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A red scare in the special election for Iowa House District 37
In a bipartisan display of nationalist fearmongering, each party accused the opposing candidate of being a stooge for Chinese communists.
Adam Sullivan
Sep. 20, 2021 12:24 pm
The red menace of China was a top issue in the recent special Iowa House election, for an office that has basically no influence over U.S. foreign policy.
Republican Mike Bousselot narrowly defeated Democrat Andrea Phillips last week in House District 37, made up of suburban and rural precincts north of Des Moines. In a bipartisan display of nationalist fearmongering, each party accused the opposing candidate of being a stooge for Chinese communists.
It was not exactly a substantive, issues-based election.
It started with Bousselot’s attack ad against Phillips, which claimed she “worked closely with the Chinese government, facilitating deals that outsource our jobs to China.” It’s a repeat, almost verbatim, of an anti-Phillips ad during her 2020 campaign for Iowa House.
Phillips had several jobs in China from 1999 to 2009, according to her public LinkedIn page. Given the scope of state power in China, she surely had some interactions with government officials. Of course, that does not make her an agent of the Chinese Communist Party.
Conservatives also pointed out Phillips’ past social media posts where she apparently had a small statue of Mao Zedong, the totalitarian former leader of China. It is a little bit weird but seems more like kitsch than a political idol.
Iowa Democrats fired back, trying to draw their own lines between the Republican candidate and communist China. Bousselot served as chief of staff to former Gov. Terry Branstad, who went on to work as U.S. ambassador to China under Donald Trump.
The party shared a photo online of Bousselot and Branstad celebrating Branstad’s confirmation as ambassador to China.
Days before the election, Amber Gustafson, a Democrat and leader of a political action committee, published a series of Twitter posts linking Branstad to pandemic mismanagement and genocide by the Chinese government. She did not mention Bousselot, but the implication was clear.
“Have we ever talked about @TerryBranstad and his long relationship with Communist leader Xi Jinping?” Gustafson wrote in a since deleted tweet. “ … TB cultivated a close relationship with the leaders of the Communist Party.”
Further, Democrats complained that Bousselot falsely accused her of wanting to defund police. Phillips — like all prominent Iowa Democrats — supports sustaining and increasing exorbitant police budgets.
Democrats also tried to spin up a conspiracy theory that Bousselot had a “fake baby” after he and his wife were shown holding his goddaughter in an ad. As a childless adult, I take exception to the idea that childless adults can’t care for and take pictures with the children in our lives.
Between China, defunding police and the “fake baby,” the losing candidate blamed the results on misinformation. “How embarrassing to have to lie to win,” Phillips wrote on Twitter the day after the election.
It was not exactly a substantive, issues-based election.
It’s not hard to get Americans riled up against a foreign specter, inevitably exaggerating the strength and sophistication of the adversary. Last century it was the Soviet Union. In recent memory, Donald Trump did it with China and Democrats did it with Russia.
The Chinese government is really bad. It’s even more brutal and belligerent than the American government, which I am no fan of.
But the Chinese people are not our enemies. For our sake and theirs, the United States must engage in trade and diplomacy with China, the second largest economy in the world. That’s the important work both Phillips and Bousselot’s old boss Branstad spent part of their careers doing.
“When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”
Special election results don’t really tell us anything besides who won. But campaigns leading up to special elections can tell us a lot. When it’s the only show in town on a Tuesday in September of an off year, it earns the attention and resources of political parties and advocacy groups. It tells us, based on their messaging, what the partisan elites are thinking.
Based on the House District 37 campaign, the state of partisan politics in Iowa is very stupid.
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