Dad says Culver ‘saving’ Cedar Rapids

Sen. John Culver loves his hometown too much to stay out of the campaign battle over flood recovery assistance for Cedar Rapids.

“This is the city I love,” Culver said Monday (Aug. 16). “This is the city I grew up in. This is the city I proudly represented for 16 years – 10 in the House and six in the Senate. There is no city in Iowa that I have more devotion to because this is where my family spent a lifetime.”

To see its condition two years after flooding damaged broad swaths of the downtown and west side is “heartbreaking,” the 78-year-old Culver said before returning to Boston where he serves as interim director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“The only thing that makes it bearable is the pride with which I have for the leadership that my son has given to this city,” Culver said in a fiery rebuttal of former Gov. Terry Branstad's attacks on his son's $875 million I-JOBS program which is funding $113 million of recovery efforts in Linn County.

“He's saving the city,” Culver said, referring to first-term Democratic Gov. Chet Culver who is trailing Republican Gov. Branstad, who served four terms from 1983-99, in recent polls.

Culver, who retired from a Washington law firm earlier this year, has been in Iowa the past few days to rally Democrats and challenge Branstad's “gall to be critical.”

“I've been involved in a lot of political campaigns and I've never seen an environment, politically, in a campaign with as much irresponsible, false and reckless charges being advanced by the Branstad campaign,” he said.

At the top of his agenda is helping Iowa voters understand his son's “actual record of accomplishment and achievement.”

“I've been amazed at what I would call the disconnect between Gov. Culver's actual accomplishment with the I-JOBS program – 1,700 projects underway across the state and it's being funded by revenue from the casinos,” he said. “It's a very imaginative way to have those resources available to bring about this recovery and it's not a hit on the taxpayers.”

There's a disconnect all right, Branstad said, between Sen. Culver's proud opinion of his son and his understanding of Iowa today.

“He doesn't live in Iowa and I don't he think he's really aware of what's going on here,” Branstad said. “He's disconnected, I think.”

Not at all, countered Gov. Culver, defending his father.

“My father knows more about this state than Terry Branstad or just about anyone who has run for public office,” the governor said. “My father cares passionately about this state and his hometown.