Stridency stifling statecraft, former Iowa congressman says
Partisanship polluting the waters of compromise, Dave Nagle says
WATERLOO – Dave Nagle put a little local speed bump in the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.
In 1986, Nagle, a Waterloo attorney and former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, became the first Democrat in more than 50 years to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in what was then Iowa’s Third Congressional District.
For half that period it was the domain of H.R. Gross, President Reagan’s fiscally conservative colleague from his broadcast days at WHO radio in Des Moines. Like-minded state lawmaker Charles Grassley succeeded Gross in the seat prior to his election to the Senate.
Nagle’s historic win would definitely be an exception now on a statewide level. Democrats hold no seats in Iowa’s congressional delegation. In fact, they hold only a third of the seats in the Iowa Legislature, have lost the last four gubernatorial elections and hold only one elected post in the executive branch of state government. Leadership was more politically balanced between the parties in Iowa in the ‘80s.
Nagle doesn’t believe it’ll be another half century before another Iowa Democrat goes to Washington, or before the state’s rather reddish political shade becomes more purple again.
Those things are cyclical, he says. But he says the state and the nation has lost something more critical than any political boxscore would reflect.
We’ve lost, or forgotten, the ability to compromise, he says.
“Moderation has been lost to extremists, and rigidity of political thought has taken hold,” Nagle said. “We’ve allowed the wings of both parties to take control, and forgotten the principal goal should be to solve problems, irrespective of the method.
“We’re into litmus tests in which the parties are incapable of finding common ground,” Nagle said. “Worse than that, people who attempt to bridge the gaps are treated with mistrust in their own parties.”
For example, he said, “It used be the key to passage of legislation in either the House of the Senate of the Congress of the United States was to find a member of the opposite party to co-sponsor the legislation. Now that’s a kiss of death for both proponents.”
Landmark legislation of the past 70 years, such as the interstate highway system during President Eisenhower’s administration in the 1950s, civil rights legislation in the 1960s and the Job Training Partnership Act of the 1980s, all had champions on both sides of the aisle, Nagle noted.
“Those kind of legislative accomplishments are pretty damn rare” today, Nagle said. “That’s why I was encouraged with the extension of the national debt ceiling,” engineered through negotiation among Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Senate Democratic leadership and President Biden’s administration.
“Everybody got something, nobody got everything,” Nagle said of the debt limit compromise. “And I thought, maybe we’re gong to see a new day. But that was a moment of sunshine in a pretty cloudy atmosphere.
“I think we’ve forgot our history,” Nagle said. He believes that institutional memory of how legislation is forged has faded. He said he recently read that history and English are the two classes most frequently dropped by college students.
“How do you know where to go if you don’t know how you got there?” he said. “If you forget the history of compromise and what’s been accomplished with moderation, then you think your stridency is appropriate to the time. It isn’t.”
Compromise “is how we got here” and progressed as a society, Nagle said. “People say, ‘Ahhh, he’s a politician; he speaks out of both sides of his mouth.’ And sometimes that’s true. But it’s also because ‘he’ (or she) understands the problem from both sides’ perception. I regard being a politician as a a badge of honor. We need better politicians. Tempered politicians.
“What’s the answer? Colorado. Colorado is red but they went blue. And they went blue with moderates, not with extremists.” In Colorado, Democrats picked up a House seat and held the governorship and a Senate seat in the 2022 elections. Incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a member of the Freedom Caucus, won a second term by less than 600 votes out of more than 300,000 cast. The state picked up a House seat following the 2020 census.
Nagle, who served three terms in Congress, would have been considered a centrist by today’s standards. He worked on local economic issues like the Avenue of the Saints, a four-lane thoroughfare from St. Louis to St. Paul, Minn. that passed through a large portion of his district. It was a project also supported by his Republican neighbor, Sen. Grassley, of nearby New Hartford in Butler County a few miles west of Waterloo-Cedar Falls.
On a national level, in the late ‘80s Nagle co-sponsored a legislative amendment with ultraconservative hawk U.S. Rep Bob Dornan of California to include in arms control talks a ban on rapid, low-flying nuclear missiles. It would have threatened bomber bases and capabilities, and bombers were manufactured in Dornan’s district. It also would have drastically cut the time for nuclear missiles to reach their targets, narrowing the window of time in which to deter a nuclear holocaust.
“He wanted to maintain the viability of bombers as a defense,” Nagle said. “I wanted to maintain the viability of bombers as a defense because it was a hair trigger” to develop the rapid low-flying missiles.
“Sometimes you have to look at our most extreme opponent to find a solution: What is driving their concern?” Nagle said. “Try to find the thing that most concerns the person on the opposite side of the aisle from you, and try to meet their concern and yours at the same time. Strident political rhetoric does not lend itself to compromise.”
Also, Nagle said, the flow of information has picked up, along with the tenor of its presentation. “I don’t know we’ve lost our capacity to absorb it,” he said, but added, “I think the media hurts us because they hype it so much. Every event is ‘the turning point.’ ”
As an example, he said, “I’m going to defend President Trump,” even though he described him as a “a fraud” and “a bully.”
”Every network with the exception of Fox is now running stories with ‘experts’ speculating how soon the former president will be convicted, and of what. The whole concept of fair trial has been obliterated with pre-trial publicity,” Nagle said. “I think the competitiveness of journalism has contributed to it.
“The good news is, with the stridency with which we’re approaching things, the temperature has to drop,” Nagle said. “If the president (Biden) is re-elected and his second term is as successful as his first term, we may find what Colorado had found, and that is, that moderates can prevail.”
Nagle, who turned 80 this past April, was elected to the Iowa Democratic Party Hall of Fame in 2011. He is a columnist and still practices law in Waterloo.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription .
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