Stateside With Rosalea Barker
Exclusion Tactics?
The Gannett corporation—owner of 23 television stations and publisher of more than a thousand newspapers, including Air
Force Times, Army Times, the Defense News, Federal Times, Marine Corps Times, Navy Times, and 23 daily newspapers across
the country, including USAToday—is the owner of the Des Moines Register, which has come under heavy criticism for
excluding Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel from last week’s Democratic debate in Iowa.
Both candidates are strongly against the military-industrial lobbyists’ ability to drive the political and foreign
policy agenda in Washington. According to USAToday, the Des Moines Register’s standards for participation in the debate
included “at least 1 percent in its statewide poll and an office and paid staff in Iowa.” A Republican candidate who has
not campaigned much in Iowa, Alan Keyes, qualified for the Republican debate on those criteria.
Both debates are accessible on the web from the Iowa Public Television web page here:
Kucinich met the 1 percent threshold, but his campaign is run from a home office rather than a storefront, the
traditional venue for campaign headquarters. The Register’s editor, Carolyn Washburn, reportedly told the Kucinich
campaign that, "It was our determination that a person working out of his home did not meet our criteria for a campaign
office and full-time paid staff in Iowa."
Here are the full criteria, annotated by Jean Hay Bright, a diarist on DailyKos, and unsuccessful Democratic candidate
for the US Senate seat for Maine in the 2006 election (for Kiwi readers, “check” is US English for “tick”):
Eligible Participants for Des Moines Register Debates will include Presidential Candidates who:
1. Have filed an FEC Form F-2, "Statement of Candidacy," with the Federal Election Commission; (CHECK)
2. Have publicly announced an intention to run for the nomination of the Republican or the Democratic Party for
President of the United States; (CHECK)
3. Have employed at least one paid campaign staff representative to perform full-time campaign duties in the State of
Iowa on behalf of the candidate since at least October 1, 2007. (CHECK – Kucinich has had a full-time staffer – an Iowa
resident – on board since April)
4. With at least 1% in the Des Moines Register October, 2007, Iowa Poll (CHECK)
5. And lastly, have a Campaign Office inside the State of Iowa as of October 1, 2007 (to which the Kucinich campaign
says CHECK, but the Des Moines Register says CHECK-OUT)
In the week before the debate, Hay Bright writes, the Des Moines Register put out a press release saying that six of the
eight Democratic candidates for President had "accepted invitations" to the debate.
“What the Des Moines Register press release should have said,” writes Hay Bright, “is that they offered invitations to
this debate to only six of the eight nationally recognized Democratic presidential candidates and that all six who were
invited accepted. The way they turned that phrase in that news article, the implication is that Dennis Kucinich did not
accept the invitation they offered to him.”
An article headlined “Why Kucinich isn’t in the Democratic debate” published at www.desmoinesregister.com on the day before the debate stated: “Six Democratic candidates for president will take the stage at 1 p.m. Thursday in
the Des Moines Register’s second presidential debate” and went on to list who they were and what the criteria for
selection had been. “Neither Dennis Kucinich nor Mike Gravel had a campaign office in Iowa by the Oct. 1 deadline,
according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Gravel also did not have any paid staff in the state by
the deadline.”
The article went on to say that the debate could be watched on Iowa Public Television, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel,
C-SPAN 3, via web cast at DesMoinesRegister.com and on radio via XM Radio POTUS Channel 150, C-SPAN Radio and Fox News
Radio.
The quarterly reports required to be filed with the FEC by candidates’ election committees can be found at http://www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/srssea.shtml) They are not Excel files, so can only be viewed as HTML images one page at a time, or as PDFs of the images, which
means that searching for the word “rent”—how else could you tell from the report what expenditure item relates to having
an office?—is a very time-consuming business, let alone the time it takes to download multi-megabyte-sized PDF
documents, but the Des Moines Register no doubt has the resources to do so and didn’t find anything that showed Kucinich
rented an office in Iowa.
On the other hand, I can’t see anything in Republican candidate Alan Keyes’ very short October quarterly report to the
FEC that he had paid any money to rent an office:
http://images.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?_27990768940+0. (Pages 10–13 list his disbursements.) Yet he was included in the Republican debate.
The one person who might conceivably be a Keyes staffer lists a PO Box in Lohr, Iowa, as her address and was paid $500
for “travel” and $2000 for “consulting” in September. That same PO Box is the address of a gentleman who was paid $500
for “computer consulting”. By contrast, Kucinich’s paid staff—the man working from his home office—is listed as “field
staff” and was paid $1500 twice a month.
Even if I am missing something from my reading of those FEC filings, it is difficult to see how participation in a
nationally broadcast debate can justifiably be limited to only those who rent office space in the state from which the
broadcasts originate, especially in an age where candidates—as Hillary Clinton did—launch their campaigns from the
comfort of their own living rooms via the Internet, and so much organizing and fundraising is done using the Web and
email.
Resources about Kucinich:
For a recent, lengthy, negative article about Kucinich from an online news source in Cleveland, Ohio, which he
represents in Congress, see here:
http://www.clevescene.com/2007-12-05/news/the-king-of-spin/1 and for a positive view from a group of supporters on what he offers the presidency, watch a take-off of a popular
early American TV show, Leave it to Beaver, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVXI6QzLwDM
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rosalea.barker
--PEACE—