On the Side| Brad Hicks

 Elections almost always lead to circumstances that people don’t understand.

For instance, some of the state’s 150,000 or so public workers have expressed opinions over the past two weeks regarding the Republican-controlled Iowa government changing the collective bargaining law. GOP officials said they are “giving Iowans a place at the bargaining table,” claiming the law had swung too far in favor of public employees. 

You can always have a debate about those things, but one thing you can’t debate is that despite the protests at the Capitol and elsewhere, the Republicans campaigned on making changes to the law, and they overwhelmingly won control of the Iowa House and the Iowa Senate. One could probably argue that voters spoke that matter.

So as the legislative session began, the GOP wasted little time acting on a part of the campaign promises it made. It should not have been surprising. That’s what political parties do. If you want to see another example of that, consider the birth of Obamacare, which the Democrats ran through when they had total control in 2009-2010. 

On the flip side, elected folks often seem clueless. 

For instance, President Trump is being eaten alive by the Swamp Thing. Apparently, he doesn’t understand that the Swamp Thing has been living in Washington, D.C., for a long time and really doesn’t want his habitat drained.

What was Trump thinking? He wasn’t! He stumbled onto a campaign slogan that fired up a portion of the conservative base, which has long believed there is too much bureaucracy, and that much of that bureaucracy spends more time and money manicuring the swamp than taking care of business.

The problem is, the Swamp Thing has its tentacles everywhere. In the 2016 presidential election,  residents of the swamp proper – D.C. – voted by a 282,830 to 12,723 in favor of Hillary Clinton, a 22-1 margin.

So, when President Trump starts talking about plugging leaks, downsizing departments, and rooting out bad bureaucrats, the Swamp Thing is going to fight back because it knows it has the local numbers on its side. And the Swamp Thing knows, too, that the Republicans in the House and Senate are afraid of it, because they’ve been repelled in the past.

President Trump’s decision to pick a fight with the major media is another scratch-your-head choice. A 2016 study by Politico found that of the 72 members of the White House press corps, not a single member was a registered Republican, and 25 percent were registered Democrats Sixty percent were not registered to vote, but 72 percent of those polled said they think reporters should vote in elections they cover.

Of course, the media can be out of touch, too, which some members admitted for about 12 hours in the aftermath of Trump’s victory. Before that, nearly 90 percent of the White House press corps said they expected Hillary Clinton to be the nation’s next president. 

Apparently, there’s enough incomprehension to go around.

 

Brad Hicks is publisher of The Express. Reach him at publisher@redoakexpress.com

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