Scuttle survived Election Day, and so can you

I spoke Friday at the First Presbyterian Church as part of the Interfaith Council of Iowa's 'Intersections” speaker series. I was asked to talk about the 2016 election and its aftermath. Here is an excerpt from my presentation.

Election Day was a very strange and eventful day for me.

I came home in the late afternoon because I was assigned to help host a podcast on Tuesday night. My dog Scuttle, was running around in the backyard. You might remember Scuttle. I wrote a column comparing him to Donald Trump. He's still miffed, and by 'he” I mean Scuttle.

I stepped out on the deck and called to him. He got very excited and took off like a rocket toward me. But he lost his footing on the patio and slammed into the deck steps.

The poor guy was staggering and drooling and wobbling. It turns out, after checking in with the awesome but pricey emergency vet, Scuttle had a concussion. He's fine now, by the way.

So how is Scuttle's crash relevant? I'll let you decide.

Alternative one: Just hours later, an American electorate overexcited and overstimulated by the 2016 campaign ran headlong into history's deck steps. It's going to leave a mark.

Alternative two: No matter how sharp the blow, how bad it seems, recovery is possible. Painkillers help.

Alternative three: The low energy loser Dorman made the whole thing up. I heard he doesn't even have a dog. So sad.

Alternative four: Remarkably, a living thing is actually excited to see a journalist.

You can take your pick. But there is no alternative ending to what happened in Iowa on election night.

For one thing, Donald Trump won Iowa by a huge margin. He's only the second Republican to win Iowa's electoral votes since 1984. And probably not the last, the way things are trending.

Exit polls show large chunks of the Iowa electorate believed the country is on the wrong track and they wanted change. Even though Iowa's economic fundamentals are better than a lot of states, many of these voters named the economy as their top issue. Of course, a fair number of these voters came from rural areas, where economic prospects are dimmer, young people are departing and there's a sense that government policies are ignoring that reality.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary and former Gov. Tom Vilsack has been talking in recent days about the need for Democrats to engage rural voters. If not to win over rural areas, to at least reduce massive margins of defeat that swamped Dems advantages in urban areas on election night.

The polls also showed a lot of Trump supporters in Iowa have misgivings about their pick, his temperament, trustworthiness and experience. So his support could sour if he bungles the job.

I've heard a lot about anger among Trump voters. And we've seen some evidence of that. But most of the Trump supporters I spoke with during the campaign in Iowa were generally pleasant people deeply unhappy with government policies that they insisted get in the way of business. Obamacare tops the list, but many spoke of a government that fails to address what they see as really big problems, such as immigration, or hands their taxpayer money to people who don't deserve services, like food stamps.

They disliked Obama. They disliked the media even more.

Iowa Republican leadership remained remarkably unified, more so than in virtually any other state. State party leaders, Gov. Terry Branstad, Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds, Ag Sec. Bill Northey, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst all were strong Trump supporters. Branstad got so fired up you'd have thought he was out campaigning for ethanol or lean finely textured beef.

Of course, Eric Branstad's role in directing Trump's Iowa campaign played a major role in Team Branstad's enthusiasm. Party leaders hoped their loyalty would be rewarded by keeping Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses intact. Top Republicans feared alienating Trump supporters, who they believed held the key to down ballot races.

And, not surprisingly, they vehemently disliked Hillary Clinton and saw Trumpian excesses as small prices to pay for defeating her.

CLINTON DISLIKED

Even beyond Republicans, Iowa has really never been Hillary Clinton country. In 2008, Iowa caucus goers handed Barack Obama a victory that led him down the road past Clinton to the White House. During that campaign, her advisers toyed with the idea of skipping the state.

This time around, she nearly lost Iowa to Bernie Sanders' insurgency. His supporters believe he did win the head count vote, which isn't released by the party. They blame the party establishment for putting a thumb on Hillary's side of the scale, which is a valid gripe. WikiLeaks seems to bear that out on the national level.

So on election night, she was up against unified Republicans, skeptical independents shifting right and more than a few Sanders supporters who refused to give her their votes.

I'd also add another theory. The Republican drumbeat message of a country on a hopelessly wrong track, failed Obama policies and American social decline has been the dominant soundtrack of Iowa politics for six years. We had a pack of GOP presidential hopefuls preaching it from the 2010 midterm campaign through the 2012 caucuses. The 2016 GOP presidential campaign began not long after the 2012 election and ran through to February 2016, featuring more than a dozen candidates. Most if not all of those hopefuls painted a very bleak picture.

Toss in a $60-plus million U.S. Senate race in 2014, with piles of outside cash, much of which was spent attacking Democrat Bruce Braley.

Politics has been like a paintball barrage in recent years, and most of the balls hitting Iowa are bright red. It's no wonder our purple state has gone crimson.

…

The biggest loser in every presidential election cycle I've witnessed has been the media. Never have I heard anyone say 'Wow, the media did a great job covering the campaign. No complaints here!”

Winners won despite the media. Losers lost because of the media. People have made a good living pointing out how the media screws up political coverage. Many of the critiques are on the money.

This election cycle may have been the most challenging ever for journalists. Fake news stories got more traction on major social media platforms than real news stories. When real news stories were damning to one candidate or the other, their supporters simply screamed bias or false equivalence. Facts and evidence seemed to matter much less than emotions and accusations. Fact checkers reminded me of those photos of Polish cavalrymen in 1939 wielding pikes against Panzers. So many pairs of pants were burning the whole campaign was shrouded in smoke.

In my small corner of the journalism world, since the election, I've been told multiple times that I'm an out-of-touch member of the media elite who didn't understand the power and popularity of the Trump movement, even in my home state. If I had, I wouldn't have been so hard on him.

I ponder my elite-ness often as I drive to work in my minivan, with its cracked windshield, and 117,000 miles.

My response has been to point out a couple of things.

First, that I've lived in this state my entire life, in cities and towns of every size. I've written about all levels of government and issues too numerous to count. I certainly can't walk in every voters' shoes, but the notion that I'm no different from a coastal scribe who jets in on occasion is little more than a convenient construct to basically ignore or dismiss what I'm writing. If I don't agree with you, I must have come from outer space, or maybe San Francisco.

Second, what I'm paid to write is my own view of things, informed by what I experience and the information I gather. Based on that, I saw Hillary Clinton as a potentially disappointing president. But I saw Donald Trump as a potentially destructive danger. Clinton is a state championship-caliber liar. Trump, in my view, is the undisputed world champion. Maybe even Mr. Universe, if he watches his figure. So I wrote my columns accordingly.

You may disagree. Many did. But the notion that I should have taken a different tack because my view turned out to be electorally unpopular doesn't make sense to me. If I think he's wrong, why would I write otherwise? If I conclude he's a bigger threat, why would I pretend they're equivalent? Why would I write a dishonest opinion to please a segment of my readership, even a large segment?

I know it's the college kids who get knocked heavily for their safe spaces, sensitivities and trigger warnings. But I have several very adult readers who are convinced my column should regularly be fashioned to make them feel good about their political views. It should be about what they think, not what I think. That's not how it works, but they can keep trying.

I don't worry about the critics, even the ones who give me the distinct impression they'd like me to pack up and get out of town. I learned a long time ago if you want a friend in journalism, get a dog.

l Comments: (319) 398-8452; todd.dorman@thegazette.com