Culver’s done; a U of Iowa fan is tasered; Michael Mauro gets a lift
This weekend’s Iowa Poll is the death knell for the Culver campaign, important Democrats quietly concede. It closed doors and checkbooks, they say.
For weeks, Culver folks have been cornering White House operatives — in Washington and at Iowa functions like the Harkin Steak Fry — asking for fly-in help from Big Names in Washington, starting with President Obama. Wait till the next poll comes out, the Culver folks were told. Big Names don’t want to waste valuable time and appearances on sure losers, they were bluntly told. Well, the poll is out, and it shows Chet Culver still trailing Terry Branstad by seven furlongs. Culver has gained nothing in the past seven months — he was down by 20 points in February, and he’s down by 19 now. So don’t expect any campaign appearances here by anyone who’s important or who even thinks she’s important. As proof: Obama is in Des Moines this week, but the White House has made it clear there will be nothing political and the meetings will be private.
Last week, a big-time Iowa Democrat and longtime Culver supporter told a Republican friend that if the poll numbers don’t close, his checkbook will. Others aren’t so blunt, but when pressed they say, yeah, that’s how they feel, too. Some plan to move their money to Congressional and state legislative races. Others just will keep it under the mattress.
The poll pointed out the true feelings of Iowans: they don’t much care for either man. Only 36 percent of those polled favor their candidate because “this is the best person for the job.” An astounding 53 percent are backing their man simply because “of all the candidates, this is the person I can most easily live with.” Whoever came up with that question — be it pollster Ann Selzer or someone at The Des Moines Register — it was telling, and brilliant. And that pretty much negates the other strange finding, that 33 percent of those polled “could still be persuaded to vote for another candidate.” The problem: there is no other candidate they like.
The poll — and Monday’s poll showing Chuck Grassley in a big lead over Roxanne Conlin — is bad news for Democratic officeholders hoping for some coattails to grasp. But Secretary of State Michael Mauro did get a break during the week. Eleven Republican county auditors endorsed Democrat Mauro for re-election, an almost-unheard-of crossing of the lines. But county auditors work closely with the Secretary of State, and by all accounts Mauro has run an efficient and scandal-free office since taking over from Culver, who had his share of problems as Secretary of State. Culver had his eye on the governorship almost from the day he became Secretary of State, and politics was always part of his agenda. Mauro, an election-policy wonk, has made it clear he has no designs on higher office, which makes the Republicans comfortable in supporting him. ...
It took two weeks for the press to hear that a fan was tasered at the Iowa-Iowa State football game in Iowa City. In the stands. During the game.
It was no secret. Scores of people saw it. An outraged mother of a student who was standing next to the person who was tasered wrote a long letter to Iowa president Sally Mason about it on Sept. 16, and she sent copies to many others.
Finally, on Saturday, the Cedar Rapids Gazette had a story, which the Register picked up.
The circumstances are in dispute, but the tasering isn’t. In a letter to Mason, Kris Rowley of Spirit Lake said that during the first quarter of the game some police showed up apparently in response to a complaint from her daughter about rowdy behavior by students sitting behind her. According to the letter:
“My daughter...was greeted by ‘shut your f@‘ing pie-hole’ curses from a university police officer who then aimed a taser at her and threatened, ‘or do you want to be tased?’ Frozen in shock, she then witnessed the officer change his taser target to a Hawkeye fan standing beside her.” The police then tasered and arrested that man. Rowley says her daughter, a senior piano performance and business major whose name is Krista Rowley, “did not see the taser victim do anything to the officer that merited being tased or that merited” being arrested. She also said her daughter “stood frozen to the spot, afraid to speak or move, convinced if she moved a muscle she would be tased, until the taser victim fell backwards into her. She was traumatized by the event.”
The police say it’s not quite like that. They say, first, the officer who tasered the fan was not a University of Iowa policeman but rather a North Liberty police officer who was with the university police. They say the fan shoved the university officer into the crowd and the officer lost his balance. They say the North Liberty officer acted in defense of the university officer. The police also deny using profanity. They say they’re still investigating the incident.
But everyone agrees a fan was tased.
The person arrested was Christopher Knotts, 25, of Solon. Records indicate he was charged with public intoxication, criminal trespass, assault on a police officer and interference with official acts. He had a previous conviction for public intoxication, according to the police. He’s a U of Iowa student and was featured in the alumni magazine of February 2008 because of his tattoos of a pair of handcuffs and an inked map of Iraq to “commemorate his service in 2004 as a military policeman in the Sunni Triangle during Operation Iraqi Freedom.” He also has a tattoo of an American eagle over the flag with the words “Born to Love, Trained to Kill,” according to the alumni magazine. (Yeah, none of that is relevant to this, but it’s just kind of interesting.)
Knotts was one of 145 persons arrested on game day as part of the university’s attempted crackdown on drinking. (A week earlier, there were 130 arrests, but fewer than 30 this Saturday when rain and an early start changed the atmosphere.) The Iowa City newspapers listed the arrest along with the scores of others, but there was no mention of the tasering incident until Friday. Kris Rowley, who is the Dickinson County treasurer, called Sally Mason to try to discuss the incident, but the call was returned by the security office because, she says she was told, it was “university protocol” that Mason not return the call.
The point, of course, is not really whether Knotts pushed or didn’t push the police officer. The news is that behavior at the football games is so out of hand, that drinking is so out of hand, that arrests are so common that being tased at a football game appears to be just an accepted fact of Saturday life. So accepted that the press never even hears about it, or at least doesn’t write about it for a couple of weeks, so accepted that it’s just part of a Saturday in Iowa City.
Mason is being praised by Regents and others for her willingness to deal with the game-day drinking issue and for her tough stand, but Kris Rowley, for one, disagrees.
“Please look for positive ways to turn the tide on binge drinking instead of the hammer method with police-state attitude that is heading the University in the direction of the perfect storm,” she wrote to Mason. And her letter said: “I think the changes have created situations that are much more dangerous for students and Hawkeye fans than witnessing people pee on the sidewalk.” CV
