Underdog Fiegen will rely on social networking

By James Q. Lynch The Gazette

CEDAR RAPIDS – Tom Fiegen is hoping lightning strikes – for a second time.

The Cedar County Democrat who hopes to stop Sen. Chuck Grassley's re-election next year will model his campaign on the game plan used my Mount Vernon college professor Dave Loebsack to defeat 30-year Republican incumbent Rep. Jim Leach back in 2006. 

“We'll do some things differently, but we'll use his campaign as a model, the way he built it from the grass roots,” said Fiegen, who practices bankruptcy law in Cedar Rapids.

If it worked once, it can work again, said Dave Bradley of West Liberty, who was on hand for Fiegen's announcement Friday in Tipton. “Absolutely, lightning can strike twice,” Bradley said.

Fiegen knows he can't raise as much money as Grassley, but has set a goal of $3 million – less than what Grassley has in the bank now, according to Federal Election Commission reports. With elbow grease, shoe leather and social media networks, Fiegen believes he can compete with Grassley's money.

Shaded from the midday August sun by a locust tree in Greene Square Park in downtown Cedar Rapids Friday, his supporters outnumbered by media, Fiegen promised a bare-bones campaign that would rely heavily on social media networking.

 “I think they were helpful to Dave Loebsack,” he said, “So we're going to take what he did, what Howard Dean did, what President Obama did and we're going to try to use that on an Iowa level.”

Fiegen, who joins Bob Krause of Fairfield in seeking the Democratic nomination, said his first priority will be to raise campaign cash. He's talking to national fundraising firms who, he said, tell him contributors will come forward if the sense Grassley is vulnerable.

He'll go back to the people who supported his Iowa Senate campaigns as well as some of those who believed in Loebsack when he was an underdog.

“Hopefully, it's a snowball process where the money we raise from the people I know will let everyone else know this is a viable campaign,” Fiegen said.

He conceded upsetting Grassley, who has scored four lopsided re-election victories since defeating Sen. John Culver in 1980, is a long shot. However, Fiegen recalled he defeated a five-term Iowa senator to win a seat in the Iowa Legislature. He served one term before redistricting put him in the same district as the late Sen. Richard Drake, R-Muscatine. He lost that election and lost again to Rep. Jim Hahn, R-Muscatine, in a bid to succeed Drake.

People who handicap Senate races like the odds of Grassley winning a sixth term. He's a “fixture in Iowa politics,” according to CQPolitics.com. “He appears very secure … despite a recent Democratic trend in the longtime swing state, symbolized by Barack Obama's easy win for its seven electoral votes in 2008.”

The Rothenberg Political Report calls Grassley “currently safe.” Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com also called Grassley an institution and told an Ames audience in April: “If he runs, he'll win.”

Those predictions were made before Fiegen announced.