What motivates Roxanne Conlin?
Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Roxanne Conlin says her outrage over what she called the “useless” federal bailout of Goliath banks is the primary motivation behind her bid to become Iowa’s first female elected federal representative.
Conlin, a Des Moines attorney, said the vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), with an original cost of $700 billion to taxpayers that the Treasury Department says is now down to $105 billion, was “one of things that made me the angriest I have ever been at Washington.”
In an interview, she dismissed the argument that without the bailout a brewing recession would have been worse.
“There’s nothing to support it,” Conlin said. “It’s just a bunch people saying, ‘Well, if we don’t give a whole bunch of money to Wall Street, the economy is going to go in the dumper.’ There’s no economics behind it.”
Conlin, 65, a longtime Des Moines attorney, ran for governor in 1982, losing to eventual four-term governor Terry Branstad. She’s also been a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, an assistant attorney general for Iowa and the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party.
Conlin is trying to crash through a political glass ceiling in Iowa, a state that along with only Mississippi has the distinction of never electing a woman to Congress, the U.S. Senate or as governor.
“One of the things that makes us a very great place to live is our traditions. But sometimes those traditions harden into stereotypes,” Conlin said. “When I ran in 1982 about a third of voters said they wouldn’t vote for me because I was a female.”
Conlin said those views no doubt still exist in the Hawkeye State but that people are less likely to voice them, which she sees as progress.
On military issues, Conlin supports President Barack Obama’s deployment of 1,200 National Guard members to the U.S. border with Mexico.
“It appears to be a mission that can be accomplished,” she said.
But she opposes the president’s addition of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
“We are allied with a corrupt government, with a government headed by a man who only a couple of weeks ago threatened to join the Taliban,” Conlin said. “Why would we send our young men and women to fight on his behalf? Whenever we are allied with a corrupt government, it does not go well for us. We did what we set out to do. Our troops have done everything that we have asked for and more. It’s time for them to come home. I really don’t think that 30,000 is going to do any good.”
Conlin expressed disappointment that the U.S. Supreme Court, with the appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the pending one of Elena Kagan, is becoming an largely Eastern United States panel with no rural or Midwest representation. Conlin doesn’t want a geographic litmus test for judges, and said she would not vote against Kagan as a protest over the court’s lack of such balance, but she urged the president in the future to consider talented lawyers and judges from Midwest.
“It’s a very narrow court, and in the same way I want diversity on the court in terms of gender and race, I think diversity is a value in terms of geography and life experience and we don’t have that,” Conlin said. “We don’t even have any Protestants.”
Conlin is Roman Catholic, but in a recent interview in Jefferson with journalist Chuck Offenburger she said she doesn’t attend church on a regular basis. I asked her to elaborate on that.
“I still consider myself Roman Catholic, though I am not a regular attender of church,” she told me.
Why is that?
“For a variety of reasons, some quite personal,” Conlin said.
Conlin went further and questioned whether the media should ask her about her personal faith — even as a follow-up to her pointing out of the absence of Protestants on the High Court.
“Really, I wonder, is it?” Conlin said. “I want to be the senator for all of Iowa. That’s why I went to all 99 counties. And I think my personal religious views and practices are not really fair game as long as I’m a moral person — as long as I’m not lying, cheating, stealing, any of those kinds of things.” CV
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.
