Infamy: Coleen Rowley
It was October 2004. Like the much of the country, I was eating, drinking, and breathing the presidential election. But I hadn’t given two seconds’ thought to the U.S. House race. That is, until I saw the first television ad for the race, one from the Teresa Daly campaign. It featured her, if I recall correctly, blathering about internet porn — she was probably not quite as single-minded as my memory would have me believe, but that’s all I recall her talking about. To top that off, Daly had virtually no political experience to speak of.
So one wouldn’t think the second district DFL could do any worse, right? Wrong: meet Coleen Rowley, this year’s godawful nominee. Rowley gained national attention when Time hailed her as one of their persons of the year for blowing the whistle on 9/11-related FBI ignorance. And today she’s still coasting off that, mindlessly and limitlessly expressing her view on the the “ethics of congress.”
But really, this doesn’t boil down to much. It doesn’t take an advanced ethicist to discern that elements of the Mark Foley scandal were unethical. Rowley is able to slap her shiny “unethical sticker on about anything that crosses her path, but when forced to say what she might actually do differently, one hears little more than a flurry “uh” and “um.”
And this indecisiveness extends to the issues as well. Daly had this problem when the only memorable stance she took was on internet porn — I wish I could say this much for Rowley. Her website professes slightly better than she does in person stances, but it still contains sentences like, “When asked whether I am ‘pro-choice’ or ‘pro-life,’ I respond that I am pro-common sense.” As bold as that statement is, I’m left craving some actual opinions.
You might think I’m being kind of hard on Coleen. About a week ago, I would have agreed. That was until I heard this gem of enlightenment. Listening to it is a difficult experience, hearing a woman you thought could have been a maverick of change instead dodging as many questions as possible while spewing out seemingly endless attacks on her Republican opponent, John Kline.
And yet, the Right couldn’t have picked a better adversary: a woman frequently described as having “a snowball’s chance in hell” and who, at the end of the day, is a Republican in a Democrat’s clothes.
Resources and other Propaganda
- Second district election results from 2000, 2002, and 2004.
- Red Wing attorney Carol Overland’s take on Rowley
- Article on Rowley from Mother Jones magazine
- City Pages article on the 2004 2nd district campaigns