Vernon, Murphy duke it out

It seems like a good time to check in on the race for the Democratic nomination in your 1st Congressional District. Better than spraying dandelions.

Democrats Pat Murphy and Monica Vernon are vying to take on Republican U.S. Rep. Rod Blum in November. Murphy is a longtime state lawmaker from Dubuque who served as Iowa House speaker from 2007 to 2011. Vernon is a former Cedar Rapids City Council member who founded a market research firm.

Murphy beat Vernon and a cast of thousands in the 2014 primary, but he lost to Blum. Vernon joined Jack Hatch's gubernatorial ticket, which won a single county. Undeterred, they're back.

Murphy has spent considerable time and energy pointing out Vernon was a Republican until the spring of 2009, and gave money to Republicans in the past. I even got a robocall at my desk a couple of weeks ago pointing out Vernon's GOP history. Murphy says he's been a Democrat since becoming a voter in 1977.

Curiously, Vernon hasn't come up with a mic-dropping retort, even though she faced the same attack in 2014. She insists she is a 'lifetime progressive,” whatever that means. We're all progressing through a lifetime, after all.

At a debate in Monticello on Saturday, according to our James Q. Lynch, Vernon told Murphy to 'quit looking in the rearview mirror.” Better. But still not great.

Murphy wants to talk about 1977 and 2009. Vernon might want to argue 2010 and 2014 are more important. Those are election years when the House Democrats led by Murphy lost their majority, and he lost a Democrat-leaning U.S. House district to a very conservative Republican. A Democrat who was a Republican might be more acceptable than a Democrat who loses to Republicans.

Murphy's tenure as speaker yielded multiple disappointments for progressives, lifetime or otherwise. Take the collective bargaining expansion in 2008 Murphy and House leaders rushed through in such a sketchy and reckless procedural fashion that Gov. Chet Culver vetoed it. Culver took the heat, but it was a lousy process that doomed it.

Why did Vernon switch? At the time, it seemed she was positioning herself to run for mayor, a nonpartisan job in a largely Democratic town. She told me back then vehement GOP opposition to marriage equality was a factor. Regardless, I doubt she did it so she could someday get elected to Congress and become a secret Republican mole.

And this loyalty test stuff seems ill-fitted to the times. Some Bernie guy who represents Vermont in the U.S. Senate as an independent 'democratic socialist” has drawn millions of Americans to his run for the Democratic presidential nomination. And some guy named Trump, who is leading the Republican race, has spouted views all over the political map. He's a hybridized weapon of mass hysteria.

So party loyalty isn't what it used to be, even among partisans. In Vernon's case, Democratic leaders and allied groups have been piling on endorsements.

And the longer Murphy makes this the central rebuttal to Vernon's candidacy, the more it begs the question: 'What else have you got?” Because this probably isn't enough.

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