The Keystone Kops of Politics

 I almost fell out of my chair when I saw Mike Thayer’s essay in the Cedar Rapids Gazette a couple of Sundays ago.  I have to give Thayer credit for at least correctly identifying the problem: Johnson County is a one-party jurisdiction.  Thayer is also right in assigning blame: that the GOP does so poorly here is entirely the fault of that party’s local leadership.

Where Thayer gets it wrong is in his proposed remedy to GOP impotence in Johnson County, especially when he looks to the University of Iowa College Republicans as a font of fresh ideas.  Thayer and the U of I College Republicans are to reasoned, serious political activity what Jack the Ripper was to surgery.

I defer to Thayer’s assertion, made as a party insider, that the Johnson County Republican Central Committee is a clique which, wittingly or not, works to keep the local GOP as exclusive as a country club (like Augusta?).  I also share Thayer’s belief that the Johnson County GOP needs to make itself relevant to urban residents of the county, not just the rural folks who dominate it today.

But how is the party to do that?  Thayer wants his fellow Republicans to emulate the University of Iowa College Republicans.  While the CR’s represent a key demographic the GOP is losing, young people, their methods leave much to be desired if the party is to indeed grow.  The Iowa CR’s have been much more adept at smirking at our community and mocking its values (or projecting their prejudices of who and what we are) than they have in trying to become a serious part of it.

The most recent nadir is their “Conservative Coming Out Day.”  Iowa CR’s seem to think it funny that LGBT people face prejudice and have been historically persecuted in this society.  To liken being conservative in Johnson County to being LGBT in the US shows a fundamental ignorance of what it means to be gay or lesbian in many parts of this country today.  To lampoon the risks a gay or lesbian takes in coming out to friends, family, and professional colleagues by coopting the language of coming out for a cheap laugh bespeaks a complete lack of empathy, indeed is almost sociopathic, much like Mitt Romney dismissing 47% of Americans as people who refuse to take personal responsibility for their lives.

The group’s own webpage, more than a year out of date (so much for being serious as an organization), puts another rhetorical thumb in the eye of this community: “Iowa City is liberal, but you don’t have to be!”  Combine that with last year’s “Animal Rights Barbecue,” and you get the attitude which the Daily Iowan described in a September, 2012 editorial: “So, while the charges of bigotry leveled by some against the College Republicans may have been overblown, it should be said that the group’s annual attempt to get its opponents’ collective goat is harmful to civil discourse, blatantly condescending, and very, very smug.”

Thayer himself orchestrated an embarrassing episode in the Johnson County party’s history.  In 2010, Janelle Rettig was appointed to fill an unexpired term on the Johnson County Board of Supervisors.  Thayer, dissatisfied, helped spearhead a petition drive to force, at taxpayers’ expense, a special election.  He was joined by Lori Cardella, whose political experience consisted of working on the Solon school board and organizing a TEA-faction rally in Iowa City in April 2010.

Cardella bombed as a candidate: Thayer posted a “humorous” video of Cardella and other Johnson County GOP women singing an anti-Obama song, dressed like “Catholic schoolgirls,” on YouTube.  The video was so embarrassing Thayer pulled it.  Cardella performed poorly in a candidate debate.  Worse, we learned that she licensed her personal vehicle in Florida (cheaper, don’t you know?).

Rettig won election handily: while Cardella polled reasonably well, for being such a weak candidate, in rural areas of the county, Rettig overwhelmed her GOP opponent in Iowa City and Coralville.  Thayer went so far as to speculate that, given her rural performance, Cardella had a real shot at winning the regular election, held in November 2010.

But Cardella didn’t run.  Rettig won election to a full term on the Board of Supervisors, unopposed.  That aspect of Thayer’s stunt has always stuck in my craw: he had no problem forcing taxpayers to pay for a special election, but then Thayer and his party weren’t serious enough (nor was Cardella) to run in the regular election held five months later.  Cardella’s husband Tom, founder of telemarketing firm Cardella and Associates, then showed his lack of commitment to this area by moving a call center to Texas: seems his unemployment insurance had become too expensive, given Cardella and Associates’ track record, kept by Iowa Workforce Development, of frequent employee firing.  Seems that Cardella is a man who, like Mitt Romney, likes to fire people!

The Johnson County GOP’s problems reflect the party’s problems nationally: it is too small, too male, too Caucasian, too old, and too rural.  You don’t fundamentally change such an organization by looking to young people, like the U of I College Republicans, who look to “Animal House” villains Doug Niedermeyer and Greg Marmalard as political exemplars.  You don’t fix an organization at risk of following the Whig Party into irrelevance and dissolution by taking advice from a guy who cost county taxpayers thousands of dollars in staging a stunt which embarrassed the party.

The GOP will fix itself by abandoning the politics which failed it so spectacularly in 2012: drop the divisive social issues and embrace women’s reproductive rights; drop attempts to suppress black and Latino votes; develop a reasonable, humane plan for immigration reform; rethink the policy reliance on tax cuts for the wealthy; rethink “fiscal conservatism” so the ideology accepts the continued existence of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and; collaborate with public education professionals, instead of seeking to undermine and ultimately destroy public education and teachers’ unions.

The opportunities are there, if serious leaders of the GOP are willing to change and ignore the voices of people, like Thayer, who have driven their party to the brink.