Posted on 06/23/2007 11:26:31 AM PDT by Clintonfatigued
David Yepsen's column this weekend suggests that Republicans do not have a credible challenger to Harkin for 2008. Yepsen points out:
Yet so far, no big-name Republicans seem to be making the moves needed to challenge him. Only obscure names are heard. Could the ghosts of Bill Scherle (1974), Roger Jepsen (1984), Tom Tauke (1990), Jim Lightfoot (1996) and Greg Ganske (2002) be scaring off credible GOP challengers? Could 2008 be the year that Harkin, finally, gets the same sort of free ride from Republicans that Democrats have been giving Chuck Grassley for 20 years?
Of course in Republican circles the buzz has been that Congressman Steve King was preparing to run against Harkin in '08. Yepsen suggests that since King has a safe house seat (in western Iowa were Dems are as rare as buffalo) that he would be content to hold the seat indefinitely.
I agree with Krusty! I am one who believes, or maybe it is simply hope, that King will take up the challenge. Unlike Grassley, Harkin has had close races. Conservatives in Iowa are itching for this fight. King vs Harkin would rally the base like never before. King is no lightweight (I mean Lightfoot). He is charismatic and controversial but he would mobilize conservative Republicans across the state.
(Excerpt) Read more at hawkeyegop.com ...
Steve King has emerged as Iowa’s leading advocate for border security and national sovereignty, the most important domestic issues facing us. He would make a fine Senator. Also, he is the strongest candidate who could be found for the GOP.
In addition, Tom Harkin has been a destructive force for the country. King’s candidacy combined with the 2008 Presidential election would rally Iowa’s conservative grass roots like never before.
Indeed it would.
The only way to defeat Commie Tommy, the socialist warrior, is with a conservative warrior. And Steve King is that.
...and you know, with some MiGs over Vietnam.
One small error with Yepsen’s column...
Roger Jepsen was the incumbent in ‘84. A scandal-plagued incumbent who should have won handily in a true GOP year.
But Harkin beat him while Reagan carried the state.
But the rest of the story is correct. The GOP has put up some first-rate challengers to Harkin but they really haven’t come close to beating him.
Steve King is great. He is a good man who does good for Iowa. He isn’t one of the establishment sell outs. This is why he will not run for Senate.
I hope he does. He can do more in the Senate than in the House.
Would it be bad of me to hope Nussle runs? We don’t wanna break with our tradition of ex-congressmen running for Governor AND Senator then vanishing forever now do we ??
= )
Not really, but if he couldn’t defeat a non-incumbent leftist, how would he defeat a longtime incumbent?
Now that would be a great race. Steve King is the right man for the job.
It was a joke about Nussle, saying this would be a good way to send him into political exile...
I don’t think we will get rid of Harkin until he is representing a MUCH warmer constituency.
= /
I couldn’t tell the date of the blog entry when I went there. I find it curious that it references Krusty, and we all know he shut down the first week of May, so I’m thinking this is an old blog entry.
Steve King doesn’t owe anybody anything, and he shouldn’t let David Yepsen lure him into a knife fight. Yepsen and his bosses at the Red Star would like nothing better than to send Steve back home, so it’s not likely he would get neutral coverage from them. They’d be pushing Harkin all the way.
Whatever Steve does, I’ll be there behind him with my checkbook and my tennis shoes for pain free door knocking.
All of Harkin’s challengers since 1984 have been first-tier. Harkin hasn’t run for reelection in a Presidential year since he faced Jim Ross Lightfoot in 1996. Many of us thought Lightfoot would finally bring him down, as he hailed from the same bailiwick as Harkin (Lightfoot won Harkin’s House seat in 1984), but he still came up short (not helped by the fact that Clintoon was carrying the state), though held him to his closest margin.
These are the results of his 4 Senate runs:
Harkin-(Senator) Roger Jepsen (1984) 56-44%
Harkin-(Congressman) Tom Tauke (1990) 54-45%
Harkin-(Congressman) Jim Ross Lightfoot (1996) 52-47%
Harkin-(Congressman) Greg Ganske (2002) 54-44%
I think if Harkin had had to run in ‘94 against Lightfoot, he probably would’ve been defeated by around 51-49% and Lightfoot would still be the junior Senator today. It was the thinking in ‘02 that Dr. Ganske could bring down Harkin because of the fact he accomplished his greatest feat in ‘94 in bringing down 36-year incumbent Democrat Rep. Neal Smith (but he only performed slightly better than Sen. Jepsen, who did the worst against Harkin).
I think that the alien amnesty issue, Steve King’s popularity with both northwestern Iowa and the conservative grass roots, and Hitlery being the Rodent moninee will be the right combination.
It’s the other parts of Iowa I’d worry about. The western end of IA has always been Republican. It’s the eastern squish end (Dubuque, the Quad Cities, Iowa City) and Des Moines that is far more iffy.
True. But Dubuque is not reliably Democratic. Lots of pro-life Bavarian Catholics live there, and Tom Harkin has been pushing aggressively for fetal stem cell research. Des Moines has a growing ring of suburbs which is increasingly willing to vote Republican. And while western Iowa is usually Republican (though it elected Rodent Congressmen during most of the 1970’s & 1980’s), Steve King would have hometown appeal, generating enthusiasm that the other GOP nominees didn’t generate.
A lot of them will vote Republican for president in 08, especially if a certain person is the Democrat nominee.
Also important is taking back both the 1st and 2nd (and the 3rd would be nice, too) House districts. On the Politics1 site, former Baseball player Cal Eldred is listed as a possible (but undeclared) challenger to the 2nd’s Dave Loebsack and University of Dubuque President Jeff Bullock as a challenger to Bruce Braley in the 1st. Both should be premier targets.
Leonard Boswell’s health and age (he’ll be 75 at the start of the next Congress) should be an issue in the 3rd, though he’s not a moonbat as the freshmen reps are. One warning bell for him, the last time a Democrat ran for reelection at that age was Neal Smith in 1994, and he lost. His potential challenger is newly-elected State Sen. Brad Zaun. Zaun was the only new Republican elected to the IA Senate last November.
I actually goofed on the Western IA thing, at least with respect to the ‘70s and early ‘80s (when Berkley Bedell and Harkin had the then-5th and 6th seats — for some reason, I don’t know why I kept thinking Harkin was from the central IA seat below Neal Smith’s). IA in the ‘70s was more like the Twilight Zone. Following the Watergate election, almost the entire delegation, House and Senate, was rodent (except for Chuck Grassley, who barely won the open seat in ‘74), with a RINO liberal Governor, Bob Ray. It took until the ‘90s for the seats to revert back to their historic norms (and now, of course, ‘06 was almost like a mini-Watergate in IA).
Iowa hasn’t been great for us since the ‘80s, where the GOP was chronically underperforming at the Presidential level. When Reagan carried it by a paltry 53-45% in ‘84 (I mean, more urban IL gave him 56%), Bush, Sr. lost it by a humiliating 55-45% to Dukakis, and got all of 37% (to Clintoon’s 43%) in 1992. Dole got just under 40% in ‘96, and Dubya lost it in 2000 by about 4,000 votes (though it was the best a Republican had done since 1984). And, of course, when he ran for reelection in ‘04, he carried it for the first time in 20 years, and by a still rather paltry 10,000 votes (and still got just under 50%).
Hillary or Obama (from neighboring IL), I would not rule out being able to be potentially competitive here (but it probably doesn’t help them that with the Dems in complete control of state government, led by a liberal Blonde dunce named Chet Culver, that might turn out a net positive for us).
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