Sac City native Swalwell may run for president

Congressman Eric Swalwell speaks at the Progress Iowa Holiday Party.

Des Moines

A 38-year-old Sac City native who has risen to prominence as a forceful cable television presence is eyeing a presidential bid.

U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, already has appeared several times in Iowa at events for other Democrats. Just before Christmas, he was one of four keynote speakers at the Progress Iowa Holiday Party in downtown Des Moines, a feasting and vetting ground for potential left-leaning candidates for the White House.

A leading liberal light, Swalwall was born in Sac City — which sits in the district represented by one of the most conservative members of Congress, Steve King. In fact, King, a Republican, won Sac County with 60 percent of the vote in his 2018 re-election bid.

“I just remember two parents who worked very hard and wanted their kids to do better than they did,” Swalwell said of his Iowa youth in an interview with this newspaper.

U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell

Swalwell’s father, Eric, Sr., worked as an investigator for the state while the family lived in Sac City. Eric and Vicky Swalwell moved their family to Algona when the younger Eric was 2. In Algona the elder Eric Swalwell served as chief of police. The family moved to Oregon when the congressman was 5, Swalwell said.

Swalwell has not announced a campaign for the White House, in which he would join potentially more than 20 other high-profile Democrats in the nomination contest. But he does acknowledge a path forward for himself as a presidential candidate.

During the Progress Iowa speech, Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, played to a strength he often displays on a cable television shows — lashing President Donald Trump.

And he complimented Democrats in Iowa for helping to flip the U.S. House to Democrats.

“You have cut our time in hell in half,” he said.

Swalwell said his experience with the American dream — the notion of a work ethic delivering a better life — started in Iowa.

“It’s one that I can relate to from two parents who raised me and fought for that idea in Algona, Iowa — my dad as a cop, my mom raising four boys, making doll houses in our garage, baking wedding cakes in our kitchen and running a very large unlicensed day care facility,” Swalwell said.

As they chased that American dream from Oregon to California, the family settled in Dublin, California, what Swalwell said used to be a “low-income town with low expectations.”

Swalwell played goaltender on his high school soccer team. Kids from teams in wealthier towns gave the blue-collar Swalwell the nickname “Scrublin” — a blend of scrub and Dublin, he recalled in Des Moines.

“We were best known for having the most fast food restaurants per capita in the United States and no Fortune 500 companies to speak of,” Swalwell said of Dublin.

Later, Swalwell served on the council in Dublin and worked to build modern schools and attract better employees.

He was elected in 2012 to represent the East Bay of California, which includes the northern part of Silicon Valley.

Following the Des Moines speech, college students and twenty-something activists surrounded Swalwell. They posed for photos and handed him their business cards. He gave several out, too.

“This generation wants us to go big on the issues we solve, be bold in the solutions and always do good for our country,” Swalwell said. “Go big, be bold, do good.”

Swalwell is a strong advocate for gun control. Earlier this year, he proposed banning certain assault weapons. There would be a voluntary buy-back period, followed by the prosecution for the owners of any of the prohibited guns under his plan.

“We can ban and buy back every assault weapon, every weapon of war in our country,” Swalwell said in the Progress Iowa speech.

He supports a privately-delivered, publicly-financed single-payer universal health care system — so-called expanded Medicare.

During the Des Moines speech, Swalwell said he grew frustrated traveling western Iowa and seeing old jars hollowed out with a sick person’s picture on it in local, small-scale fund-raising appeals for medical expenses.

From his key committee positions, Swalwell continues to be a vocal critic of President Trump.

“In our 2016 elections, Russia attacked our democracy,” Swalwell says in his congressional website. “It was silent and nearly invisible, but nevertheless it struck the core of our democracy – our free and fair elections. Our intelligence agencies have concluded with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin orchestrated these cyberattacks in order to influence the 2016 election to favor then-candidate Donald Trump.”