Okay, I’m trying to be clever again. I really do. Let me try to explain.
I was more of the anti-Democrat candidate.
As a child I remember asking my parents in the kitchen one day what we were. I knew we were American, Catholic, but were we Democrat or Republican? This was during Nixon, Kennedy, I think, but that would put me in kindergarten. Well, maybe kids talked about those things then. Anyway, we were Democrats, I learned.
As a protester in the 1980s in Omaha I despised the Democratic Party. Actually, I also despised other protesters, the ones who did not “risk all”, go to jail, kept their liberal ideas and their lives intact, while I was losing mine.
Anyway, I lost my mind in prison. We left Omaha, came to Iowa. One reason was that Ruth and I wanted to find a good, nice place to raise our two children. Well, we went to Minnesota for that first, then Iowa. And for many years I did mostly nothing as far as protesting. I was a stay at home dad, trying to write novels, and had an early morning paper route. I would read about the local congressman and one day I thought, I can do this.
See, this is an overwhelmingly Republican district, so not many Democrats even want to run. I thought that by running, getting on the ballot, I could get the things that I thought were important on the table.
And so, I need to start cutting these answers down, that’s what I did. I got on the ballot and tried to talk about prisons, military, immigration, which I saw as the most important things. The Democratic Party did not embrace me, not at all. I think I embarrassed them. At least, I hope I did. They did and still do wish to put their ear out the window to find out what others are thinking and talking about and then make that their issues, rather than searching their hearts and making that their issue.
When I first ran, well, my mother had just died, I had some money from that, and I used part of it to buy a full-page, back cover, full-color ad on Easter Sunday in the Sioux City Journal. It said something like, Iowa’s Democrats say, shut down the 185th [Iowa’s National Guard unit in Sioux City], kill the death penalty, welcome Mexicans, shut down prisons.
That’s what I thought Democrats should say, so I said it for them.
I was a registered Democrat, still am, and my campaign was a model for what a Democratic campaign should be, that was my belief.
Also, I felt strongly that my whole campaign was a model for American democracy. I was very much a nobody, someone who got up off the couch and tried to run for Congress.
I wrote about it in my novel, “Joe Coffee’s Revolution.”"
3. What would you say to those who might assert that you hold an “anti-American” viewpoint simply because you have an axe to grind against the federal criminal justice system?
"Great questions by the way. I love ‘em.
Yes, I do. I have an anti-this neighborhood out my window viewpoint.
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