Brendon Miniter has a great piece in the WSJ Opinion Journal on Rep. Jim Nussle’s fight against government waste and abuse.
Rep. Nussle deserves praise for fighting against Washington’s culture of fraud and waste in government spending. By making a fight against wasteful spending a personal battle, Nussle is one of the few people in Washington willing to stand for accountability and responsibility in using our tax dollars.
If only there were more in Congress with the integrity and bravery of Rep. Nussle.
Jim Nussle is to northeast Iowa what Tom Daschle is to South Dakota. He’s way out of the mainstream of his district’s left-leaning politics, but is just popular enough to get re-elected every two years even though he is one of the biggest right-wing weasels in the entire Congress whose key votes act as sledgehammers to the knees of his heavily working-class constituency. However, Iowa is drifting more to the left all the time, and I can assure you that Bush and his war are about as popular in Nussle territory as AIDS is. The Dems need to find a strong candidate this year because it’s their best chance to force that snake Nussle back into his hole.
Again, the liberal spin machine responds to efforts to force government to account for the way it mishandles the people’s tax dollars with slurs and innuendos.
There’s a reason why Nussle won by a landslide of 14% in Iowa in the last election – because the voters of the 1st District are sick of seeing their tax dollars wasted away by the federal bureaucracy.
That "right-wing weasel" is the one standing up for working Americans while the radical leftists in the Democratic Party try to shackle them with more taxes, more regulation, and less opportunity and freedom.
For a six-term incumbent, a 14-point margin of victory is hardly impressive, especially considering his opponent was as invisible as Gutknecht’s opponent Andreasen in the 2002 campaign. For Nussle not to be winning at least 60 percent of the vote given his tenure and lack of strong opposition shows he’s very vulnerable, particularly with Iowa’s rabid opposition to the Bush war.
And despite the paradoxical support for Nussle in northeast Iowa, the area seems to be completely rejecting your rhetoric and his about the devastating effects of Democratic-controlled government….especially considering they’re being absolutely destroyed by Republican-controlled government.