Culver keeps campaign promises, stumbles on appointments

Gov. Chet Culver is approaching his first 100 days in office this month and many observers give the former teacher good grades so far.

Culver, a Democrat, has fulfilled campaign promises to increase the minimum wage, raise the cigarette tax by a dollar a pack, and lift restrictions on types of stem cell research.

Culver has stumbled, however, with some appointments going awry and has had mixed results in getting spending priorities passed.

He is helped by a Legislature controlled by his own party, but he suffered a setback when Democratic leaders couldn't muster the votes for a controversial law that would allow unions to extract fees from nonunion workers for services that unions provide.

Culver, who took office Jan. 12, hasn't yet seen lawmakers pass a $100 million renewable energy development fund, the cornerstone of his economic development plan.

Raising teacher salaries, expanding preschool access and using money from the cigarette tax increase to boost health care programs is still unfinished business.

"Culver's benefiting from the honeymoon that he's getting from members of his own party ... and the pretty good shape that the state's in" with revenue growth from an expanding economy, said Dennis Goldford, a Drake University political science professor.

The appointments are "minor irritants, but if they continue and form a pattern, then that's a problem," said Goldford, because people may start to question the governor's competence.

Culver says filling slots on state boards and commissions has been one of the toughest tasks he has faced.

"It has been perhaps as challenging as anything that I've had to do as governor, to sift through roughly 2,000 names and come up with 189 people," he said. "You have to have political balance and regional balance and party balance."

While Culver's four picks to the board that oversees Iowa's three public universities appear to have solid credentials, there have been loud protests that the Board of Regents would have no members from western Iowa.

A Des Moines Register poll taken Jan. 21-24 showed one-half of Iowans approved of the job Culver was doing as his new administration got down to work. Eighteen percent disapproved and 32 percent were unsure.

An appointment to a state board that oversees nursing home administrators backfired because of potential conflicts of interest stemming from his wife, Mari, a lawyer, and one of her clients.

Mari Culver had represented the appointee, Jan Reis of West Des Moines, in a lawsuit against a nursing home chain. The governor then rescinded the appointment amid conflicting accounts from his aides about how the situation was handled.

"You have to do a lot better job of investigating appointments like that," said Senate Republican leader Mary Lundby of Marion.

Culver's decision to replace four members of the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission has heightening the concerns of some environmental advocates that he won't be as aggressive in that area as his predecessor, Tom Vilsack.

Culver also was tripped up by an appointment to a state agency that was announced before he took office in January. His choice for director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, Des Moines physician Gregory Peterson, turned down the job four hours after Culver announced it.

"Our team did the very best job we could," Culver said. "We learned there are ways to improve."

Senate President Jack Kibbie, an Emmetsburg Democrat, says critics should cut Culver some slack over his appointments.

"Back in Harold Hughes' day, you could put the appointments on one page," said Kibbie, whose legislative career dates to the 1960s when Hughes was governor.

Culver won't escape comparison to Hughes.

Culver's overall performance in his four-year term is likely to be measured against the legacy left by Hughes, who was the last Democratic chief executive to have the advantage of working with a Democrat-controlled Legislature.

No one knows that more than Culver, who recently had a portrait of Hughes hung in the governor's office.

The 1964 landslide election victory for President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party nationally gave Hughes a huge Democratic legislative majority to work with in 1965. The result was an avalanche of changes including the start of Iowa's community college system, the creation of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, and the repeal of the death penalty.

"We really haven't done anything quite like it for more than 40 years, since Gov. Hughes was in the office," said Kibbie, 77.

Republicans think Democrats are charting a reckless course that will cost them control of the Statehouse, just as their grip on power slipped away during the latter half of the 1960s, by going on a spending spree and pursing policies that take a sharp turn to the left. In 1968, Iowans elected Republican Robert Ray as governor and it wasn't until Vilsack was elected 30 years later that Democrats regained the governor's office.

Culver, who was twice elected secretary of state before winning the governor's race with 54 percent of the vote last November, believes he's been given a mandate for change.

He said he's not worried about losing the support of Iowans as long as he sticks to the things "that we promised the voters."

Information from: The Des Moines Register, http://www.desmoinesregister.com

LOAD-DATE: April 10, 2007