Money, honey

Ed Tibbetts runs down the cashitation situation in the run-up to the Iowa 1st District race, and it's shaping up to reach appallingly high levels.

First-quarter (January through March) campaign finance results aren’t due until next week, but the apparent leaders in both parties have raised more than $100,000 apiece. Those are big, almost Jim Nussle-like, numbers this early in the game.

On the Democratic side, Waterloo lawyer Bruce Braley, a past president of the state trial lawyers association, says he’s going to be close to or at his goal of raising $125,000.

On the Republican side of the fence, Rep. Bill Dix, R-Shell Rock, said he racked up about $117,000 in the first quarter. Nobody figured this was going to be a cheap race. Open seats in Congress don’t come along very often, and Democrats in Washington, D.C., are putting this one toward the top of their wish list because it’s a Democratic-leaning district now in Republican hands.

Even in the days when Mark Baker and the GOP were throwing everything including the kitchen sink at U.S. Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., things didn’t crank up this soon. In the year before the 1998 election, Baker raised $171,000. And that was through the entire year.