Bob Vander Plaats, a businessman from Sioux City, has run for the governorship of Iowa three times and has never come close to winning it. After he lost the most recent Republican primary to Terry Branstad he founded an organization called Iowa For Freedom whose goal is to unseat the three state Supreme Court justices [...]

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Two years ago, the second floor Gallery Room at Iowa State’s Memorial Union hosted a show featuring a series of photographs of Iowa musicians. The title and description of the show suggested that the photographs would represent the range of Iowa music, yet almost all of the photos were of artists based in Iowa City. [...]

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That’s how it goes for Obama: on one day you pass a resolution against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and on the very next day you have to expose a nation for trying to proliferate those weapons. That’s how it was during Obama’s intense days at the UN and the G20 summits on September 24 [...]

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During Obama’s presidential campaign, he repeatedly promised that he would “change the culture of Washington” by fostering an attitude of shared legislative labor across party lines. And in the early months of his presidency, Obama has made a well-meaning, Lincoln-inspired effort to incorporate Republicans into his cabinet and to seek the counsel of moderate conservatives [...]

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Al Franken’s long-delayed arrival at the U.S. Senate is a milestone for the current Democratic caucus in the Senate – bringing the Democrats to an unfilibusterable 60 senators – but it is an even more important milestone in American political satire. The satirist’s role has traditionally been to comment upon, react to, and indirectly influence [...]

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The Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to legalize same-sex marriage in our state marks one of the proudest days in our history. Iowa can now legitimately claim to be on the vanguard of civil rights and human equality. And Iowa is a leader in the Midwest, proving that the perception that gay marriage is an [...]

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For the massive television audience on January 20th, 2009, Inauguration Day was a parade of odd and stirring images: from the quivering mass of a million and a half people packed into the mall, to Dick Cheney’s menacing emergence in a wheelchair, to the far-away look in Barack Obama’s eyes as he arrived on the [...]

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In retrospective narratives about Barack Obama’s path to the White House, the Iowa caucus is universally acknowledged as a pivotal moment for the success of his campaign. His win in Iowa is considered to have made a psychological impact on voters around the country and to have created a sense of confidence that he would [...]

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My friends, the American people have spoken and I concede that Barack Obama is the next president of the United States. I’ve been looking forward to this: now that the race is finally over, I would like to take a moment for some straight talk. My friends, in the 2000 presidential campaign I was devastated [...]

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The terms for the 2008 presidential election have been set: Barack Obama sets the agenda, determines the themes and introduces the vocabulary and John McCain responds by awkwardly and disingenuously parroting Obama’s agenda, themes and vocabulary. The most obvious and desperate example of this is the McCain campaign’s adoption of the “change” theme in the [...]

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