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Consider impeachment. Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District is red as it comes. So you’d expect its denizens to be fervently against the inquiry against the president, right?
That’s not exactly what my colleague Emma Green heard when she visited Sioux Center, Iowa recently (population: ~7,000) recently.
“People were skeptical that the impeachment inquiry would go anywhere, but they smiled ruefully at the fantasy of a President Mike Pence and a clean slate of Republican candidates in 2020.”
Read Emma’s full dispatch from Iowa.
Earlier this fall, Emma also talked to the Iowa-based writer Lyz Lenz who’s on a mission to tear down misconceptions of what rural voters are like:
“There’s a woman in my book, Evelyn Birkby, who was 97 when I interviewed her. I feel like she’s a lot more representative. She identifies as conservative and she remembers the Dust Bowl,” Lenz said. “But she also questions the thing I call ‘patriarchy,’ which she would just call ‘power.’”
Finally: Picture of a rural farmer. What kind of person comes to mind? As my colleague Vann Newkirk II writes in our September 2019 cover story, black farmers have faced a little-covered crisis of stolen land: Between 1950 and 1969, an average of 820 acres of farmland—an area the size of Central Park—was ripped away from black farmers every day.
Read Vann’s full story of how a million black farmers have had their land torn from them.
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« ARGUMENTS AND IDEAS »
(RON FREHM / AP)
A tale of two families—and two presidencies
How does an average Joe bring down a presidency? Before the first public hearings in the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Trump, Katrina Northrop shares a family story about her grandfather’s role in President Nixon’s fall.
I remember asking my grandfather the first time I heard the transcript story, as a young kid, “If you hadn’t hurt your back, would Nixon never have resigned? I now understand the naïveté of my question…
What does one writer chose to do when given the chance to bring up her father’s deportation under the Bill Clinton presidency, with Hillary Clinton?
I congratulated [Hillary] Clinton on her book, Gutsy Women. She graciously asked me about mine.
“It’s called Here We Are,” I told her. “It’s about the decade-long deportation case I fought to keep my father in this country after your husband signed those laws in 1996.”
Read this argument about Clinton’s immigration legacy.
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« WHAT OUR POLITICS TEAM IS READING »
¶ If Delaware has recovered from Jonathan Chait’s epic 2002 takedown—and it probably hasn’t—then Tim Murphy’s new look into the state’s shady banking laws and Joe Biden’s role in propagating them deals the state a new body blow
—David Graham, who covers national politics for The Atlantic
¶ You may have heard critics of the Iowa caucus argue that the state is too white or too rural to be representative of America, and therefore, shouldn’t hold the first presidential nominating contest. NPR’s recent analysis actually looked at race, education, age, income, and religion to see which state is actually the most representative of the country.
—Elaine Godfrey, who covers Democrats for The Atlantic
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