Ames Progressive

A lot has been going on in Ed Fallon’s primary challenge to 3rd district Democratic Representative Leonard Boswell since I last blogged on the subject. Perhaps most interesting: on February 14, Boswell became the 25th cosignatory to Dennis Kucinich’s House bill calling for the impeachment of Dick Cheney (scroll down for more on that).

On the endorsement front, Iowa Governor Chet Culver has joined the Boswell camp with Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Dave Loebsack. This, despite that all three (with the possible exception of Culver) would seem to be ideologically closer to Fallon than Boswell. All but Harkin have endorsed Barack Obama for president, and Harkin has spoken out against superdelegates while Boswell continues to support Hillary Clinton despite her overwhelming defeat in the 3rd district to both Obama and John Edwards. (Both Harkin and Boswell are superdelegates.)

More party bigwigs are sure to follow. Without a Fallon challenge, conventional wisdom suggests an easy win for Boswell in November despite his relatively close margin of victory in 2006 over former Iowa Senator Jeff Lamberti (52 to 46 percent).

That said, Fallon’s contention that the district needs a new representative to mount a challenge to an incumbent Republican in 2012, when Iowa will likely lose one of its five congressional districts, should be taken seriously. Issues aside, in 2012, Boswell will be 78 years old.

Fallon picked up his first major endorsement on February 14 from Democracy for America, the political action committee founded by former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Through ActBlue, DFA members raised more than $10,000 for Fallon in the endorsement’s first couple hours; currently, Fallon’s received upwards of $20,000 from its members.

The influx of cash led Boswell campaign adviser JoDee Winterhof to accuse Fallon of hypocrisy for opposing PAC money and then taking it. To be accurate, all the money came from individual donors on the PAC’s mailing list, not from the PAC itself. (More on that here.)

Now, the impeachment bill. That Boswell — who supported the Iraq war and a considerable amount of other Bush administration-backed legislation — would support the impeachment of the vice president seems a bit unlikely, to say the least.

And it may serve to back up a Fallon campaign talking point. On February 12, the DFA-backed progressive Donna Edwards ousted incumbent “Bush-Dog Democrat” Albert Wynn in Maryland’s primary 60 to 35 percent. Wynn, who sports a similar voting record to Boswell’s, cosigned Kucinich’s impeachment bill on May 10 of last year, presumably in an about-face to try to ward off Edwards’ challenge.

DFA and Fallon both compared the Fallon campaign to the Edwards campaign the same day that Boswell signed on to the bill. This, after Boswell was one of 21 Democrats in the House to sign a January 28 letter to Nancy Pelosi urging her to schedule a vote on the Senate version of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act bill that would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies involved in President Bush’s illegal eavesdropping on American citizens, which is itself arguably an impeachable offense.

Boswell’s endorsement of impeachment may also serve well to reinforce Fallon’s charge that a fresh face is important for the likely 2012 scenario of Iowa losing a congressional district. Should Boswell defeat Fallon this cycle and go on to reelection, he will have a record of endorsing Cheney’s impeachment while simultaneously backing much of the Bush administration legislation most frequently pointed to in discussions of impeachment.

Could this toll the knell for Boswell’s campaign? It would be interesting to see him try to campaign against Bush loyalist Representative Tom Latham or Steve King in 2012 after this.