For this post, I’m going super local. If you don’t live in Iowa City, you’ll find the local context unfamiliar. But the themes probably feel common enough for you to draw connections to your own community.

With that as a disclaimer, let’s get down to it.

County Supervisor Rod Sullivan blogged twice about our upcoming city council race. His first attempt was ill-informed. Readers who use my two part test for criticizing a candidate’s social media posts would have to conclude that it fails at least the second part.

But that’s the last time I’ll mention his first attempt. That’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing because Rod made a much more interesting and compelling second attempt to write about the race. That’s the post I’m using as a springboard here.

Like many others in Iowa City these days, Rod raised issues about what disqualifies a candidate from office. The topic has come up with regard to three candidates for office in the last year: Royceann Porter, Guillermo Morales, and Oliver Weilein.

I’ll introduce Rod’s argument, say a bit about why it’s such an appealing argument, and then I’ll lay out some of the problems in it. At the end of the day, there are huge differences between Weilein, on one hand, and Porter and Morales, on the other.

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City council elections in Iowa City bring out personal attacks. Sadly, it always happens, and it usually happens to everyone on the ballot.

Notably, the attacks take different forms, depending on the ideology of the candidate. Attacks against candidates further to the left are the most common. But they’re also the most likely to come wrapped in various pieties about ‘Iowa Nice’ or ‘civility.’ They often involve tsk-tsking someone for social media posts.

That takes us to our latest installment. Both candidates in our upcoming election face criticism for their social media posts. But only one candidate faces attacks couched in the language of ‘civility.’ Attacks against the other candidate have focused on policy (though those are often overdone, and at times confirm Godwin’s Law).

So, what happened?

A variety of right-leaning Democrats – including a duo of an unpopular former mayor and a feckless state legislator, among others – launched a vicious, manipulative campaign against a left leaning city council candidate over his social media accounts. And after the candidate in question trounced their preferred candidate in a primary, some of them re-upped the attacks with all the urgency of desperate upper middle class hand-wringing.

With this incident in mind, I’d like to ask the question of when this sort of thing is OK. When can we attack a candidate for their social media posts?

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