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What happened to Chuck Grassley’s relevance? Such a shame. I don’t know how we’ll get through health care reform without him.

So Chuck Grassley decided that he’s going honor his healthcare-industry campaign donations and, along with the “Quitta from Wasilla,” drum up fear instead of rational debate on the ever-shrinking healthcare reform we were promised last November. It’s not that I don’t think Senator Grassley is probably controlled by Republican handlers I’d find appalling, it’s just that he’s seemed somewhat rational in the past. His harping on the Sotomayor nomination, and now his “they’re going to pull the plug on grandma” show a decline in his previously-perceived-as-centrist speech. I feel like he’s marching, lock-step with the looniest of the loons. So much for Grassley attempting to curry favor from anyone but the hard-right. I suppose when you’re not worried about re-election, you cater to your base.

So, Senator Grassley, your remarks just got me to pony up money for your inevitable downfall. I really hope Tom Fiegen or Bob Krause pulls the plug on Grassley. Both campaigns (@tlfiegen & @krauseforiowa) managed to figure out that Twitter is worthwhile. Heck, I now know that Bob Krause will be on the Rachel Maddow Show, waiting for me on DVR, thanks to Twitter. Krause has an ActBlue fund raising page which you ex-Iowan’s might consider tossing money at. Maybe Grassley should consider following some of his own advice and taking the “Japanese-way out.”

so here you are: a good and pious metropolitan liberal, holed up in your coastal ivory tower and luxuriating in the smell of your own cinnamon-scented farts, when your 3G mobile device tells you that one of those vowel states (“iowa”…is that the one with the potatoes?) is now one of only three in the nation that recognize same-sex marriage. facebook awaits your input. what to do, what to do? can you suppress the urge to belittle everything and everyone that isn’t within fifteen minutes of an apple store long enough to celebrate a historic achievement for equality and social justice? or do you take the opportunity to reference cow-tipping?

because blogging would be dreary and pointless if there wasn’t always something to bitch about, my jubilation over the varnum decision from this morning has been tempered a little (not much) by the persistent tone of know-nothing urban provincialism on display in the blurted remarks of some (not many) friends-of-friends in online chatter today. by way of illustration, a few comments overheard in the outer realms of facebookistan and twittervania over the last few hours:

“really? iowa??”
“wow, who would have thought Iowa?”
“You find common sense in the strangest places sometimes.”
“I never thought I’d have a reason to say “Go Iowa” – or even *think* about Iowa for that matter…”
“really, have you been to Iowa… besides cow tipping and corn picking – marriage is the most interesting thing to do – now everyone can. yay.”

let’s not even bother trying to plumb the depths of condescension and mock-astonishment among the NY and DC-based national media, who swallowed the red state/blue state kool aid years ago. suffice it to say, at this moment the number of heads exploding in the east village and the castro over the idea that whitebread cornfed little iowa has done what new york and california couldn’t do is at least equal to the number of heads exploding in sioux city and urbandale over the visual of two dudes making out in tuxes.

to help our urban betters wrap their huge enlightened heads around today’s news, here’s a brief history lesson. turns out iowa has a long tradition of progressive action, including but not limited to landmark legislation and court decisions, on civil rights and equality for minorities.

1839 – state supreme court, in one of the first such rulings anywhere, says a fugitive slave becomes free by setting foot on the free soil of iowa
1851 – iowa becomes the second state (after pennsylvania in 1780) to repeal racial anti-miscegenation laws
1868 – racial segregation banned from iowa schools 86 years before Brown and nearly a century ahead of the Civil Rights Act
1869 – first state to allow women to practice law
1873 – supco rules against racially segregated transportation & public accommodations
1948 – first lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, 12 years before Nashville and 7 years before Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. Iowa supco rules against the Katz Drug Store in Des Moines, ending its policy of refusing service to blacks

is this whole post an overdetermined reaction to what were admittedly only a handful of off-the-cuff remarks by people i don’t even know? perhaps. am i defensive about this stuff? you’re goddamn right i am. i hear it all the time from people — liberals — who should know better. as far as i’m concerned, today is a victory for the long-maligned flyover as much as for gay couples.

with this morning’s supreme court ruling, iowa becomes the first non-coastal state to recognize same-sex marriage, one of only three in the nation (after prop 8 ) where gay couples enjoy the same rights as straight couples.

Richard Socarides, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay civil rights, said today’s decision could set the stage for other states. Socarides was was a senior political assistant for Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin in the early 1990s.

“I think it’s significant because Iowa is considered a Midwest sate in the mainstream of American thought,” Socarides said. “Unlike states on the coasts, there’s nothing more American than Iowa. As they say during the presidential caucuses, ‘As Iowa goes, so goes the nation.’”

i don’t know about “nothing more american,” but judging from the last two elections we seem to be a pretty good bellwether of mainstream political sentiment. it’s worth remembering that this was a judicial ruling and not a legislative or popular movement; iowans as a whole may not be standing up to demand equality, but at the same time i’ll be surprised if the backlash is as loud or as ugly as it would have been ten or even five years ago. at any rate, it’s heartening to think that equal rights can no longer be considered strictly a new england & san francisco thing. not to mention that our tourism industry could use the boost!

oh yeah, and the “varnum” in “varnum v. brien”? that’s my cousin kate and her now-legally-recognized spouse trish. are we proud of them? just a little.

http://www.judicial.state.ia.us/wfData/files/Varnum/40209Varnumsummary.pdf

Des Moines, April 3, 2009— In a unanimous decision, the Iowa Supreme Court
today held that the Iowa statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man
and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.
The decision strikes the language from Iowa Code section 595.2 limiting civil
marriage to a man and a woman. It further directs that the remaining statutory
language be interpreted and applied in a manner allowing gay and lesbian
people full access to the institution of civil marriage.

Thank you for doing what’s right and just. This legal system might just work after all. Now if we can get the politicians to leave their church out of the state, this might just stand. Heck, Obama is getting rid of nukes too! We might just exist as a human race for a bit longer!

i woke up this morning to the sound of birds singing outside the window. no shit — birds. i’m trying hard not to find undue significance in every little thing i see today, but it’s seven degrees. nothing should be alive out there, much less creatures capable of making music.

has it only been a year since we sat in that booth at the brewpub, waiting for obama’s iowa caucus victory speech to begin?

it had been a day like this one, bright and clear and cold as hell. night had fallen hard, and early, as it does this time of year. amy and i were still warming our fingers and toes after the trek across town from our caucus location. it was amy’s first iowa caucus, and she still wore the sticker numbered “1,” proof  she was first in the door out of the hundreds who at our precinct, and a mark of pride for a newly registered Democrat. as we learned over the next few days, she was one of thousands statewide who’d attended their first party caucus, pushing turnout numbers to all-time record heights. this was no surprise, based on what we’d seen in our neighborhood: a veritable riot of twenty- and thirty-somethings, absolutely on fire for barack obama. i had seen enough caucuses to know something was up.

charlie arrived shortly and settled into a beer. he gave a similar account of his precinct across town. rubbing our hands together and sipping pints of OCBW honey hemp ale, the three of us sat there watching the results and pondering the meaning of it all.

this time last year, i wasn’t an obamaphile. i had generally favorable impressions of the guy, sure, but i was still holding fast to that skeptical-pessimist posture we’d all learned to adopt, like whipped puppies, over the past seven years of bitter experience. who the hell was this dude, anyway? i wanted to believe that the smart antiwar candidate whose buttons adorned the backpacks of my favorite students was viable. but this wasn’t 2000 or 2004, and i was in no mood to dick around with another pyhrric victory of a doomed-liberal campaign. even with the tentative victories of ‘06, the wounds were still too fresh.

that uncertainty was echoed by a friend we ran into at the caucus, a long-suffering lefty of our parents’ generation who’d “been burned too many times” by charismatic and impressive Democratic leaders who tended either to become corrupt and ineffective over time, or to be assassinated before ever getting the chance. her perspective lent a sad poignancy to the spectacle of the political neophytes who surrounded us that night, too hopped up on optimism and adrenaline to even fathom the outcome that seemed most likely to us at the time — another humiliation for progressives, and a white house ultimately occupied by, if not a republican, then another weasely self-serving empty suit of a democrat who would continue carrying out bush’s disastrous policies from sheer inertia. still, it was hard not to be a little intoxicated by all that energy, unexpected as it was, not to wonder in the back of the mind: what if?

i wish i could say i allowed myself to get swept up in the obama movement then and there, but it took a couple more months. the only outcome i had hoped for on caucus night was a decisive defeat of hillary clinton, who struck me as exactly the kind of pro-war, corporatist political parasite who would guarantee another four years of the odious status quo. (i needn’t have worried; at our precinct, at least, hillary didn’t even reach viability, her supporters all but laughed out of the auditorium with zero delegates to show for their troubles.) throughout 2007 i’d been more or less equally impressed by obama, edwards, richardson and biden, and was prepared to caucus for obama if it came down to a close contest between him and clinton. but i also liked john edwards’ message and wanted to see him stay in the primary race a while longer, so when the register poll that week showed obama with a strong lead it seemed safe to caucus for edwards. (i’ve since come to regret that support, not because i give a shit about his pissant marital infidelities, but because of his monstrous act of political malpractice — when i think about the fact that he would’ve allowed himself to be the democratic nominee in 2008 knowing that bombshell could drop at any time and blow the whole election, i could kick the bastard’s teeth in.)

 back at the brewpub, watching the coverage and comparing notes with friends reporting in from other precincts, a picture was emerging: the obama thing was bigger than we’d thought. he wasn’t just winning decisively among the same old caucus stalwarts who dutifully pull on heavy coats and boots every four januaries and trudge out into the night to pick a candidate. obama was driving huge turnout among new, never-followed-politics-before voters. lots of them. that was my first inkling that in some ways maybe it didn’t matter who barack obama was or what he stood for; the important thing, the interesting thing, was the movement he represented. the people who’d been primed for politicization by a decade of republican farce and atrocity and were just waiting to be mobilized.

more precincts reports rolled in, interspersed with bemused commentary on the evening’s proceedings on the GOP side — miserable attendance, and a surge of support for mike huckabee, of all people. you could almost feel the collective shrug as the room’s attention drifted back to what was obviously the Real Story. we ordered another pitcher. charlie fiddled with his iPod, trying to pull down county-by-county numbers from the pitiful wifi signal that would waft into the pub from time to time. edwards and clinton, in turn, each marched out and delivered chipper concessions, eagerly looking forward to new hampshire.

by the time obama took the stage, there was silence throughout the bar. people on their way out stopped and stood there in their winter coats, listening. i don’t remember much of what he said, but the way he said it and the way his crowd responded was like nothing i’d ever seen before. the word “alchemy” comes to mind. i’d heard he was good, even seen him work a crowd in iowa city the year before, but this was something altogether singular to behold. and it hit me like a frying pan to the head.

“he’s going to win,” i said, twisting around in the booth to see amy and charlie. “he’s going to be president.” it wasn’t  a prediction. it was a sudden jolt of crystal-clear perception, spoken with the slack-jawed guilelessness of one who has just processed the punchline to a joke told five minutes earlier. a simple extrapolation of facts and processes already in motion: right time, right place, right guy. and he was simply too smart and competent to fuck it up.

there followed several weeks of campaign sturm and drang, during which my impressions of obama as a political supergenius grew stronger, though i still withheld judgment as to whether this was necessarily a good thing. for a while there i suppose i rooted for him more out of animosity toward hillary clinton, who had morphed before our eyes from an unreliable, underprincipled and entitled but otherwise more-or-less capable leader, into nothing short of a political horror show.

but that’s water under the bridge. obama made a believer of me in march, when i heard the “a more perfect union” speech — an epiphany already well documented here. a few other moments from the campaign stand out… the feeling i had, watching the speech in berlin, that it might soon be possible once again to venture out into the world with a U.S. passport and my head held high. the calm and reason he exuded amidst the abject panic of september’s bank implosions. the people i met while out door-knocking in godforsaken flooded-out little post-farm-economy towns and shitty section-8 apartment buildings along the highway, or humping voter registration forms up and down the ped mall. and the eyeball-popping euphoria of election night, after ohio was called… all indelible memories. but this morning, watching the inaugural festivities on TV, wishing i was there in the capitol freezing my ass off with ben and the gajillions of others who are witnessing this moment firsthand, it’s last january that’s on my mind. it’s cold — ungodly, unmercifully cold — but spring is coming.

happy new year, america! i love you all.

Western Gateway Park in downtown Des Moines on a stunningly beautiful Halloween morning

Photos from 10/31/2008 Obama rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

i arrived way too late to be anywhere near the podium, but had a pretty good spot within the spillover crowd, which extended a little over a block past the park itself. fortunately the sound system was excellent.

that white speck in the middle is barack. this is actually a much better look at him than i got with my own eyes -- give it up for zoom!

it's hard to get a good sense of the size of the crowd from these pictures, but it was quite a scene. iowa loves obama!

things that washed up in our yard:

we can’t figure out how this got here, or where the other half is. the nearest state patrol field office is in cedar rapids.

we think the picnic table may have come from the park about a half-mile upstream.

tripped on this huge jug of deadly poison while hauling up sandbags from the neighbor’s house. happily the seal was intact, but makes you wonder what else is in that water you’ve been slogging through…

this is my favorite find. as you can see, it’s from the famous Ayinger brewery in Bavaria and traveled a long way to become my new fifteen-gallon brew kettle under the sacred law of Finders Keepers.

items not pictured that also drifted by during the flood: two trash barrels, a door, several trees, and something we think was a buoy that got loose from the reservoir.

two likely long-term political outcomes of the 2008 flood occurred to me while in the midst of sandbagging last week:

one, a lot more people are going to be open to the idea of global climate change after this summer. two 500-year floods fifteen years apart should be enough to convince even the most willfully ignorant skeptics that, at a minimum, something is up.

two, there’s vast political capital to be reaped by whoever is smart enough to grasp the magnitude of the disaster and respond accordingly. unlike louisiana, a state where democrats lost influence with the post-katrina exodus of african americans, there will be no diaspora here. instead, as is often the case in situations where normal life has been turned upside-down, the potential for change — and people’s appetite for it — are at a peak. the conventional strategies and demographic calculations that used to keep populations divided and neatly contained within predictable voting blocs are falling apart faster than a poorly constructed levee.

in the last week i’ve seen iowa city hippies working side-by-side with mormon and baptist missionaries, farmers holding bags for college professors to fill, black folks showing up to stack sandbags in exclusively white neighborhoods. it’s funny how little it resembles the red/blue america we’ve been told we were living in. the more people get outside, meet their neighbors, engage with them in common cause, the less interested they become in the old ideological wedges and abstractions: those who pitch in to help are friends, those who obstruct and drag their feet are not.

as george bush arrives in eastern iowa today, more than a week after the need for help was greatest, nobody is particularly pleased to see him. nobody that i talked to was much impressed by michael chertoff’s mealymouthed, empty platitudes after last week’s tornadoes either. but barack obama filling sandbags across the river in quincy makes an impression:

even if it is a staged photo-op, it’s clear from his remarks that obama has at least spent enough time in the affected areas to have some idea what its like for people there, and more importantly, to understand the feeling in the air and the fluidity (no pun intended) of the political situation. that’s one reason why stories like this one are happening all over the region.

and where’s john mccain? who the hell knows, or cares? people here have been too busy to watch or read anything but local news. nobody’s paying attention to mccain or his 20th-century-style campaign. until he actually shows his face here, he’s a nonentity.

meanwhile, bleeding heartland reports on some iowa GOP bloggers who are objecting to state & federal flood relief on the grounds that it’s politically beneficial to democrats. i’ll give them this much: it’s true that actually, y’know, doing the work of government likely redounds to the benefit of those politicians who are doing it. but convening a special legislative session to address the worst natural disaster in our state’s history, they complain, constitutes pandering to special interests — in this case, the people of iowa. this, ladies and gentlemen, is the legacy of the bush presidency, in which nobody ever lifted a finger to help anyone but GOP cronies. from a post-bush republican mindset, any meaningful action whatsoever is only comprehensible as political payoff — why else would you bother?

so, my fondest hope for 2008 is that iowa republicans campaign hard on this theme, that democrats are only pushing the relief effort because they want your vote — as if rewarding effective leadership and punishing incompetence and venality weren’t the whole reason we vote in the first place.

the last week has trained us not to make optimistic pronouncements prematurely, but it does seem like the worst is over, for our neighborhood at least. the river crested late sunday, two days ahead of schedule and almost two feet lower than predicted. the water line doesn’t seem to have gone much higher than our bottom two tiers of sandbags, which were more than enough to keep it out of our lower level, though a few inches seeped into the garage from below. in short, we dodged the bullet.

the river has been receding fast since yesterday — it’s almost back down to street-level here, though it will be many days or maybe weeks before the rocky shore drive can reopen. the power company shut off gas to the neighborhood on friday, in the midst of evacuations, but miraculously the lights stayed on, along with internet. in order to get the gas turned back on, we need a city inspector to come by and okay the house, but we join a very long list of houses that all have to be checked out individually by a department already stretched thin — we had an appointment to be inspected this morning, but nobody showed. water service, meanwhile, has been uninterrupted, though the city was been mumbling about conservation (the water treatment plant is fine, apparently, but some of the sources of treatable water may not be), so we’re trying to go easy — not having hot water for showering helps.

until the water recedes enough that sandbags can be removed, most of our cleanup work consists of moving stuff back downstairs — it came up in hasty, disorganized fashion, so it’s a big job of organizing and getting rid of crap we should have pitched years ago. happily, though, nothing was damaged. otherwise, the weather is nice and it’s a pleasant interlude before we have to contend with the layer of toxic mud that the river will leave behind all over town. thanks for all your thoughts & prayers, and huge thanks to everybody who helped out!