As others see it: Silly season starts early in Iowa

Talk about it

This is just silly.

The campaigns of Chet Culver and Terry Branstad are fighting over which party raised the governor’s salary more since 1982.

A day after Gov. Chet Culver’s re-election campaign lobbed an ad attacking former Gov. Terry Branstad for his eight pay raises in 16 years as governor, the four-term Republican’s campaign cried “Fault.”

It claimed the documents the Culver campaign used to support its attack actually said the governor didn’t seek the raise. It said the headline on the Des Moines Register article cited by the Culver campaign was “Branstad wants no raise, might veto others’ raises.”

“Double fault,” the Culver campaign responded, pointing out the Branstad campaign was reading the wrong 27-year-old newspaper story. ...

Time out, kids:

Fact: It takes two branches of government to get a budget with pay raises approved.

Fact: The governor’s salary apparently has increased by another $25,000 under the administrations of two Democratic governors, Tom Vilsack and Culver.

Fact. At least some of these pay raises were approved when each party controlled the opposite branch of government. Branstad entered office with a Democratic Legislature and Vilsack entered office with a Republican one.

Fact: The governor’s salary increased 75 percent over Branstad’s 16 years as governor. But the Democrats didn’t exactly put a cork in the pay raise bottle as the salary increased another 18 percent under the 12 years of the Vilsack and Culver administrations. ...

So, Chet, Terry ..stop calling each other poo-poo heads and focus on real issues like the economy, jobs, taxes and education. ...

Tags: opinion, editorials, iowa, governor, political, bramstad, culver