King tweeted on Thursday, “I will do media and two events in Colorado Saturday. One at Elizabeth at 11:00, one at Loveland at 2:30 with Tancredo and others.” Can’t wait!

Meanwhile, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Sue Dvorsky said today,

“King’s statements reflect an absolute callous disregard for the truth and is an embarrassment to all Iowans,” Dvorsky said. “I’m calling on Sen. Grassley, Terry Branstad, and Iowa Republicans to join me and the Northern Colorado Tea Party in denouncing Steve King’s irresponsible and divisive comments.” […]

“It’s truly unfortunate that Matt Strawn and other Iowa Republicans haven’t mustered the courage to put him in his place,” Dvorsky said. “This is a Congressman that spends more time trying to make the news than working for his constituents. It’s time for Iowa Republicans to make a stand and let Rep. King know this kind of behavior is not going to be tolerated.”

UPDATE: Isaiah McGee, the rising African American star of the Republican Party of Iowa, defended King in this post at The Iowa Republican blog. The Iowa Democratic Party asked whether Terry Branstad was indirectly defending King, noting that McGee serves as Young Professionals Chair for the Branstad campaign.

I was offline for a few days and returned to find that Representative Steve “10 Worst” King has been shooting off his mouth again. Historically, King’s offensive outbursts have enhanced his reputation with the country’s right wing, but this time even some conservatives are troubled by his comments. On Monday, King went on G. Gordon Liddy’s talk radio show to talk about Arizona’s new immigration law. Apparently that topic wasn’t controversial enough, because King said of President Barack Obama’s administration,

When you look at this administration, I’m offended by [U.S. Attorney General] Eric Holder and the President also, their posture.  It looks like Eric Holder said that white people in America are cowards when it comes to race.  And I don’t know what the basis of that is but I’m not a coward when it comes to that and I’m happy to talk about these things and I think we should.  But the President has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race – on the side that favors the black person.

The Media Matters Action Network’s Political Correction blog posted the audio clip here. Naturally, King misquoted Holder and distorted the meaning of his words. Over at The Atlantic blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses the long American history of claiming your political opponent is “favoring black people.”

We Iowans are used to King embarrassing us from time to time, but some out-of-staters were apparently shocked this week. Republican candidate Cory Gardner, who is challenging a Democratic incumbent in Colorado’s conservative-leaning fourth district, quickly canceled a fundraiser King was planning to headline this weekend (more on that here). Meanwhile, the Northern Colorado Tea Party axed King’s scheduled appearance at its June 19 event, saying, “we do not feel his remarks align with the mission and vision of the Northern Colorado Tea Party, which focuses on promoting fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free enterprise according to Constitutional principles. The race debate does not have a place in the Tea Party movement or in politics today.” Gardner will be at the Tea Party event and presumably wanted to avoid being on stage with King.

King told an Iowa political admirer on Monday, “The fact that liberals have risen to attack me and call me names without rebutting my assertions concedes my point […] When they start calling you names you know they’ve lost the argument.”

No, Congressman, when even your supposed political allies can’t get far enough away from you, it proves you have lost the argument. How often do candidates cancel opportunities to raise money for a campaign?

In case you were wondering what King had planned to say about the Arizona law on Gordon Liddy’s talk show, I infer it’s something like what he said on the floor of the U.S. House Monday evening:

   KING: Some claim that the Arizona law will bring about racial discrimination profiling. First let me say, Mr. Speaker, that profiling has always been an important component of legitimate law enforcement. If you can’t profile someone, you can’t use those common sense indicators that are before your very eyes. Now, I think it’s wrong to use racial profiling for the reasons of discriminating against people, but it’s not wrong to use race or other indicators for the sake of identifying that are violating the law. […]

   It’s just a common sense thing. Law enforcement needs to use common sense indicators. Those common sense indicators are all kinds of things, from what kind of clothes people wear – my suit in my case – what kind of shoes people wear, what kind of accident [sic] they have, um, the, the type of grooming they might have, there’re, there’re all kinds of indicators there and sometimes it’s just a sixth sense and they can’t put their finger on it. But these law enforcement officers, if they were going to be discriminating against people on the sole basis of race, singling people out, that’d be going on already.

Something tells me King wouldn’t be so comfortable with racial profiling if law enforcement singled out people who look like him. But empathy has never been his strong suit. We’re talking about a guy who thinks deporting undocumented immigrants to an area devastated by an earthquake might be a good way to send extra relief workers.

Matt Campbell is the Democratic nominee in Iowa’s fifth district; go here to get involved in supporting his campaign. Rob Hubler, King’s opponent in 2008, spoke with the Sioux City Journal’s Bret Hayworth last week about the challenges of campaigning in this huge district, which covers 32 Iowa counties. He noted that it’s particularly hard for a candidate to get a message out with so many media markets covering portions of the district.

UPDATE: The Political Correction blog followed up on this story today.

Also, King told Radio Iowa that he stands by his remarks. Campbell commented on the controversy too: “I think they’re reflective of a pattern of Mr. King saying polarizing things. I think collectively they preclude meaningful work on issues important to the development of western Iowa because of statements such as this.” Hard to argue with that one.

SECOND UPDATE: Representative Bruce Braley, a Democrat, said King’s comments about Obama favoring black people “were deplorable and an embarrassment to the state of Iowa.”

Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn and third district Congressional candidate Brad Zaun declined to comment, and Zaun said repeatedly that he didn’t know exactly what King had said.

Between 1984 and 2007, “The gap between the wealth possessed by white and black families grew more than four times larger,” in part because of tax cuts and policies that favored high-income groups. Researchers from the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University also found in a new report that the average middle-income white family was able to accumulate more wealth (assets minus debts) than the average high-income African-American family: “Consumers of color face a gauntlet of barriers – in credit, housing and taxes – that dramatically reduce the chances of economic mobility.”

The growing wealth gap between the races in the U.S. is the focus of the new report, which you can download here. Other researchers have found equally damning evidence of the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else. This graph shows how “the top 10 per cent of income earners in the US took home an ever more outsized share of the total national income starting at the end of the 1970s.” From the World War II era to the early 1980s, the “top 10 percent took 30-35 per cent of total national income,” but by 2007 that figure had grown to about 50 percent–a level not seen since just before the Great Depression.

Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policies started this trend, but George W. Bush accelerated it with his enormous tax cuts for the highest earners. During Bush’s presidency, “The share of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent of households increased sharply, from 16.9 percent in 2002 to 23.5 percent in 2007 – a larger share than at any point since 1928.” In addition, approximately “Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households […].”  

This enormous wealth gap is invisible to the Reagan-worshippers who now dominate the Republican Party. For them, any attempt to increase working-class wages is a “job-killer,” and tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the well-off are the solution to every problem. Look at how the Republican candidates for Iowa governor balk at spending $42 million to send more than 12,000 kids to pre-school but brag about plans to cut corporate taxes by $80 million to $160 million. Their priorities would be laughable if the real-world consequences were not so tragic.

Share any relevant thoughts in this thread.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has been under pressure lately. Since he took over in January 2009, the RNC has spent far more than it has raised, and the latest numbers show the Democratic National Committee ahead of the RNC in cash of hand (which is highly unusual). Major Republican donors have been fleeing the RNC for various reasons, including staffers’ embarrassing fundraising proposals and massive overspending on luxury hotels, limos and nightclubs. Today RNC Chief of Staff Ken McKay resigned, prompting one of Steele’s advisers to leave in what Jonathan Martin described as “a full-scale bloodletting”:

“Leadership requires that I can safely assure you, our donors, and the American people that our mission is what drives every dollar we spend, every phone call we make, every email we send and every event we organize,” Steele wrote in the email [sent to RNC members and donors on Monday], obtained by POLITICO. “Recent events have called that assurance into question and the buck stops with me. That is why I have made this change in my management team and why I am confident about going forward to November with renewed focus and energy.”

McKay didn’t immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

But his apparent firing has roiled the close-knit world of GOP operatives and Monday night longtime Republican strategist and Steele adviser Curt Anderson said his consulting firm would no longer be working with the RNC.

“Ken McKay’s departure is a huge loss for the Republican Party,” Anderson said in a statement to POLITICO. “Ken steered the party through very successful elections last fall that have given us tremendous momentum. He’s a great talent. Given our firm’s commitments to campaigns all over the country we have concluded it is best for us to step away from our advisory role at the RNC. We have high personal regard for the Chairman and always have; we wish him well.”

It’s hard to see how the turmoil at the RNC won’t end with Steele’s departure, although Josh Marshall argued today that Steele

can’t be fired, in significant measure, because he’s black. Because canning Steele now would only drive home the reality that Republicans were trying to paper over, fairly clumsily, when they hired him in the first place. So Republicans are stuck with his myriad goofs and #pressfails and incompetent management and all the rest because of a set of circumstances entirely of their own making.

Hey, don’t blame Iowa’s RNC members; they voted for Katon Dawson over Steele in January 2009. But I must say I doubt a guy who became a Republican because the government desegregated his high school, and more recently belonged to an all-white country club, would have been the right man to rebuild the GOP’s image.

April 1 is the U.S. Census Bureau’s target date for Americans to fill out and return their census forms. Every 1 percent increase in the census mail-back rate saves the U.S. Census Bureau about $85 million. After April 10, the bureau will start sending out census-takers to households that did not return their forms. President Barack Obama filled out his own family’s form and declared today “Census Day”:

The First Ladys mother lives with the family in the White House. Since the census asks for a count of everyone currently living in the household – not just immediate family – the President included his mother-in-law on his census form.

In these difficult economic times its common for extended family and friends to live with another family, yet many households mistakenly leave these individuals off their census forms.

Mr. desmoinesdem and I filled out our family’s form and mailed it back a couple of weeks ago. There are no “long forms” anymore; everyone gets the short survey with just 10 questions.

As of this morning, the national census participation rate was 52 percent; you can click on this interactive map to find participation rates in your area. Today Iowa ranked fifth among the states with a 60 percent participation rate. South Dakota and Wisconsin tied for first place with a 62 percent participation rate, and North Dakota and Nebraska tied for third with 61 percent. Within Iowa, a few towns had participation rates exceeding 80 percent. About 63 percent of households in my corner of the state, Windsor Heights, have returned their census forms so far.

Although some conservatives hyperventilate about the demographic questions on the census form, recording the race and ethnicity of U.S. residents helps the government “execute and monitor laws and programs that are targeted to specific groups.” Like conservative arguments about the legality of health insurance reform, objections to the census questions have no basis in constitutional law:

On numerous occasions, the courts have said the Constitution gives Congress the authority to collect statistics in the census. As early as 1870, the Supreme Court characterized as unquestionable the power of Congress to require both an enumeration and the collection of statistics in the census. The Legal Tender Cases, Tex.1870; 12 Wall., U.S., 457, 536, 20 L.Ed. 287. In 1901, a District Court said the Constitution’s census clause (Art. 1, Sec. 2, Clause 3) is not limited to a headcount of the population and “does not prohibit the gathering of other statistics, if ‘necessary and proper,’ for the intelligent exercise of other powers enumerated in the constitution, and in such case there could be no objection to acquiring this information through the same machinery by which the population is enumerated.” United States v. Moriarity, 106 F. 886, 891 (S.D.N.Y.1901).

The census does not violate the Fourth Amendment. Morales v. Daley, 116 F. Supp. 2d 801, 820 (S.D. Tex. 2000). In concluding that there was no basis for holding Census 2000 unconstitutional, the District Court in Morales ruled that the 2000 Census and the 2000 Census questions did not violate the Fourth Amendment or other constitutional provisions as alleged by plaintiffs. (The Morales court said responses to census questions are not a violation of a citizen’s right to privacy or speech.) […]

These decisions are consistent with the Supreme Court’s recent description of the census as the “linchpin of the federal statistical system … collecting data on the characteristics of individuals, households, and housing units throughout the country.” Dept. of Commerce v. U.S. House of Representatives, 525 U.S. 316, 341 (1999).

Share any relevant thoughts in this thread.

If all you knew about 2nd Circuit U.S. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor came from conservative commentators, you would think Barack Obama had nominated a far-left reverse racist for the Supreme Court. A typically unhinged assessment by Iowa’s own Ted Sporer, chairman of the Polk County Republican Party, is titled “The Supreme Court pick: Justice denied, racism and sexism exalted.” Like most conservatives who are freaking out, Sporer is reacting to one quotation from a speech Sotomayor gave in 2001:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Conservative commentator Rod Dreher read the whole speech and concluded on Wednesday, “seeing her controversial comment in its larger context makes it look a lot less provocative and troubling.” However, the right-wing noise machine continues to sound the alarm about Sotomayor’s alleged radical, racist agenda.

You won’t be surprised to learn that people who have examined her judicial record (as opposed to one sentence from one speech) have reached substantially different conclusions. Some reality-based links are after the jump.

I saw at Iowa Independent that the Asian-American newspaper AsianWeek named Swati Dandekar the Asian Pacific American person of the year for 2008:

[I]t was hard to decide who should be the APA Person of the Year in 2008. When looking at the future of Asian Pacific America, however, and thinking about the community’s growth out of the comfort of urban enclaves and into suburban and even rural America, the answer became clear: Swati Dandekar.

Dandekar, a Democrat born and educated in India, has been living in Iowa for over thirty years and has served three terms as a member in the Iowa House of Representatives. In 2008, she threw her hat in the ring to run for an Iowa state Senate seat that had voted Republican for almost 20 years. Reaching out to many rural Iowans with a platform based on education, quality health care, renewable energy and economic growth, she won 54.3 percent of the vote and is seen as a rising star of Iowa politics.

Swati Dandekar could have played it safe and stayed in her House seat because most incumbents are re-elected. Instead, she chose to reach for a higher office that required her to knock on doors in areas where she had not represented the people and where knowledge of Asian Indian Americans may not have been high. As a result of her successful gamble, however, she now has added clout as she battles for educational opportunity and other key concerns. And APAs now have a state Senate-level standard-bearer in a state not know for its high percentage of APAs.

I echo the newspaper’s statement that Dandekar took a big risk in running for Senate district 18. Even though she has attracted a lot of cross-over Republican voters while representing Iowa House district 36, seeking the Senate seat long held by Mary Lundby (who retired) was no sure thing.

Congratulations to Dandekar for picking up a Senate seat for Iowa Democrats while making Asian Pacific Americans across the country proud.

In August I posted some questions about the accuracy of opinion polls on the presidential race. I wondered whether any of the following factors might introduce distortions in the polling:

-the growing number of voters who use only cell phones;

-the practice of polling on weekends (when certain demographic groups are less likely to be at home);

-the varying estimates of the partisan and demographic breakdown of the electorate;

-the enormous disparity in the two campaigns’ ground games (which is even more obvious now than it was in the summer).

Most of the factors I mentioned would lead polls to understate support for Barack Obama. However, some political analysts have also questioned whether polls might be overstating Obama’s support because of the “Bradley effect” (or “Bradley-Wilder effect”), whereby white people tell pollsters they plan to vote for a black candidate but act differently in the voting booth. Here at Bleeding Heartland, American007 has expressed concern about this possibility.

We won’t know how accurate the polls were until November 5, and even then we won’t be able to prove how much of the difference was related to last-minute external events and how much was related to pollsters’ errors in weighting their samples, or respondents lying about their intentions.

However, here are some pieces worth your time if you enjoy this kind of speculation.

The “mystery pollster” Mark Blumenthal doubts there will be a “perfect storm” leading to wildly inaccurate polling, because

the potential polling foibles may work in opposite directions and “cancel each other out.” A return of the Bradley-Wilder effect would work to McCain’s benefit, while an underrepresentation of younger, African American or “cell-phone-only” voters will likely benefit Obama.

Embedded in that piece is a link to a research paper (pdf file) by Daniel J. Hopkins, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard who analyzed data from 133 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006. He found a Bradley effect in the early 1990s but no evidence that it still existed in more recent elections. If you don’t want to download the whole file, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium summarized Hopkins’ findings in this post on “The disappearing Bradley effect.”

Sam Wang looked at the evidence about cell phone users here and believes this factor is probably only understating Obama’s support by about 1 percent.

But Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com compared the McCain-Obama numbers in many polls and found that Obama does 2 to 3 percent better in surveys by pollsters that call cell phone numbers in addition to landlines.

Silver is not concerned about the Bradley effect after analyzing the primary results. Obama did better than his pre-election polling numbers in more states than he underperformed.

I wonder whether the kind of person who would lie to a pollster about being willing to vote for a black candidate is more likely to vote in a general election than in a Democratic primary. That said, I do find Hopkins’ analysis persuasive, so I have decided not to worry about the Bradley effect either.

I’m not a pollster or a statistician, but my hunch is that the greatest potential for pollster error is in the assumptions made about relative turnout by certain demographic groups. Should we assume the proportion of Democrats, blacks and young voters will be about the same as 2004, or should we assume higher turnout in those groups? Being wrong in one direction or another could significantly skew the results, especially in states with large black populations.

The Research 2000 tracking poll for Daily Kos is assuming a higher proportion of Democrats in the electorate than Gallup and Rasmussen, for instance. I assume Democrats will increase their share of the electorate because of the trends in voter registration over the past year as well as the enthusiasm gap. However, Jerome Armstrong is among the skeptics who think the partisan turnout will look very much like 2004.

I would question any poll that assumes African-American voters will make up the same proportion of the electorate this year as they did in 2004, especially in states where Obama has a massive voter turnout operation and John Kerry did not compete (such as North Carolina, Virginia and Missouri). Even in Georgia, where Obama has significantly reduced staff since the summer, we can expect to see much higher black turnout if voter registration trends and early voting are any indication.

I am less confident about a surge in young voter turnout, but if that did happen, pre-election polls weighted according to the 2004 figures would understate Obama’s support.

If Latino turnout is higher than in 2004, Obama will benefit because McCain does quite poorly among Latinos, far worse than George Bush did in 2004.

What do you think? Are you counting on polls to be mostly accurate this year, or significantly off the mark in one direction?

Paul Street has published a thought-provoking piece at Black Agenda Report: The Deeper Racism in Iowa: Beneath the White Obama Craze.

I recommend clicking through and reading this whole article, but here are some passages that illustrate the argument he is making:

Barack Obama’s January 3rd Democratic Caucus victory in Iowa demonstrated that a Black man – or, at least, this particular Black man – could attract winning numbers of white voters. The candidate’s supporters claimed Iowa signaled a new day, that “race doesn’t matter” anymore in the United States. They are in a fantasy of denial. Not only does race remain imbedded in American social relations, but Iowa is especially afflicted with the compulsion to throw African Americans in prison more frequently than any other state. “Liberal” Iowans, proud that their state began a cascade of Obama victories, find it more difficult than ever to face up to the racism that distorts all cross-racial interaction in their cities and towns.

Interestingly enough, you don’t see many if any white liberal Iowa City Obama supporters involved in efforts to fight and overcome routine institutional racism and racial harassment in their city and state.

Given the purported anti-racism behind their support for Obama, they seem remarkably indifferent to – and ignorant of – Iowa’s status as the nation’s leader in disproportionate black imprisonment.

Some of the black and liberal students here find this a paradox.  I have a different perspective. Two days before the heavily Caucasian Iowa caucus, one forthcoming and self-critical caucus-goer and neighbor told me something I’d been suspecting for some time. Obama, he said, was “a way for liberal and moderate whites around here to pat themselves on the back for not being too prejudiced to vote for a black guy.”  But it was all premised, he agreed, on Obama being a “good,” that is non-threatening, middle-class, academic-friendly, and “not-too fiery black” – one who seemed unlikely to confront institutional white supremacy in any way more meaningful than attaining higher office. Like the racially accomodationist, white-friendly media mogul and mass Obama marketer Oprah Winfrey (who came through Iowa to stump for him a few weeks before that state’s critical Caucus), Obama capitalized on middle class whites’ rejection of openly bigoted “level-one” (state-of-mind) racism only because he reassured them he would honor their refusal to acknowledge and confront the continuing power of deeper, “level two” (state-of-being) – societal and institutional – racism in American life. I have spoken with local middle-class whites for whom loving the “good” (bourgeois) black Obama is the other side of the coin of hating the “bad” and “underclass” blacks who are becoming more evident in Iowa City.

The town’s white liberals don’t seem interested in tackling the deeper institutional racism that lives on beneath the surface while they congratulate themselves for being willing to back a certain non-threatening kind of black candidate. They certainly don’t want to look closely at the unpleasant picture of how racial and class oppression produce  pain and inequality in their own schools, neighborhoods, and community. They respond very well to what Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford has identified as Obama’s “strategy to win the White House” by “run[ning] a ‘race-neutral’ campaign in a society that is anything but neutral on race.” As Ford notes, “the very premise – that race neutrality is possible in a nation built on white supremacy – demand[s] the systematic practice of the most profound race-factual denial, which is ultimately indistinguishable from rank dishonesty.”

I would like to hear your views on this piece, especially if you are an Obama supporter and/or an Iowa City resident.

I didn’t have a chance to watch it, but if you did, what did you think of Barack Obama’s major speech on race this morning?

The transcript is after the jump.

Saw this piece in the Des Moines Register and thought it was worth a mention:

Iowa would eliminate school open enrollment desegregation plans based entirely upon race under a proposal that lawmakers moved ahead with today.

House File 2164 would eliminate minority pupil ratios used in voluntary desegregation plans or with the state’s open enrollment law. Instead, it allows the Iowa Board of Education to adopt rules that establishes guidelines based on criteria other than race to set up diversity plans.

The proposal is linked to a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that condemned a Seattle school’s desegregation plan as illegitimate because its objective was only to set racial balance without “any pedagogic concept of the level of diversity needed to attain the asserted educational benefits.”

At least five Iowa districts with desegregation plans have used race within the past year when deciding whether to allow students to transfer in or out of their districts. District officials in Des Moines, Davenport, Waterloo, Postville and West Liberty have already decided to use other factors to determine whether schools are integrated. Those factors include disability, language and income.

This seems like a sensible bill.