Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Bruce Braley is apologizing today after a video emerged showing him insulting not only a sitting U.S. senator, but farmers as well.
Braley, a trial lawyer, was captured on video dismissing Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) because he isn’t a lawyer, but is a “farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.”
The state of Iowa, in which Democrat Braley is running for a statewide office, is full of farmers who never went to law school. Who vote.
“If you help me win this race,” Braley says in the video, posted online by a donor after the Jan. 23 fundraiser in Corpus Christi, Texas and released today by the conservative America Rising PAC, “you may have someone with your background, your experience, your voice, someone’s who’s been literally fighting tort reform for 30 years in a visible and public way on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Or you might have a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school, never practiced law, serving as the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Braley says. “Because if Democrats lose the majority, Chuck Grassley will be the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
Grassley has served on the Judiciary Committee for decades. He is hardly inexperienced.
The elitism in Braley’s comments is impossible to ignore. The fact that he also comes out so adamantly against tort reform probably won’t help him either. Tort reform, like voter ID, is an issue that tends to poll well, but trail lawyers tend to hate it. When they believe they’re only talking among themselves, they hate it even more.
Braley’s comments may also prove to be a problem for the Texas Democrats who hosted him at the fundraiser where he made the comments. Do they agree that being a farmer is somehow a bad thing?
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