With the recent announcements that Brighton businessman Donn Janes of Tennessee, a successful software developer, and conservative activist Bradley Rees of Virginia have dropped out of their respective Republican primaries and will run as independent “Tea Party” candidates for seats targeted for takeover this autumn by the national GOP, the list of independent congressional candidates in this year’s mid-term elections continues to grow.
The latest independent to announce his candidacy for Congress is Richard B. Iott, the former president and CEO of Seaway Food Town, Inc., a 73-unit regional supermarket chain that enjoyed annual sales of more than $559 million before being acquired by Michigan-based Spartan Stores nearly a decade ago. The 58-year-old Iott declared his candidacy yesterday for the seat held by Democrat Marcy Kaptur, a fourteen-term member of the House.
A ranking member of the Appropriations Committee and the longest-serving woman in the U.S. House, Kaptur was first elected to Congress in 1982 when she upset freshman Republican lawmaker Edward F. Weber after being outspent by a three-to-one margin. She garnered approximately 73 percent of the vote in 2008 and arguably hasn’t had a truly competitive contest since 1984, two years after initially winning her seat.
Unlike the situation in Tennessee’s 8th district, where the Democratic incumbent is retiring, and Virginia’s 5th district, where freshman Democratic lawmaker Tom Perriello is viewed as particularly vulnerable, Kaptur’s seat hasn’t been targeted by national Republicans who seem almost oblivious to the growing discontent in the Northwest Ohio district, a region in which the unemployment rate in Toledo alone is a staggering fifteen percent and where city officials, saddled with a massive $40 million budget deficit, are facing the greatest fiscal crisis since the recession of the early eighties.
Iott, who appears poised to run a Perot-style campaign and whose independent candidacy is already generating considerable buzz in the heavily-Democratic district, was quick to point to this growing dissatisfaction in his declaration, saying that he sensed “a great deal of resentment” in the area — widespread discontentment that extends into the district’s small town and rural regions.
In declaring his candidacy in Ohio’s ninth congressional district — a seat once held by Frazier Reams, the only independent elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1950′s — Iott said that his campaign will be focused on sound fiscal policy and a common sense approach to government. He also favors term limits and wants to restrict the federal government’s reach into the private lives of its citizens and the activities of small businesses.
Like many of those mounting independent congressional campaigns this year, the former grocery store executive said that his biggest concern is the rapidly-expanding national debt: “We are bankrupting the future of our children and grandchildren with a burden of debt that they can never repay.”
Acknowledging that he has never held public office, the Toledo-area businessman said that fact was precisely what makes him a unique candidate in 2010. “I am not a politician, never have been, and don’t intend to become one,” he asserted. Believed to be in a position to self-finance his insurgent candidacy, Iott isn’t expected to have too much difficulty obtaining the 2,098 signatures necessary by May 3 to appear on the November ballot.
Here’s a link to Iott’s announcement from Northern Ohio’s Morning Journal.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Ross Levin // Jan 13, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Very nice article, Darcy. I’m glad to see you posting.
2 d.eris // Jan 13, 2010 at 10:49 pm
I second that.
3 Darcy G Richardson // Jan 14, 2010 at 12:51 am
Thanks guys. By the way, I’ve been thinking about posting an occasional historical piece, a kind of “Blast from the Past” feature relevant to something currently happening in the world of independent and third-party politics. It was an idea initially suggested by Trent a couple of years ago, but one in which I never really had time to pursue.
As a matter of fact, in addition to my brief mention of independent Toledo congressman Frazier Reams, there were actually a couple of other historical angles that I could’ve used in the above story, including Toledo’s rich and colorful history of electing independent and third-party personalities such as the picturesque “Golden Rule” Jones at the turn of the twentieth century, or municipal reformer Brand Whitlock, who was elected mayor of Toledo on an independent ticket four consecutive times between 1905-1911.
Then again, there was also Cornell Schreiber, a self-styled political reformer who was repeatedly elected to office in Toledo as a “non-partisan,” as well as the witty and cultured Independent-Socialist Solon T. Klotz — a highly successful 73-year-old lawyer whose interests ranged from socialism to Shakespeare — who stunned his major-party rivals to win the mayoralty during the Great Depression.
Dating back to the Greenback-Labor Party, which held its 1878 mid-term national convention in that city, Toledo has had quite a history when it comes to alternative politics.
Moreover, there was also another interesting angle that could have been mentioned in this posting — namely, the sheer irony of Marcy Kaptur facing a potentially deep-pocketed, Perot-style independent challenger this year when Perot himself had asked the Ohio congresswoman, a consistently fierce foe of free trade, to be his vice-presidential running mate on the Reform Party ticket in 1996.
In any case, I may proceed with Trent’s idea starting sometime later this month, as long as it doesn’t bore the hell out of our readers! If nothing else, the articles could be a reminder that independent and third-party candidates have succeeded, at least every now and then, in our nation’s relatively short history.
4 Trent Hill // Jan 14, 2010 at 4:17 am
Darcy,
Please do. My only suggestion would be to go for the most recent historical anecdotes first. This will grab people’s attention more, I think.
5 d.eris // Jan 14, 2010 at 10:46 pm
“the articles could be a reminder that independent and third-party candidates have succeeded, at least every now and then, in our nation’s relatively short history.”
I think this is a really important point. One of the most frequent arguments put forward against any third party or independent effort is that third parties cannot succeed today because they have never succeeded in the past, which is simply false. A lot of this history isn’t widely known because it is often local or regional in character and because political historians are also prejudiced in favor of the duopoly system.
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