Category Archives: Chamber Annual Dinner

In anticipation of the Chamber’s Annual Dinner coming up on September 28th and the speculation related to the political landscape prior to the upcoming mid-term elections, the Chamber staff was itching to hear what our keynote speakers, John Heilemann & Mark Halperin, would have to say.  We enlisted our own political “expert,” Chris McGowan, to ask a few questions and get a sneak peak of what was to come in their keynote address.

Chris McGowan: Your non-fiction work, Game Change, became an instant best seller, were you surprised by the book’s success?

John Heilemann & Mark Halperin: Working on the book was a source of great pleasure for us — the richest, deepest, most satisfying reporting that either of us had ever done. When we finished, we had a fair level of confidence that we’d done what we set out to do: convey the high human drama of this historic campaign, showing how the candidates and their spouses experienced what we (and they) considered the presidential race of a lifetime. But predicting any degree of commercial success is a sucker’s game. And we certainly had no idea that the book would take off in the way that it did, reaching so many people outside the realm of political insiders. That was a surprise, and a source of enormous satisfaction for both of us, to be sure.

CM: We are less than eight weeks from the 2010 midterm elections and it appears that the political climate has shifted dramatically since the historic 2008 Presidential race you covered in Game Change, are you surprised that the pendulum has swung so quickly?

JH/MH: American politics has been characterized by radical instability during most of our journalistic careers. So we had no expectations that President Obama’s first term in office would be an easy ride. At the same time, like Obama himself, neither of us would have predicted that his administration would encounter such difficulty in achieving what was in many ways candidate Obama’s central promise: to ease the bitter partisan divisions that marked the terms of his two immediate predecessors. During Bill Clinton’s time in office, both of us believed that we would never see a president more polarizing than him — and then along came George W. Bush, who inspired even greater polarization than Clinton. Now Obama has surpassed them both on that score. People of different ideological dispositions have different views about whose fault that is. But the fact of it is indisputable, and surprising, and depressing.

CM: Recognizing that the only poll that counts is the one taken on election day, which party do you believe will control the House of Representatives and the Senate after this election?

JH/MH: Probably the Republicans and probably the Democrats, respectively — but neither of us would want to bet the mortgage money on that outcome.

CM: You covered President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton extensively in Game Change, do you believe that there is any chance that Clinton will challenge the incumbent President for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 2012 as Senator Kennedy did to President Carter in 1980?

JH/MH: We believe the chance of that happening is very close to zero — for reasons we will be explaining in our talk on September 28.

CM: A handful of Republican Presidential aspirants have already begun to visit Iowa in anticipation of the 2012 Iowa Caucuses, do you have any thoughts on who the early favorites are, who might eventually emerge with the Republican nomination?

JH/MH: Traditionally, the GOP is the party of primogeniture — tending to award its nomination to the person whose “turn” it is in the collective judgment of the Republican elite and electorate. By that reasoning, Mitt Romney (due to his second place finish to John McCain in 2008) or Sarah Palin (due to her position as McCain’s running mate) would seem to have the best claim to being next in line. But the field is taking shape remarkably slowly, especially in light of the president’s clear and growing vulnerabilities, and we expect a number of significant players in the party who are currently laying low to emerge as contestants in the year ahead. We have some guesses about who those people might be, which we’ll also share on the 28th. But for now, suffice it to say that never in our respective histories covering presidential politics has the race for the Republican nomination been more wide open than it is shaping up to be in 2012.

More insight will definitely be revealed at the Annual Dinner – it will be a night you won’t want to miss.  Reservations can still be made by calling the Chamber at (712) 255-7903 or visiting the website.

Hope to see you there!

Nicole Thompson

Events & Communications Specialist