The song remains the same

Barring a miraculous turn of events, Kim Reynolds is going to win her first elected term as governor in November and continue to do most of the things she’s doing now, and the Democrats are going to wonder aloud why they always manage to squander golden opportunities and find new ways to lose. Well, it doesn’t take a political scientist to solve that equation.
           
As almost every left-leaning columnist from Davenport to Sioux City has already pointed out, it may be hypocritical that Reynolds and Company are attacking Fred Hubbell for his wealth while adhering to the principles of a movement that worships at the alters of free markets and supply side economics. But isn’t it equally confounding that a party railing against the evils of income inequality while advocating for fairer taxation and social services is running the ultimate Iowa aristocrat primarily because he raised the most money and aired more TV ads than any of his challengers?
           
We’re living through a direct reenactment of the 2012 presidential election, but in this case, Hubbell is Mitt Romney. He hasn’t released his tax returns yet, and if/when he does, we’ll likely learn what should be obvious: rich people—whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, and regardless of their public positions—are really good at accounting tricks and accumulate most of their wealth through investment earnings taxed at a much lower rate than regular wages. Again, if this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the exact same line of criticism Obama Democrats used against Romney.
           
Reynolds herself has seemingly moved farther and farther to the right by the week, but she avoids rocking the boat and prefers signing controversial laws to tweeting about them. The returns she’s made available reveal a relatively blasé middle class lifestyle before she ascended to the lieutenant governor’s office, and even her recent attempts to restrict media access are unlikely to cause much of a stir outside of newspaper opinion pages, the liberal Des Moines blogosphere and non-Sinclair TV broadcasts.
           
The governor isn’t dumb. She’s realizing that antagonizing the press—albeit without openly saying as much—is absolutely a winning strategy, and the syndicated editorials condemning Donald Trump for his “enemy of the people” comments aren’t really achieving anything.
 
In a high stakes election, nothing is off-limits, and although she can’t seem to cite much beyond that one ranking we were all obsessed with for a week as proof of her success, Reynolds can rest assured that every sentient resident of this state will know Hubbell personally closed down Younkers, stole all of his slacks without paying for them even though they were already 40 percent off and gave himself a $50 million raise in the process by the time the polls close in three months.
 
And Hubbell, no matter what he says from here on out, may never shake the perception that he’s an out-of-touch oligarch who can’t possibly empathize with the struggles of everyday serfs living paycheck to paycheck.
 
While organized labor launches a comeback in deep red states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona and Missouri—where, just last week, voters decisively shot down a statewide right to work law at the polls—Iowa Democrats have chosen to make a man who’s spent his entire adult life in the executive’s chair the face of their bid to turn the tables against an opposition they frequently label corporatist, greedy and exploitative.  
 
Two years removed from the great Hillary Clinton debacle of 2016, Hubbell’s inevitable loss will induce a new wave of head scratching, soul searching and internal debating on how to right the ship, and in four years, the party will put up another boring warm body pleading for a return to moderation against Reynolds while the national media clamors to know whether she’ll join Joni Ernst to create the first all-Iowa, all-female presidential ticket in history.
 
What’s that old saying about the definition of insanity?