Sand's ad called a Democrat Republican; Sand's debate called a Republican a fake Iowan

…(cont) That's the whole page. I didn't write anything underneath it. Just the word, the date, and the two things sitting next to each other that don't belong there — the party label and the registration.

Five days later — I'm on the next page now, October seventh — Iowa held its first governor's debate, at St. Ambrose, Rob Sand against Zach Lahn. And Sand, by every account I've got — The Hill, NBC, the Examiner again — spent a good piece of that hour on whether Lahn is really a resident of the state he wants to govern. Full-time resident, is the phrase in the story. Not full-time, Sand's side was saying. Carpetbagger is the word some of the coverage used. The Examiner's own headline says the debate was "dominated" by it.

So I've got two pages, five days apart, in the same notebook, built on the same word. First page: somebody else's residency and party both get printed wrong, and nobody with a microphone is on record asking about it yet. Second page: a man's residency becomes the whole debate.

How many voters in that first ad got checked against the rolls before it ran — all of them, none of them, just the one the story happened to catch? I don't know. The piece only caught Dale. So the only count I've actually got is one out of however many were in that ad, and I'm not going to pretend I can round that up to nobody or down to everybody. One's what's written down.

My car's up on blocks in the garage — fan belt's gone again — so I had the hood open and the time to think about it. Went to the glovebox while it cooled, digging for my registration, because that's the one document I own that says where I live and isn't up for argument. Found it behind a flashlight and half a pack of gum. Name, address, the date I renewed it. Nobody's put that on a debate stage. Nobody's run it through a fact-check either way.

Which is the part I kept turning over, walking back in from the garage with grease on one hand and the registration in the other. Which version of "resident" was already sitting in print when that debate started at St. Ambrose — the one from October second, calling a Democrat a resident and a Republican both, or the one from October seventh, asking out loud whether a Republican is a resident at all? Those aren't the same question. One of them got answered by a voter file nobody disputed. The other one got an hour of television.

I was walking back out to finish the belt when it came to me — oh, wait, hang on, before you go a second — one more thing on this.

The ad, October second, states it: Dale, resident of Le Claire. Flat sentence, no question mark, just wrong about the party. The debate, October seventh, five days later, doesn't state it. It asks it — asks it about the other man, for a whole hour, on television.

So which one's the resident — the one the document declared, or the one the stage interrogated?