On the Campaign Trail with Ed Tibbetts

It looks like video gambling may have new life in the Iowa Legislature. House Speaker Pat Murphy, a Dubuque Democrat, is calling the issue “a live round to be discussed.”

That’s a difference from July, when I started poking around to find out if Iowa would match Illinois’ decision to allow video poker. Recall, Illinois approved video gambling as part of a larger budget package that included a long-awaited capital bill.

Back then, Murphy didn’t shut the door on the possibility, but said “I think it’s a tough uphill fight.”

Apparently, the hill has flattened a bit.

The Des Moines Register reports Murphy said yesterday that legislators who may have turned their nose up at it a year ago may be looking at it differently now.

Certainly, video gambling would bring money into state coffers at a time when there’s a round of budget cuts going on. But it would also inject gambling expansion into an election year, which is likely to ruffle some feathers.

Republican candidate for governor Christopher Rants was in about a week ago and he had an interesting observation about Terry Branstad getting into the race. Specifically, he talked about a lack of easily-retrievable articles about the ex-governor.

You want to know something about me, Rants said, and all you have to do is Google my name and there’s a 1,000 articles.

He has a good point. Today’s politics is a lot different than it was in Branstad’s hey-day. Today, opposition research is pretty easy. Google makes it so. Even looking for the really embarrassing courthouse stuff is easier, thanks to the Internet and the increasing willingness of courts to post documents online.

But, as Rants pointed out, Branstad is shielded from some of this because the stories written about his four terms are all pre-Google.

Well, today it looks like Rants is trying to even the scales. He’s added a new feature to his web site — an archive in which he’s scanned “news from the 80s and 90s,” as he puts it.

Don’t expect a lot of stories about Duran Duran, Big Hair or the A-Team.

Rants first article, posted today, is about……yes, Terry Branstad.

The piece, an 11-year-old David Yepsen column in the Des Moines Register, is headlined “Branstad, the liberal governor”.

Rants promises a “blast from the past” every week. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other candidates follow suit. In fact, there are probably a lot of folks visiting their local library to pull copies of old articles to be scanned onto web pages.

Turns out the stage won’t belong just to former Gov. Terry Branstad today.

Gov. Chet Culver is launching a new television ad, this on the heels of a meeting with the Des Moines Register editorial board in which he said he hadn’t — and won’t — raise taxes, a not so subtle reminder that Branstad did.

The ad, which the Register reports will run in the Des Moines and Cedar Rapids markets, features Culver looking straight into the camera telling viewers he’s making the tough decision to cut spending (and not “passing the buck” to the Legislature).

He reminds us he cut, his own pay, too.

“I chose tough medicine today to build a stronger Iowa for tomorrow,” Culver says in the ad.

Culver will also be on IPTV’s “Iowa Press” program today.

All this guarantees that, for all the speculation about — and possibly even confirmation — of Branstad’s plans to run for governor, Culver is going to be in the face of Iowans, too, this weekend. And on his own terms.

The only people being crowded out, it seems, are the Republicans already in the race.

Yes, they’re still out there. It just might not seem so today.

UPDATE (11:20 a.m.): One of those Republicans just chimed in on Culver’s new ad. Christian Fong, of Cedar Rapids, says the governor failed to make the tough decision to cut spending the last two years.

In the campaign ad that Governor Culver began airing today he talks about his “choice” to cut spending, rebuild the state and to take the tough medicine of today.   The “choice” Governor Culver fails to mention is his choice to sign budgets over the last two years that have grown state government by a rate that was clearly unsustainable. At the end of the day, ultimately it was Governor Culver’s choices that brought us to this point.  Iowa voters will have a choice next November to choose fresh leadership and I look forward to being that alternative.”