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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie. Today we have with us, Rob Sand. Rob is the current state auditor for the state of Iowa, he recently won re-election in a very close race. He's the only Democrat to win statewide office in the state of Iowa. He is a champion of public service over politics, in fact, the Associated Press has said, and I quote, "He is a political brand that transcends party lines." He's gotten there by abandoning politics as usual and instead is trying to get away from the personal attacks and trying to treat people a lot better. I think perhaps we're going to hear something about a man that is embodying the change that we hear so much desired by the readers, listeners, and viewers of The Common Bridge. So maybe, maybe, green shoots; that there is a fiercely non-partisan way forward. Rob, welcome to The Common Bridge.
Rob Sand
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited about this and excited about the community that you're building here because I think it's incredibly important. So I'm really excited to be here.
Richard Helppie
Very glad to have a fellow Midwesterner here, and particularly someone that established himself as a guy that will defend the other party if there's something unfair or untruthful in that attack. You're asking even your own party to approach politics with persuasion and kindness, not venom and public venting. That can't make you that popular at cocktail parties, I would imagine.
Rob Sand
I definitely get a lot of people in my own party who tell me that I need to be more of a Democrat. I get people who tell me that I'm too nice. What the weirdest thing is that the idea that somehow pushing back against the status quo is somehow soft, which is bizarre to me, because actually, the easiest thing to do is do what everyone else is doing, then you don't stick out at all.
Richard Helppie
I'm in heated agreement with you on that because I see so many people playing team sports instead of politics; did my team win? I just abhor this notion of red, blue and purple. It's nonsense, and it's just further dividing us. But right outside the state of Iowa, our audience probably doesn't know much about you. So if you could tell us a little bit about your early days and maybe some of your early jobs and education and jobs leading up to becoming state auditor?
Rob Sand
I was born and raised in Decorah, Iowa. It's a town of about seven or eight thousand people. You've got to drive an hour to get to a four lane highway. First job was catching chickens. Second job was working behind the counter at McDonald's. If you ever want to be totally super pumped about working at McDonald's, try catching chickens first.
Richard Helppie
What does the job of the chicken chaser actually do? Are they penned or are they in that two lane highway heading out to the four laner?
Rob Sand
No, they are. This is an industrial poultry operation so I'd be in the barn, huge barn that we would drive these big trucks into - I wouldn't drive them, I was 14 - but the big trucks get driven into the barn and then we'd climb down, turn off the lights because chickens can't see well in the dark, and walk up behind them grab them by the legs and hand them to the guys on the truck who take them back for processing. A very dirty job, the only thing they've got left to do once you've grabbed it by the legs is let it all out. So you'd go home smelling like a barnyard. My mom, if she caught me in time, would usually make me take my outer layers off outside of the house before I came inside.
Richard Helppie
Those jobs though are so instructive because no one needs to tell you maybe you want to learn a trade or go to college and find some marketable skills because you don't want to be chasing chickens late into your 50s or anything. I understand that you were a good student, you qualified and attended Brown University. You got a political science degree there.
Rob Sand
Yep, I loved growing up in the Midwest, loved growing up in Iowa and thought hey, I don't know what it's like somewhere else, maybe I should go see. I really did enjoy my time in Rhode Island, liked being at Brown, but then came back when I was done because I went and saw.
Richard Helppie
Then you went to law school at University of Iowa.
Rob Sand
I had gotten admitted to Harvard as well. That was one of those choices that was actually easier than a lot of people oftentimes expect. I knew I wanted to do public service work. I knew that typically, it's not very well paid. I knew I wanted to live in Iowa. And for those reasons, among others, I just thought it makes a lot more sense to be home to go where I had a full ride so I wasn't loading myself down with debt and to go where I would have a better chance of getting to know people and building friendships. Having grown up in a small town in the corner of the state, it's very far away from everything else. I didn't necessarily have a lot of high school friends in Cedar Rapids or Des Moines. I sure thought about going back to Decorah when I was done with law school. One of the main problems was some of my mom's friends were telling me who I should date if I moved back so...
Richard Helppie
They had your life mapped out for you. We had Professor Derek Muller on - do you know Derek?
Rob Sand
I don't know him personally, but I know of the work he's doing over at Iowa, and I think we follow each other on Twitter.
Richard Helppie
He's election law, he was a great guest. He's from Michigan. And given that Michigan's on its way to Arizona to play TCU, I suspect he may be coming in with a little maize and blue to work, and of course, Michigan's former quarterback's heading out to Iowa.
Rob Sand
We're excited about that.
Richard Helppie
He's a good player. He's a nice young man and a good player. So I wish him the best of luck, except when he's playing Michigan. Now you were the chief public corruption officer. What exactly is that? And you had a couple of really big cases?
Rob Sand
So I handled most of the public corruption prosecution in Iowa. When I worked at the attorney general's office - I was assistant attorney general - there's a small division of people there who are handling cases that county attorneys are referring to the attorney general's office. If it was a financial crime, typically it was mine and probably around half of those financial crimes were public corruption cases. I got to see quite a bit of that. Worked on the Iowa Film Office tax credit scandal; we had one of those film-making tax credits that did not turn out to go so well. And then, later on, actually ended up working on a case that turned into leading an investigation that uncovered the largest lottery rigging scheme in American history. It's a wild tale. There are Bigfoot hunters involved, Richard, it's bizarre, I wrote a book about it that came out this year called "The Winning Ticket." So you can pick that up wherever you like to buy your books. It is a fun read. It's a true crime book. It's not really much about politics. I note at the very end that I left the office shortly afterwards and ran, but that's about it.
Richard Helppie
Called "The Winning Ticket: Uncovering America's Biggest Lottery Scam." I have not read the book yet, but I will. You took on elected and appointed officials, you also knocked heads with Republicans, Democrats, attorneys, investment advisors, embezzlers and other people that exploit the elderly. So there were a lot of guys on the bad guy side of that equation. I'm fascinated to read about that. It always amazes me that with so many easier ways to make an honest living that someone would turn to that. Put that same effort, same intellect in a legitimate enterprise and probably do a lot better. It is what it is. So Rob, we've got the situation now in the country, the Democrats are saying, hey, be really afraid of the Republicans. In fact, our president went on and basically lit up a segment of his opponent personally, which is something we've only seen in the last six or seven years. The Republicans are coming back, hey, fear the Democrats; it's all about big tech, censorship, inflation, they're going to take your guns, etc. We've got this media environment that they're picking an audience, in fact, they're shaping the audience with their narrative. New things just this week by reporter, Matt Taibbi, about how the publishing industry, the journalism industry, has lost their way. Of course, that's one of the reasons we've gone to Substack, we think this new media model...then social media being manipulated, it's toxic. We can't get any place as a country if we're going to identify with a team versus a better future. I know this something near to your heart and you've got some ideas and maybe some guidelines about how we get out of this morass. Can you tell us a little bit about that, please?
Rob Sand
Absolutely. I mean, a fundamental piece of that, to me, is we can't rely on each party to check the other because there's no interest in checks and balances coming from the other party. So if somebody says something awful in the Democratic Party, if a Republican tells them it's awful, every Democrat just says, shut up, you're a terrible person, we don't want to hear from you. All of that rhetoric is just totally useless. At the end of the day, we have to have Democrats checking Democrats and Republicans checking Republicans, because that's the only point - we are so tribalized here, the criticism really has to come from your own tribe for it to be effective. One of the things that I have really worked at is doing that, defending elected Republicans in Iowa when it's the right thing to do, criticizing Democrats when it's the right thing to do. That doesn't mean that I have to say it on every single thing that I see. But geez, we all ought to be saying it sometimes and it's not particularly hard. All I'm saying we ought to be doing is doing the things that we were all raised to do; remind people that it's good to be nice, remind people that it's not nice to call names; remind people that criticizing someone for something also makes other people who may have that trait feel criticized too. It's not complicated stuff. And yet, the more I have done it over the last four years, I oftentimes get push-back from Democrats who are upset that I'm defending a Republican, when at the end of the day, to me, I'm defending kindness, I'm defending decency. The fact that it happens to be about someone with a particular letter behind their name, to me, doesn't matter. If we want to get to a better place where we can work together, where we can solve our problems, where we can be strong, we're going to have to put away some of the cruelty and some of the partisanship that's gotten us to where we are right now.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, in the recent days, we've had former President Trump invite someone, I think his name's Fuentes, or had dinner with him, they got together in some manner, almost the next morning, there was this screaming going on, on Twitter and other social media platforms and in certain publications saying, hey, no Republicans have condemned this. My experience has been that we've had a number of these occasions where the story really wasn't a full story but it's almost another way to attack the other side; they did something, their own party's not condemning them, therefore they're all evil; therefore vote for us. But you've talked about a guiding principle about evil actions versus evil people. Is it a little odd that we're even having that as a conversation?
Rob Sand
Probably. I think you're right about that. That, to me is just one of those things that...and this goes back a long way. I remember, before I was running in 2018, it was probably a couple of years before that, it was pre-Trump even, we still had - even in the Democratic Party - this sort of like, oh, that's a bad person, you shouldn't say anything nice about him. I have one specific recollection about it, where Chief Justice John Roberts gave a graduation speech at a really high highfalutin, DC, private high school, where all the kids there, I'm sure, were sons and daughters of the most wealthy and powerful people in the area. What impressed me about the piece of the speech that I saw, was that he said something to the effect of, I hope you have failure in your life because that'll help you have empathy for people who have failed. I hope you have to struggle in your life because it will give you empathy for people whose life is mostly made of struggle, and a lot of just reminding them of their positions in society and their privilege in a way that I thought was effective and nurturing, while at the same time being serious about the fact they had all these advantages. I remember sharing that on Facebook and having friends of mine say, well, you shouldn't share anything by John Roberts, he's a terrible guy. I disagree with most of...well, I disagree with plenty of his decisions. Citizens United is a travesty to the American democracy and our campaign finance system. But he had a good point that day, and I feel like when somebody has a good point, we have to be willing to say, hey, wait a minute, this is someone that I don't tend to be in love with but I think right there, as the saying goes in Iowa, even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, if you think about former Attorney General Bill Barr - a lot of scathing opinions on him - and if you unwrap the facts on it, less than a month after the November 6 election in 2020, he's in the office of the president United States telling him hey, all the stuff you're saying about a stolen election is bullshit. And then he said I resign, I'm not going to handle this. He went from zero to hero. There was actually another podcast run by some left wingers and they were going to review his book and they all proudly got on the podcast and said, well, we're not going to actually read his book. Really? Bill Barr had some interesting things to say. Was he a great attorney general? I don't know. That's a matter of opinion. But he got some things right.
Rob Sand
Yes and I think we can...from zero to hero is one way to put it, and I like to say, hate the sin, love the sinner. If we can just look at Bill Barr's actions, and we can say, well, I disagree with this and this and this that he did, on the other hand, I'm glad that when this happened, he did that. We should judge him in whole; there are moments in his life where he's been a zero and moments in his life where he's been a hero.
Richard Helppie
And there were so many things like, we've got him now because this particular judge was throwing something at him that turned out to be nonsense, but you never hear the follow up, that, yeah, that accusation that we threw, that mud that we threw, it turned out to be nonsense and not true but it sticks there. Again, I point a lot of the blame there at the reporting. You also talked about being the change and engaging in productive political discourse. And it's a more politically diverse world of course, it's more than a binary Republican versus Democrat world. How do you go about being the change?
Rob Sand
This is something that's been important to me my whole life, I think a little bit of it is faith-based for me, in the Christian faith, really trying to focus people on the idea that we should see everyone as God's child and try to take them at their best intentions and try to create harmony and be a peacemaker in the world. So that's a piece of that to me. One way that I've done that, when I was in college at Brown, I actually put together a class on conservatism. Brown is well-known for being a liberal school. I didn't attend to their thinking that I was a conservative, but while I was there, I thought, I'm not really getting enough exposure to conservative ideas, I want to do more here. And so that, to me, was a great class because it really helped illustrate, as we took it together - a group of conservative students and moderates and more liberal folks - that a lot of times we agreed on what the end goal was; we just really disagreed about the route for getting there. If you have that understanding, the differences are much less scary. That doesn't mean it's true for everybody and certainly, with the rise of social media and the cleave that we have had between the ends and the extremes, we do have people whose goals are very different. But still, finding ways to engage with people that are productive or at least persuasive, even if not to the person you're engaging with but to the wallflowers, it's an imperative. If you want good things to happen in the world, you better be good at fighting for them; not just fighting for them, you have to be good at it. So in the auditor's office, one of the first decisions I made was, who was going to have the top spots in the office. I actually appointed an Independent and a Republican to our two deputy positions in the office. And so our senior leadership team in the office was tri-partisan: a Dem, a Republican, and an Indie. The other thing was, they both had made campaign contributions to my opponent. I had run against an incumbent; they knew that incumbent, supported her campaign. But I didn't take that as an opportunity...frankly, Richard, I took it as an opportunity to say who I was. I don't want to be the guy who says, oh, if you oppose me politically, I'm going to punish you for it. That's not public service. I want to be the guy that says, well, there are different ways of thinking in the world and I want to have people on my team who think differently than I do because that's going to help me reach better decisions, because I'm going to get asked better questions.
Richard Helppie
Well, you said a very important word earlier on when we're talking about this, you used the word "goal" and that's been my experience too - look, what's the goal? Do we want to get children educated? Alright, let's start there. Now, is there more than one path to reach that goal and what are the best ideas? Almost anything can be dealt with. Do we want safe neighborhoods? I think people would say, do we want there to be fentanyl invading our society? And yet, we're stuck with all these problems because of this deep partisan divide. Reaching a goal there's not enough reward; attacking and demonizing the other side, that is the reward. Case in point. Look at this - it's a ridiculous place we're in but it's a great example - this run-off in Georgia. Has anyone heard anything on a positive basis about either of the candidates? Neither one of them belong in the United States Senate and they just want each one to make the other one appear so bad that they won't pick him. That's why we've got this 49-49% divide there because they've each succeeded on scaring enough of their own base.
Rob Sand
That's right. Well, and that goes back to something that I'm sure you're incredibly familiar with, as a guy with a private sector background. Duopolies don't work. (Rich Helppie: No, they don't.) If you want the consumer to be served, you need to have an actual market where the consumer has choices. And citizens are not consumers but if we want to look at it through that lens, you're right, at the end of the day, the bottom dollar, the bottom line, when you have only two choices, each of those choices understands, I don't have to have you love me, I just have to have you hate the other one more than you hate me.
Richard Helppie
And it can be by name calling. What I encourage people to do is ask the second question. I've been spending some time researching some of the school districts and people are making this case, well, they become partisan, they become extremist. And I said, okay, how can that be? Well, they're banning books. Well okay, that sounds serious. What books have they banned? And it's dead silence. Well, there are certain books that maybe shouldn't be available to a third grader. So this perspective of looking at goals and looking at behavior versus vilification, are we going to get that from people that have been trained in the current political system or is there going to be more of an appeal to an outsider?
Rob Sand
It's certainly harder. It's no doubt harder. This is something...I worked on campaigns, I've volunteered for campaigns so I'm familiar with the way the current system works. And yet, I'm really committed to doing it differently, because I care that much about doing it differently. I think it's that broken the way we're doing it now. So the bottom line, I think, is who we can get this from; it's people who are going to demonstrate an actual track record of having done it. And then the trick of that is supporting them. I was actually able to get over 30 Republican conservative and Libertarian leaders in Iowa to endorse my re-election, despite the fact that I have a D behind my name. Because I was so plainly committed to what I call anti-partisanship. Bipartisanship continues the fiction that there's two ways to think; you must be this position on that, and that position on that, and that position on that, to be in this party, instead of the ability to think for yourselves. So I like the idea of anti-partisanship. All the founders warned us about partisanship, they all said, one of the greatest risks...I like the John Adams, quote; "One of the greatest evils possible under this Constitution is two great parties united only in their hatred for each other." We are living his nightmare. (Rich Helppie: Indeed.) And so to me, we can find those people anywhere, it's just a question of you've got to trust them when they show you what they're saying. So like you said, I had a close race this time. Maybe the only reason that I won was because I was willing to do things differently. Then some people in the fictional aisle, on the other side of the divide, were willing to put their neck out for me and say, hey, I may be a Republican, I may be a conservative, but I'm endorsing Sand, because he's doing things differently and he's doing things the right way. So I think that's a piece of what it takes, if this is truly what we want, then we've got to put our name and our money on the line to say, this is someone that I'm supporting. So we were able to have people who were donors and people who were endorsers who just said, I want more of this.
Richard Helppie
Look, everybody wants our government to work. When we talk about goals in a private sector setting, you have to satisfy a customer and if you don't, you don't get to be in business anymore. You've got to make sure that the customer likes it. And yet, you look at on the public sector side, very, very little that we do in the public sector is rated high. You can see why that occurs as the partisanship gets baked in - kind of a class of people I find interesting. They're nice people. They're not unintelligent, classic profile: were raised in New York, went to school on the East Coast, went to work for a political campaign, went to work for a congressional person, and got caught up in politics, and that's what they do. They never chased a chicken in Iowa, they never tightened an auto part in Detroit and yet, they've got this idea about politics being, beat the other guy and not getting the idea like, what is it we want the government to do? Some of that, of course, morphs into who's there; how do they get there. We talked about the voting system, and I've had people on the show talking about ranked-choice voting and proportional representation, and other ideas like that, again, not necessarily an endorsement, but just presenting for our audience on The Common Bridge. You like the idea of a jungle primary?
Rob Sand
Well, jungle primary combined with ranked-choice. Because California, they do the jungle primary and then send the final two, but then you just have a duopoly for the general election again. And so the same corrupt incentives are there to really serve yourself as opposed to serving the public. Similarly, if you do ranked-choice but it's only among party nominees, then you have the party choosing it. So what I really like is what we call final five voting or final four voting. It's the Alaska system; you have an open primary, everyone has the same right to participate, including independents, and then the top four or five vote getters go to the general and then you do ranked-choice. An idea I like - I don't know if I'm the only person who's come up with it - but it's just simple review voting; everybody gets ranked or rated. So if you love a candidate, give them five ovals. If you're okay with them, give them three ovals. If you think they're the spawn of Satan, give them one oval. And then you just average them on election night, you're going to get quicker returns and the highest average review - the average highest average number of ovals - wins the election.
Richard Helppie
We buy a lot of products on Amazon on a five star review. (Rob Sand: Yes!) But we do get these false choices. Now, one of the things that would be interesting about a jungle primary and a ranked-choice voting is today, it seems to favor the Democrats, which it certainly did in Alaska. California, effectively, it's a one party state. And there might be critics of yours that say, well, of course, you'd like to see that as a Democrat in Iowa, because that would benefit more Democrats than Republicans at this point in our history.
Rob Sand
I don't think it benefits either party. I think it benefits the public. I think you get better Democrats and better Republicans elected with it, period. In fact, look at Mary, getting elected to the US House of Representatives - the Democrat in Alaska - she had endorsed Lisa Murkowski for her re-election, the Republican, and Murkowski had endorsed her back. I mean, that is the kind of attitude that I think is fostered and actually encouraged by final five voting that you don't get with the current system. Because your own party is going to yell and scream at you and tell you that you're a terrible evil person or a sellout or something like that, as opposed to just being a human being who says, hey, I'm committed to working with people that I disagree with on some stuff; there are so many things that we agree on that we're going to just try to focus on those and get those things done. I think by working together on that everyone can feel more represented. They also have a coalition government right now in Alaska; Democrats and Republicans working together and leaving out a few extremists. So if they put this system in place in California, I think they should do this everywhere, not just in Iowa, maybe it would benefit Republicans in California. Again, at the end of the day, I think what it leads to is less about partisanship, and more about public service. So if it benefits one party here and one party there, I think that's only incidental in the bigger link to public service. And frankly, popular-ism, not necessarily populism, but popular-ism, where every candidate can look at an issue and say, 70% of people believe in this, I've always gone back and forth but I suppose I should support it. And then we can actually have...I would love to have a great period of time in American history where, with this system, we ended up pursuing and enacting a lot of good changes that everyone - not everyone, but the broad cross section of society - thinks that we need, and some of them will be ideas from the Republican side of the aisle, some of them will be ideas from the Democratic side of the aisle. But the key is that they're all going to be popular. To me, that's a huge, huge boon and a huge reason to do this. Because right now, I've proposed numerous ideas here in Iowa saying, we should do this, we should do that - ideas that should be popular. And everybody says, oh, they like the idea, they think it's fine, but they don't want to do it, because you have a D behind your name. They don't want to do anything that might possibly make a Democrat look good.
Richard Helppie
That happens across the board; we can't say that this was a good solution, because somebody else might get the credit. Look, it's clear that we need to do other things. And Rob, this actually has been a great start to a conversation. I hope that we can maybe have a couple of focused conversations in the future. But as we move toward the end of our time today, if you could talk about what policy changes you'd like to see, if there's something that we didn't talk about or any summary comments. I'd sure like to hear about those.
Rob Sand
The big one to me, and I think it should be everybody's priority, would be giving independence and equal right to participate as voters, and then making it so that it's not the lesser of two evils in every November election. I think that change would make it possible to solve a lot of other problems. So that would be great. Beyond that, I like the idea of simplifying things, and again, finding other ways to make them less partisan. In Nebraska, the legislative elections are not partisan, you don't run as a member of a party, you don't have your party on the ballot. I think that would force people to educate themselves a little bit more about who the candidates are even though you have, oftentimes, indications of...if you wanted to pretend the world could be simply divided into two camps, you could find ways to do it but it really emphasizes two people systemically that really should be trying to pick leaders and trying to pick servants as opposed to trying to pick cheerleaders. So that's another example. I think that would be a great move.
Richard Helppie
Well, I love the way you phrase that; rather than picking cheerleaders, picking competent people that are going after the right goals, and getting us out of that binary way of thinking. Even some of the primaries now, you can manipulate the other party's primary to come out the way that you want it, which we saw a lot of in the midterms. The Democratic Party today, is saying that Iowa is no longer going to be first in the nation because they've lost, I guess, too many of the statewide initiatives and such. Rob, this has been a great conversation. Anything else you'd like the listeners, readers, and viewers of The Common Bridge to hear?
Rob Sand
I want the conversation to continue. I love hearing from people. Any listener can follow me on Twitter @RobSandIA. I'm on Facebook and Instagram, same location, Rob Sand. Shoot me a message, I will be the one responding to you. Send me something that you think is good reading about some other reform out there that promotes public service over partisanship. I'd love to hear about it.
Richard Helppie
That's a great opportunity, I think, for our audience. And so with our guest, state auditor from Iowa, Rob Sand, talking about bringing politics back to service, to goals, getting the evil intent out of it; something we can all hope for, I'm your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
(Read, Listen, or Watch) Public Service versus Politics of Fear.