To watch the onslaught of television advertising for Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst is to be taken for an idiot.

Her handlers have packaged her simultaneously as the conservative mom next door, or as the courageous veteran, or as the flannel wearing farmer who doesn’t reel at the smell of pig shit, depending on which thirty-second commercial you get treated to as you watch your TV shows.  The artifice is so superficially applied that, as one union voter expressed, “I’m tired of Joni Ernst’s Hallmark card moments.”

Unfortunately, the general public does not get the kind of political education the average union member gets which helps union members navigate through the constant stream of televised propaganda. According to a Rasmussen poll in September, “Over one-third of likely U.S. voters remain unaware which political party controls the House of Representatives and which has a majority in the Senate.”

If one-third of likely voters do not know enough about politics to understand the balance of power, what of the 58% of registered voters who are unlikely to vote in the midterm election next week? I’m speaking of the millions of US citizens who will wake up next Tuesday, go to work, or school, or remain unemployed, or serve in the military, or do whatever people do as they fail to engage in the political process that they, in other contexts, laud over and beat their chests to defend (“USA! USA! …blah blah blah…).

The mainstream television media is only incrementally better than the thirty second ad in helping the public understand the issues so they can become actual practitioners of Democracy. What CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, Fox, et all should be doing with their hour long programs is delving into the issues with the point of creating a deeper analysis of how the candidate’s policies affect your life. Instead they are vehicles for careerist “journalists” to drive up ratings and the value of their own contracts with the networks.  They treat the election as simply a high-stakes competition, a surrogate to Monday Night Football (Tuesday Night Vote Olympics!). It’s all about being a winner! The concern is macho on a macro level.

The talk show hosts and their guests cite polls, they use the word “policy” without actually discussing the policy. They talk about change, status quo, and the play-by-play completion for control. It’s all dehumanized analytics.

The Ernst campaign is carefully maintaining control to not let the thin veneer crack over this perception of Joni as the Iowa Everywoman. Her debate performances have proven her as someone who sticks tight to her talking points. Ernst answered substantive questions with repeated incantations of generic platitudes: “Let’s make life better for hardworking Americans!”

Last week Joni Ernst surprised no one when she declined interviews with The Des Moines Register, The Cedar Rapids Gazette, The Dubuque Telegraph Herald, and other newspapers around the state. Why on earth would she expose herself to the last vestige of professional journalists who still exist at local newspapers (compared to those who smile with dead eyes reading a teleprompter to a camera)?

However, there is an agenda, and one even more conservative than Iowa’s senior Republican U.S. Senator, Chuck Grassley’s. Though Grassley supports the other ridiculous presumption that corporations are people, he has never proposed something akin to Joni’s personhood amendment.  The personhood amendment may sound innocuous (Joni plays it down by saying it’s simply an affirmation of life, “I’m always going to promote life – except, of course, when she is soldiering ).  But the personhood amendment is a Taliban-esque concept. One that would reduce women to nothing more than child-bearers. For anyone who has read Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, you understand the slippery slope such an Amendment would unleash on women’s rights.

Ernst has also proposed the nonsensical concept that states need not recognize federal laws.   In Joni-land, Iowa might as well be Somalia, not having to answer to any outside entity.

Ernst’s proposals to privatize Social Security is another classic example of playing a shell game with voters. She claims she won’t privatize or raise the retirement age for current seniors (read “likely voters”), only for those future seniors, those young people out there who are currently facing unemployment, underemployment and reduction in opportunities not seen since the parents of this current generation of seniors.  [You can read the text of her statement made in the Republican primary debate at Politifact or see for yourself in the debate video aired by KCCI].

Oh, it’s clever, all right. Worth every dime the Koch brothers have invested in it. But for Iowa voters, it is indeed one of the biggest heists the state has ever seen.

Tracy Leone
Organizer
Iowa Federation of Labor