No, I am not going to Iowa in Jan '11 to work for ANYBODY.
Posted on 11/19/2009 5:16:40 PM PST by bigred08
A popular Iowa State Senator and and a former Iowa State University wrestling coach could pose significant challenges to Democrat Leonard Boswell's Third District Congressional seat.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
Taking out the Demonrats, one seat at a time.
Boswell gets first-tier challenger from State Sen. Brad Zaun.
I’ve only spent time in CD#2. But CD#1, on the river, is the most interesting.
Well, both CD-1 & 2 are on the river (and the 3rd has the one county). I’ve never been in Iowa, my father came close to being born in Dubuque, but ended up coming out in Platteville, WI nearby. Hope to get up there before long. So many of those IA river towns had high expectations of becoming large cities, but they never quite became as important as hoped after the 19th century (although it probably helped in that it preserved the historic architecture of the towns).
Correction, the 4th has one county on the Mississippi, not the 3rd.
Zaun is a pretty good candidate. Did you hear that Jim Gibbons is entering the race? He is the ex-wrestling coach from Iowa State. Don’t know much about him, but appears that Boswell is sunk.
No, the only Jim Gibbons I know is the toxic RINO Governor of Nevada.
The recruiting success continues.
I think if the last 2 elections hadn’t been heavily rat years that Boswell would have lost already.
Interesting. Davenport, St. Louis of the North?
Having more people there would probably be bad for modern Iowa politics.
I remember my father telling me St. Louis’s big mistake was allowing the main rail lines to build their central hub at Chicago instead (back in the 19th century). Had they made it at St. Louis, it’s possible Chicago would’ve been a much smaller city (probably more like Detroit) and St. Louis would’ve been significantly larger (although it was coming close to a million in the city limits at one point, now only 1/3rd that today - but if the city and county had merged as they wanted, it’d be 1.4 million today, perhaps larger).
Anyway, the way IA was growing in the 19th century, the state leaders probably thought it would end up quite populous, like another IL or IN or OH. Of course, what ended up happening is that the booming farming areas went bust and some of those counties don’t have nearly as many people today as they did almost 120 years ago. I think they believed those 10-15k counties would balloon to 50k each with a flourishing county seat (and the larger towns, even more populous). Same thing happened to large swaths of the Plains States, such as Nebraska and the Dakotas... the counties grew to a decent size and then just went bust.
Sometimes you have examples where a given city got squeezed out between two others. St. Joseph, Missouri was really booming at the end of the 19th century, went to above 100,000 people (which was really large in those days, a major city). But it was also somewhat pressed by Omaha to the north and Kansas City to the south. It had that peak and then it started to peter out... and dwindled down to about 75-80k and just stood there, and stood there... and stood there. It’s still there now (76k as of 2008). But you go there and it’s just full of historic buildings from a century ago and very little new. They filmed “Paper Moon” there back in the ‘70s and it was set during the Depression, everything looked no different from that time period. I’m sure around 1900 they thought St. Joe would go to a half-million. Omaha would, so did KC, but poor St. Joe never did.
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