Krause stumps for Grassley's seat at fair

Former state Rep. Bob Krause (D-Fairfield), left, who intends to run against U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, listened as Barb Leistad made a point during a visit Saturday at the Clay County Democrats' booth on the Clay County fairgrounds. (Photo by Kris Todd) [Order this photo]

The informed, feisty Krause publicly thanked U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, whose political career commenced in 1958, for his comments made earlier this year which encouraged AIG executives who accepted lavish bonuses to resign or kill themselves. He also thanked the 75-year-old Grassley for encouraging people in July to get a job with the federal government if they desired good health care insurance. Krause also thanked Grassley for his statements about the government "pulling the plug on grandma" in August.

"It's a journey; it's not a destination," he said of the race for Grassley's seat, which began for him in March. "But since then, Senator Grassley has become my best friend. He keeps making mistakes. And whenever he makes a mistake, his popularity goes down a little bit and my name visibility goes up a little bit. Right now, he's at 54 percent popularity -- which is probably his lowest popularity since he was first elected in 1980. And, he seems to be making these mistakes at the rate of about one every month to two months. So, if we check our clocks, between Oct. 1 and Oct. 15, I'm predicting another comment that will create interest in the campaign."

"I see him being significantly weaker than he was," Krause continued. "I think that in the forest, even the greatest oak trees eventually fall to the ground. And I think it's about that time. I think that the winds they are a changing."

While he noted the Iowa conservative's estimated $4 - $9 million in the bank and his $10,000 raised to date and $3,000 in the bank, Krause noted how the Internet has changed the way of campaigning for politicians.

"You get behind the ads and look at what you really have," he said of Grassley. "You don't have a record that many Democrats would vote for. You don't have a record that many women would vote for. You don't have a record that many veterans would vote for. And, you don't have a record that many elderly would vote for."

Born in Algona and raised on a farm near Fenton, Krause was elected as a 22-year-old to serve in the Iowa General Assembly in 1972. From 1973 through 1979, he served as a state legislator who represented Palo Alto, Kossuth, Humboldt, Pocahontas and Hancock counties. During this time, Krause served as chairman of the Iowa House Transportation Committee for four years. The former state legislator said one of the things he is most proud of during that time period was the passage of legislation that allowed for the establishment of Iowa's coordinated regional transit systems, which became a model for the Federal Transit Administration.

After Krause left the Iowa Legislature, he received an appointment with the Carter administration as regional head of the U.S. Department of Transportation, in which he served as field spokesperson during the Rock Island and Milwaukee Railroad bankruptcies.

Krause also taught at Iowa State University, served with the Department of Transportation, worked for the Council of State Governments in Lexington, Ky., ran a think tank on transportation policy, wrote five books on transportation matters, and served as manager of intergovernmental affairs in Palm Beach County, Fla.

"I knew all about hanging chads before they became popular," he recalled with a chuckle.

Krause, who returned to Iowa in the fall of 1992, married Vicky, a Polynesian woman from New Zealand in 2007, two years after both lost their partners to cancer. Besides completing 28 years of military service, Krause also served as a former Waterloo school board member. But it wasn't until his most recent role as chairman of the Iowa Democratic Veterans' Caucus that Krause began researching how different legislators have voted in regard to American veterans. Grassley, Krause reported while at the fair, had a 62 percent negative voting record in this specific area.

"Which is really high for an incumbent, especially a Republican who says, 'I support the veterans,'" he said. "During the global war on terrorism, he chaired the Senate Finance Committee and capped veterans' health care funding right when it was ramping up and thousands of new veterans were pouring into the system with war wounds, PTSD and traumatic brain injuries and the VA didn't have any money to deal with it. What occurred because of that was Walter Reed. And that was followed by vision after vision of how poor the health care system had become for veterans, which bothered me. And then, Grassley sent out a press release saying that he sponsored the anti-flag burning amendment, which made me think, 'How can this guy wrap himself in the flag and still zing these veterans that are out there putting the flag up the flagpole every day?' The veterans issue was one of the main reasons I decided to run."

Next, Krause indicated a concern of his with the senator's stance on equal pay for equal work. He cited Grassley's vote against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which was the first bill placed on President Obama's desk.

"In his history of legislating, he has voted against equal pay for equal work in various aspects. So, he's got a pretty strong record of being against equal pay for equal work," Krause said. "The last time I counted, there were a lot of women in the workplace, and I think those women should be aware that although Sen. Grassley comes across as a very nice person, and he is a nice person I'm sure, he does not represent their issues. He will walk to the middle, talk and then he will go back and he will vote wrong."

In terms of Iowa's elderly residents, Krause mentioned Grassley's being in the middle of the Part D prescription drug formula in 2005, when he served as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Before its enactment, the Medicaid program was legally authorized to negotiate the price of drugs with drug companies.

"When they created Part D on prescription drugs, they moved that to Medicare -- one of the prime reasons being is that Medicare cannot negotiate for the price of drugs. The loss of this power to negotiate has cost our country billions of dollars. Senator Grassley ... created a situation that literally contributed years to the acceleration of the drain of our Medicare funds by preventing Medicare for negotiating drug costs," Krause said.

The U.S. Senate hopeful then transitioned to the Obama health care reform currently being discussed nationwide. As recently as Aug. 10, which was before negotiations with the president ended, Grassley was sending out fundraising letters stating that he was "doing this to sabotage the health care legislation, and that he was opposed to anything that Obama did," Krause said.

"So, he was negotiating as a U.S. Senator not in good faith. When he was down in Winterset around mid-August, he said that the legislation was intended to pull the plug on granny -- and he knew that it wasn't intended to pull the plug on granny, that it was end-of-life counseling. ... He voted for something just like that in 2003," Krause said. "Yet, he split and saw a short-term political gain, not thinking about the TV cameras rolling, and tried to make a political statement about it. I think the Charles Grassley that many people in northwest Iowa have admired and appreciated is not quite the Sen. Grassley today that they admired and appreciated then."

The potential political candidate, meanwhile, said his platform strongly supports Obama's proposed public option.

"I do think the public option is a very strong selling point because of its increased creation of competition," Krause said, listing Wellmark's current 70 percent and United's 10 percent market share in Iowa. As he then delved into his life and campaign philosophies, he said this option should not be defined as "socialism," as both the Medicare and Social Security programs were when they began.

"A lot of the baseline programs we have that create the social safety net have been accused of being socialism in the past. But once they get in, people realize the incredible economic benefit that comes to the entire society," he said. "I believe that the government and the people do have a social contract on certain things that we have to lift each other up. Government is for both the rich and the poor. We need both in society."

Krause is also advocating for the implementation of new national income policies.

"If we address the job and income situations here in America, we address a lot of the socioeconomic problems that we have in the classroom and in the courtroom. That's where we have to start," he said. As Krause indicated the average income has continued to rise, the median U.S. income is currently at its lowest since 1997.

"We need to turn that around, and we need to do it with adjustments to the minimum wage," Krause said. "We need to do it with looking at what we are doing to our manufacturing economy that has been the bastion of good jobs in our society for many years. ... I advocate a national review of all sectors of manufacturing to determine what needs to be brought back home because we have to have a strong industrial base if we are going to maintain our role as leaders in the world."