Two Iowans who’re the sons of Iowa politicians who loomed large in Iowa’s political limelight a few years ago are now signing on to presidential campaigns.
Dusky Terry is taking a job with Governor Tom Vilsack’s Heatland PAC. Terry is the son of Dixon Terry — a well-known farm activist during the farm crisis who organized the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition and was a leader in Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign in Iowa. (Dixon Terry died in 1989 when he was struck by lightning while baling hay.) Dusky Terry, as you may know, had worked on Governor Vilsack’s staff and Vilsack endorsed Dusky Terry’s run to be Iowa’s next Secretary of Agriculture. Terry lost to Denise O’Brien in the primary earlier this month.
Eric Marcus Branstad is taking a job working the Iowa ropes for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. He is the oldest youngest son of former Iowa Governor Terry Branstad — Iowa’s longest-serving governor who played a key role in Bob Dole’s Iowa campaign back in 1996. Eric Branstad has worked behind the scenes in the past two election cycles, for example heading up the GOP’s Scott County area get-out-the-vote campaign in 2004. (See comment below.)
I saw former Governor Branstad today at a news conference at Des Moines University. He’s the one who told me about his son’s new role for Frist. The elder Branstad also gave me and another reporter a tour of the Des Moines University student center and I told him the place now looks like a campus. Branstad said he hears that comment a lot. I asked Governor Branstad if he had granted bonuses to state workers with the same size and frequency that current Governor Vilsack has over the past two years (as outlined in a state report issued earlier this month) and I’m going to quit typing this post now to go write that story.
About O.Kay Henderson
Kay is a founding member of the Radio Iowa network newsroom. In 1994, she became the network’s news director. She’s a featured reporter and commentator on Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press,” and the 2002 recipient of the Shelley Award.
Just got this email from ERIC Branstad: “A friend of mine notified me that I was on your blog that I took a job with volpac. It was actually my brother Marcus who took the job with volpac. Just thought you would want to know.”
I swear Governor Branstad said Eric, not Marcus. I didn’t even know Marcus was in the political biz. I do recall, however, that my mother sometimes called me Bill instead of Kay. Bill is my closest sibling. So parents deserve some leeway when referencing their children.
Understand how parents can get the name wrong when there’s more than one child. I remember my mother going through the list until she got to the right name when she was reading one of us the riot act. Unfortunately, I only have one child and have no good excuse for my lapses. Sigh. 8>)