Coming in the New Year: A new section on Politics & Elections, with an initial report from Iowa
By James P. Gannon
The Rappahannock Voice this week will introduce a new section for news and commentary: Politics & Elections. The year 2008 will start with a bang from Iowa, where the first test of the presidential candidates will occur on the evening of Thursday, Jan. 3, as Iowans attend their local political caucuses to voice their choices among the Democratic and Republican contenders for the White House.
For ten years, I served as Editor of The Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest newspaper, which gave me a front-row seat to watch the presidential politics that preoccupies the state in one out of every four years. I had the privilege to organize and moderate the presidential candidate debates sponsored by the Register in election years 1980, 1984 and 1988. And for several years after that, I covered politics, government and elections from Washington for The Detroit News and other Gannett newspapers.
While the focus of RappVoice will remain local news, this election year provides an opportunity for political reporting and commentary that a political junkie such as I simply cannot let pass. For the past week, I have been in Iowa to visit my son Chris (a Des Moines Register news photographer) and his family, which afforded a chance to see the final frenzy of campaigning by a dozen presidential hopefuls.
We will kick off our Politics and Elections section this week with a report from the Iowa campaign front. It is our hope that this new section also will provide an outlet for your views, as readers, of the candidates and issues in this extremely important election year. We will welcome comments on any news or opinion pieces that we offer, and we invite readers to offer original pieces of opinion or analysis of their own. We hope our new Politics & Elections section might become a lively community conversation during this critical election year.
-- James P. Gannon
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