Dancing around the issue of our time

Rob Sand in Storm Lake. Times Pilot Photo by Tom Foley

Rob Sand spent a lot more time talking open primaries and ranked-choice voting than he did water pollution or cancer during a packed town hall event in Storm Lake last week.

Who needs political parties? They’re just “private clubs” that keep the game dirty. Can’t we all just get along?

The crowd at Smokin’ Hereford ate it up. They’re hungry for some unity. They hate the acrimony. Love one another, the Norwegian Lutheran fisherman from Decorah implored. Applause. Who doesn’t love neighborly?

It seems to be working. Over 100 people in Sioux Center showed up. Seventy in Sanborn. This is the belly of the beast for a Democrat. But he is not so much a Democrat, Sand insists. You can’t sell that woke stuff in Sanborn. He wishes he could be independent. The two parties are no good, in his telling. They divide us.

Were it not for the Democratic Party, we would not have Social Security and Medicare. The Republicans have been trying to undo them for generations. Were it not for the Republican Party, we might still hold humans in slavery.

Political parties matter. They exist to joust in the battle of ideas, and to elect candidates. Iowa’s system works, if not to the satisfaction of minority Democrats.

Storm Lake is green with algae. Northwest Iowa is hot with cancer — hotter than anywhere. We got hogs and chickens up the wazoo but barely a drop to drink unless you, poor yeoman, pay through the nose. We hate to talk about it, but there is something in the air, and it does not smell like money.

Sen. Catelin Drey, who flipped a Trump district in Sioux City, says water, cancer and housing affordability are what she hears about. Her seat was vacated by a guy named Rocky De Witt who died from cancer. Drey, 38, was treated successfully for uterine cancer. The coincidence should be lost on no one.

Sand dwelled on unity at Sioux Center in his 100 Town Hall tour. Teacher Brock Lehman, a Republican and a cancer survivor, said he wished more people would get informed. Lehman told the Sioux County Radio reporter that he wished that Sand talked about cancer more.

“After what I’ve had to go through — the fear and the medical bills and all that stuff — what are we going to do to fix it?” Lehman said. “That’s one thing that I wish we had more time on, that he could have addressed more … That’s a conversation my wife and I have had. Is it safe to have our kids here? … Why is it that I have to buy a reverse osmosis water system? … Is that right for a human being?”

Sand has suggested investing $20 million into cancer research. He supports levying a fractional sales tax for water quality and natural resource conservation, as approved by voters in a Constitutional amendment in 2010. The legislature ignored the amendment. Sand wants more payments to farmers for conservation. He wants to reinstate funding for stream monitors. He endorses radon mitigation, and says we should not smoke and drink so much. Standard fare from a Democrat who announced another $9 million raised from just friends.

No socialism here, folks.

Sand does not talk about regulation. You don’t hear him preach mandatory stream buffers like they have just over the border from Decorah in Minnesota. We have so many hogs we lost track of how many. Sand’s opponent, Zach Lahn, says he aims to break up the corporate livestock consolidators. (Lahn also wants to exorcize Marxists from our public schools, so there’s that!)

Sand blanches at putting a blemish on corporate ag because it feeds him. You don’t go up against the Farm Bureau. Lahn, by the way, made his fortune (enough to fund his own campaign) working for the Koch Brothers fertilizer and politics empire.

Sand has come a long way. A year ago he did not want to discuss ag pollution. It has made its way into his stump speech. That’s progress. Still, he leads with trashing the two-party system. He says it is the issue of our time. Polls say he may have a lead of nine percentage points, so he obviously knows what he is doing.

Others must be misinformed if they think that a warming climate, toxic water and corporate consolidation are the real issues confronting Iowa in 2026. Creating open primaries does not cure the fact that we will have a hard time growing corn south of I-80 in 25 years because of too many 90-degree days in July. People don’t like to think about that.

You must take it on faith that Sand will put it at the top of his agenda. His mother would want him to. Lutherans want to be good stewards. That’s what Sand is selling. So far, people are buying it.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. His latest book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World, is available from Ice Cube Press. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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