Hillary Clinton knocks Joni Ernst for skipping ed board meetings
Source: Washington Post
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Wednesday knocked Iowa Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst for failing to meet with newspaper editorial boards in her state.
"You have a lot to be proud of in this state. You test your candidates," Clinton said during a campaign event for Democrat Bruce Braley. She added: "They have to be willing answer the tough questions, which Bruce has been willing to do and his opponent has not. It truly seems like it should be disqualifying in Iowa of all states to avoid answering questions."
Last week, Ernst, a state senator, canceled her meeting with state's biggest paper, the Des Moines Register. According to a campaign official, she did so because she believed the paper's editorial board had shown a bias against her in editorials over the past two months.
Rekha Basu, a Register columnist, wrote on Facebook that Ernst has "also begged off meetings with The Cedar Rapids Gazette and The Dubuque Telegraph-Herald."
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/10/29/hillary-clinton-knocks-joni-ernst-for-skipping-ed-board-meetings/
Joni Ernst's decision to cancel meeting the Iowa's biggest newspapers perhaps reflects the new reality that Republicans can ignore independent local media and rely on corporate powered national and cable media to power their campaigns. Backed by millions in untraceable dark money, Republicans can sit pretty in a Fox News studio fielding soft balls because who actually reads newspapers these days?
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Early on in her campaign, Ernst attempted to impress the heavily agricultural state with an ad touting her expertise in castrating hogs, but she’d also like to cut gay people off at the knees. Iowa has had marriage equality for five years, thanks to a state Supreme Court ruling, but as a state senator she backed a constitutional amendment that would override that ruling; the effort to amend the state’s constitution, which requires approval by both lawmakers and voters, has stalled, however. She has also said the definition of marriage should be left up to the states, except of course if she has the opportunity to vote on an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriage nationwide. She has asserted that judges should recognize that laws “come from God” and make their rulings accordingly. And something that she’s tried to downplay in her campaign is her belief in conspiracy theories, but as recently as January she was railing against Agenda 21, an obscure United Nations community-planning initiative, saying it threatens citizens’ property rights and other freedoms. “We don’t want to see a further push with Agenda 21, where the Agenda 21 and the government [are] telling us that these are the urban centers that you will live in; these are the ways that you will travel to other urban centers,” she said at a Republican forum. “Agenda 21 encompasses so many different aspects of our lives that it’s taking away our individual liberties, our freedoms as United States citizens.” OK, not LGBT-related, but potentially enlightening about Ernst’s worldview. She and Democrat Bruce Braley are in a close race to succeed firebrand liberal Democrat Tom Harkin, a staunch LGBT ally who’s retiring after 30 years in the Senate.
