Former President Barack Obama endorsed Josh Turek on Wednesday. The endorsement came in a Turek campaign video, featuring Obama and the Democratic nominee for Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat playing basketball in a gym.
The former president is famously a basketball enthusiast and plays recreationally. Turek, who represents Council Bluffs in the Iowa House, was an outstanding wheelchair basketball player starting in college, and was a starter on four of the U.S. men’s national wheelchair basketball teams that represented the country in the Paralympic Games. He won a bronze medal, as well as back-to-back gold medals.
“We playing HORSE or what?” Obama asks in the video.
“We’re playing IOWA,” Turek responds.
“I know a little something about winning Iowa,” Obama quips.
Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Iowa Democratic Caucus is widely credited with giving the initial momentum needed to win that year’s nomination to the campaign of the first-term senator from Illinois who was not very well known nationwide at the time. Obama also won the state in the 2006 general election, and won it again when he ran for reelection in 2012. He was the last Democratic nominee for president to win Iowa. The state has voted for Donald Trump in the last three elections.
In the video, Obama and Turek discuss who they’d put on an NBA version of Mount Rushmore as they trade off shooting twos and threes. Obama misses enough baskets to rack up I-O-W-A before Turek concedes a single letter.
“A lot of people have heard me say this,” Obama says. “Of all the things I’ve done in politics, Iowa was my favorite thing.”
“There was just a magic about regular folks showing up in gyms…”
“Like this,” Turek interjects.
“Like this,” Obama says, then continues his thought. “And just talking out, how do we move our state forward, how do we move the country forward.”
“I’m going to tell you what,” Turek says, “people all across Iowa are saying that they’re feeling that hope, that optimism for the first time in a long time.”
“That’s my sense,” Obama replies. “That’s what I think’s going to happen.”
The two-and-a-half-minute video concludes with Obama addressing the viewer.
“You’ve got here a man of character, somebody who knows how to win,” the former president says. “Now, the ball’s in your court, Iowa. Let’s make sure that we send Josh Turek to the United States Senate.”
Turek will face Republican Ashley Hinson, who currently represents Iowa’s 2nd District in Congress, and Greene County Attorney Thomas Laehn, the Libertarian candidate for Senate, in the Nov. 3 general election.
