Kathie’s Big Debut

Kathie Obradivich, the new political columnist at the Des Moines Register, penned her first column on Sunday. In it, she asked for political candidates to “show us your vision.”

If this is the type of columns she is going to write, I probably will not even go online to read them. This article was nothing more than the ramblings we have all grown accustomed to on in the Register editorial page.

Does anyone else think it’s odd for a newspaper columnist to chastise candidates for not being able to cast a vision when the political reporters for the same paper consistently ask our candidates the same useless questions over and over again? How many more times do our candidates need to be asked about the Democrats’ registered voter advantage, how gay marriage will affect the campaign, or about the rift between the moderates and conservatives? Kathie, if you want vision from political candidates, tell your co-workers to ask better questions and do a better job reporting.

I think you can already get a sense of the vision that Chris Rants and Bob Vander Plaats have for the state. You just need to actually listen to them speak. It’s not a problem with the candidates. It’s a problem with our media.

I also thought it was laughable when Kathie pledged to ask each candidate for their vision for the state in less than fifty words. Is this some sort of 5th grade writing assignment? Why not 750 words? I mean, you used 977 words to talk about their lack of vision.

Kathie also wrote another column about her biases. Shocker, Kathie is about as middle of the road as you can get. Oh and she loves corn dogs, and the 20 year old abs of Ryan Reynolds. What, no romantic emails from Governor Sanford?

It is obvious that she has a long way to go before she reaches Yepsen-like status. To be honest with you, it might be impossible for anyone to fill his shoes, not because he was some great writer (he wasn’t), but because he ruled supreme while newspapers were the main source of information and political opinion. Those days are long gone, and Obradivich has to compete not only with the likes of Kay Henderson and James Lynch, but also bloggers like me and Todd “man crush” Dorman.

While we are talking about the Register, when they sent out the press release telling us that Obradivich was the new political columnist, they forgot to use the BCC function. It’s one thing for a blogger or no-name candidate to do that stuff, but the Des Moines Register? K’mon.

And you know that every time someone forgets to use the BCC field, some prick feels the need to hit reply all and tell everybody how unhappy they are about their email address being there for the entire world to spam. Since nobody had done that yet, I felt the need to weigh in for everybody and also include a link to my reaction about Kathie’s new position.

Good times…