Category: Fear and Loathing in Iowa

Remember the Crying Girl?

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JOHNSTON, Iowa
Last night I called my wife and told her I loved her, after listening to Rick Santorum’s speech to his supporters at the final town hall meeting before Caucus Day here in Iowa. Santorum paid tribute to his wife, Karen, and also to his children, who have worked so hard and sacrificed so much:

Being away from home this past week — I flew out to Iowa the day after Christmas — I could appreciate how sincerely Santorum felt about his family’s role in his campaign. He went a long time with very little money to hire staff or buy ads, and so his wife and kids made phone calls and did a lot of other work necessary to keep his campaign going. The first time I covered him in August, at an event held in a barn amid the cornfields near Roland, Iowa, his wife and kids were serving ice cream:

And then, on the day of the Ames Straw Poll, I bumped into three of his kids while they were just wandering around seeing the sights:

Longtime readers of this blog know that I was on the Cain Train from the get-go, and the main reason I covered the Santorum campaign back in August was as a favor to my Twitter buddy Lisa Graas, who has been a Santorum supporter all along. In October, when I went to the Value Voter Summit in DC, both Santorum and his wife lobbied me to get behind their campaign. But I’m very keen on loyalty, and despite my friendliness toward Santorum, I rode the Cain Train all the way to the end.

Readers may remember how it hurt that Saturday when I had to explain to my 13-year-old Jefferson that “suspend” means “quit.” And you may also remember that I had taken Jefferson with me as my assistant when I went to cover the Values Voter summit, when Jefferson posed for a picture with Senator Santorum:

If you remembered all that, congratulations: My own memory is kind of shaky sometimes. I’m awful with names, for example, and haven’t been able to keep the names of Santorum’s kids straight in my mind. So now we come to the whole point of this post, what happened last night at the final town hall meeting of Santorum’s Iowa campaign.

When I walked into the Pizza Ranch, the first person I talked to was Shane Vander Hart of Caffeinated Thoughts, who was one of the first Iowa bloggers to endorse Santorum. Shane recalled how for a long time it seemed his candidate was doomed and now . . .

Well, we were standing behind Carl Cameron, who was doing a live remote for Fox News. And it seemed like every other reporter on the planet was in that pizza restaurant. Clearly, Santorum had become the hot ticket in the Hawkeye State. Santorum’s family was with him, and at one point I found myself talking to them, which became the lead of my column today for The American Spectator:

ALTOONA, Iowa — A teenager stood beside the salad bar at Pizza Ranch here Monday night, surrounded by a huge crowd packed into the restaurant for Rick Santorum’s final Iowa town hall meeting before Tuesday’s caucuses. Carl Cameron of Fox News was there, as was conservative talk-radio host Laura Ingraham and so many reporters and photographers that some Republican voters who had come to see the surging Republican presidential candidate were forced to park in the lot of a nearby Hy-Vee grocery store. This vivid evidence that the former Pennsylvania senator has suddenly become the man of the hour in the Hawkeye State clearly made an impression on the brown-haired girl standing beside the salad bar.
“Our prayers are paying off,” said 13-year-old Sarah Maria Santorum, whose father soon emerged from the throng, stood on a chair and addressed the crowd. …

“Our prayers are paying off.” Continue reading Remember the Crying Girl? →

Santorum Attacked in Iowa With Same Smear Used Earlier Against Gingrich

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Steve Ertelt of Life News reports:

For the second time, people opposed to one of the Republican presidential candidates have misappropriated the name of a prominent Iowa pro-life organization attack the candidate in the state that holds the fist caucus tomorrow.
In December someone used the name of Iowans for Life on fliers distributed at events in the Hawkeye State to attack pro-life former House Speaker Newt Gingrich with claims that he is not prolife on abortion.
Now, Iowans for Life’s name has been falsely attached to fliers disparaging pro-life former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — who has cruised to a third place standing in the state that leads off the campaign to replace pro-abortion President Barack Obama.
“Iowans for Life has once again been subject to fraudulent use of its name for the purpose of negative rhetoric targeting a candidate in the presidential campaign,” the group told LifeNews on Sunday. “This second deceitful usurping of Iowans for Life’s name was aimed at Senator Rick Santorum.”

First Newt, now Santorum? I suspect the Perry campaign was responsible for both of these cheap smears. As I remarked Saturday, if desperation was a cologne fragance, they’d reek of it.

The Familiar Pattern Emerges Again

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JOHNSTON, Iowa
Today I published another column from the campaign trail here in Iowa:

Rick Santorum made a bold prediction here Friday night: The Pittsburgh Steelers will go all the way to the Super Bowl for a rematch with the Green Bay Packers.
The former Pennsylvania senator was enjoying a rare moment of relaxation on the campaign trail here in Iowa, where voters will gather Tuesday night to cast the first real votes that count toward the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Santorum was wearing a University of Iowa Hawkeyes cap at the Okoboji Grille, where he gathered with supporters to watch the Hawkeyes play the Oklahoma Sooners in the Insight Bowl. When he arrived at the restaurant in Johnston, a suburb of Des Moines, Santorum was swarmed by reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen who have swooped down on his campaign in the past week as polls began indicating that he was surging ahead in the pack of GOP candidates.
Most of the reporters had left the restaurant (and the Hawkeyes were well on their way to a 31-14 loss to the Sooners) by the time I had the chance to ask Santorum about his beloved Steelers. “We will beat the Browns this week,” he said, sitting in front of a half-finished platter of nachos. “My prediction is, both the Patriots will lose to the Bills and the Ravens will lose to the Bengals and we will be the Number One seed in the AFC playoffs.”
But while the underdog-turned-contender was willing to risk prognosticating the NFL all the way to the Super Bowl, he has remained hesitant to predict how he’ll finish in Tuesday’s caucuses. Santorum obviously wants to exceed expectations, but the poll numbers and media buzz surrounding his campaign are making it hard to suppress those expectations. . . .

You can read the whole thing at The American Spectator, and I hope readers are not offended by my practice of linking my columns here, but I sometimes get the feeling that if I didn’t link and quote my own columns, no one would. Here, for the record, are my previous four columns from Iowa:

God knows that, having started reporting the “Santorum Surge” weeks before anyone else noticed it, I certainly don’t deserve any credit for my foresight now that the surge is headline news all across the country. In fact, conservative bloggers who ridiculed me for writing about Santorum a month ago are now linking and quoting MSM reports about the Iowa caucuses rather than quoting anything I’ve written. Continue reading The Familiar Pattern Emerges Again →

Don’t Underestimate Rick Santorum’s Campaign Strength in New Hampshire

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“Ten days ago I was at 5 percent [in the polls] and every question I got was ‘Why don’t you pack it up and endorse another candidate?’ And now they’re saying ‘You’ve got to win [in Iowa] to exceed expectations.'”
— Rick Santorum on NBC’s Meet the Press

JOHNSTON, Iowa
One of the stupid assumptions pundits keep making about Rick Santorum is that he’s got nothing happening beyond Iowa.

There is no need to call out by name the people who have been promoting this counter-factual nonsense that Santorum is “another Huckabee,” who will do well in Iowa on the basis of his support among hard-core evangelical Christians and accomplish nothing meaningful thereafter. This myth has become a sort of conventional wisdom among some conservative pundits, a talking point promoted by advocates of the campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, who have insisted that only their well-funded “brand name” candidates have the wherewithal to fight Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination. And it’s high time for people to begin critically examining that conventional wisdom because:

A. It’s not true;
B. It prevents consideration of a viable alternative strategy for the “Anybody But Mitt” movement; and
C. The campaigns promoting it — Gingrich and Perry — are evidently on their way to finishing fourth and fifth in Iowa.

Conservatives: Why let a bunch of losers dictate strategy to you? Why outsource your thinking to people who are only repeating what they’ve been told by paid campaign operatives? Why not examine the facts and think for yourself?

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. What I want to point out is that, while Rick Santorum has campaigned relentlessly in Iowa, it isn’t as if he has ignored New Hampshire. In fact, Santorum’s campaign manager Mike Biundo is a veteran of New Hampshire politics with strong Tea Party connections, as was pointed out by ABC News a year ago:

Biundo is a seasoned Granite State political operative who most recently helped Republican Frank Guinta defeat incumbent Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter in state’s 1st Congressional District. Biundo also served on Guinta’s successful campaign for mayor of Manchester and has been involved in politics for two decades.
“I am thrilled to have Mike a part of our team. His experience and knowledge will be invaluable in New Hampshire,” Santorum said in a statement. “As I continue on this journey, it is important we determine our ability to build grassroots support and Mike will be an integral part of this process.”
Biundo served on the presidential campaigns of former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson and Pat Buchanan, who won the New Hampshire primary in 1996. He is also a veteran of grassroots organizing in the crucial early primary state and led the New Hampshire Advantage Coalition, a group promoting limited government.
“As former Senator Santorum continues to consider a run for president, I am pleased to have the opportunity to play a part in that process,” Biundo said in a statement. “The Senator’s fiscally responsible approach to government and vision for America’s future will play well here in New Hampshire.”

Biundo was originally hired to run Santorum’s New Hampshire operation and is now national campaign manager and it is a national campaign. Santorum is already running this new TV ad in New Hampshire:

That’s a pretty strong signal that, while Santorum is now in the midst of an all-out final push here in the Hawkeye State, his campaign hasn’t neglected the rest of the country.

As I mentioned Friday, the plan is that if Santorum does well here — as he clearly expects to do now — his Iowa field director Jake Braunger will hopscotch ahead to South Carolina with two-and-a-half weeks to work on the “ground game” there before that state’s Jan. 21 primary. Given the possibility that Rick Perry is supposed to be the candidate to beat in South Carolina, and Perry may suffer a humiliating fifth-place finish in Iowa (and may not even try to compete in New Hampshire), there is a chance that Santorum could come into South Carolina with a wave of momentum, looking like the most viable conservative alternative to Romney.

We talked about this Saturday on Granite Grok’s “Grok Talk” podcast with Skip Murphy and Mike Rogers, and I’d urge you to listen to that because one of the things we talked about was the danger of looking too far ahead in the campaign, trying to base decisions on hypothetical suppositions about what will happen two weeks or two months in the future. Too many people, I suggested to Skip and Mike, began their 2012 calculations by asking, “Who can win?” And they ruled out the potential of a candidate like Rick Santorum (or Ron Paul, for that matter) to have an impact on the results.

We are now about 48 hours away from Tuesday’s caucuses, and I hesitate to predict what’s going to happen Wednesday until I know what happens Tuesday. But those who have pre-emptively dismissed Santorum as a possible contender for the final “Not Mitt Romney” role in this campaign may need to re-examine their calculations. And the sooner, the better.

Rick Santorum Talks Steelers Football

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JOHNSTON, Iowa
My friend Dan Collins insisted that I must interview the candidate about his favorite NFL team, which I did Friday night:

SANTORUM: “We will beat the Browns this week. My prediction is, both the Patriots will lose to the Bills and the Ravens will lose to the Bengals and we will be the Number One seed in the AFC playoffs.”
ME: “And who is going to be your opponent in the Super Bowl?”
SANTORUM: “I cannot see how the Packers don’t get it. …”
ME: “So the Steelers and the Packers?”
SANTORUM: “Rematch. And of course, Green Bay, after the last Super Bowl says, ‘Ain’t gonna be no rematch.’ Well there is going to be a rematch.”
ME: “So you don’t give any credit to the Cowboys?”
SANTORUM: “Who?”

The kind of tough questions they don’t ask on “Meet the Press.”

SANTORUM SURGE SUNDAY: Final Poll Makes Front-Page News in Des Moines

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JOHNSTON, Iowa
You’re looking at the front page of Sunday’s Des Moines Register, which I just bought this morning at a convenience store down the street, and which carries the results of their final poll:

Mitt Romney tops the latest Des Moines Register Iowa Poll in the closing days before the Iowa caucuses, but Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are poised within striking distance.
The poll, conducted Tuesday through Friday, shows support at 24 percent for Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts; 22 percent for Paul, a Texas congressman; and 15 percent for the surging Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.
But the four-day results don’t reflect just how quickly momentum is shifting in a race that has remained highly fluid for months. If the final two days of polling are considered separately, Santorum rises to second place, with 21 percent, pushing Paul to third, at 18 percent. Romney remains the same, at 24 percent.
“Momentum’s name is Rick Santorum,” said the Register’s pollster, J. Ann Selzer.

A good solid third would be great for Santorum. Second place? Awesome. And we dare not dream of what Rich Lowry suggests:

If Bachmann and Perry fade more at the end — and this poll result could hurt them — Santorum is within striking distance of a stunning upset.

Yeah, that would be stunning. Even I would be stunned if Santorum somehow manages to win this thing. But why does Lowry suggest that only Bachmann and Perry have the risk of a “fade”? Why can’t Romney and Paul and Gingrich fade, too? Never mind.

The point is, if this lastest poll is an accurate measure, Gingrich and Perry are now locked in a desperate struggle to avoid placing fifth in Iowa. And yet the Perry campaign — which ought to be focused on beating Gingrich — is instead pouring a steady barrage of attacks on Santorum.

‘Occupy’ Protesters at Bachmann HQ: Proof That Gardasil Causes Retardation?

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JOHNSTON, Iowa
Michele Bachmann has taken a lot of flak for saying that she was approached in Florida by a mother who claimed her daughter suffered brain damage as the result of a Gardasil vaccination. You may sneer at that claim, but when I showed up at Bachmann’s Iowa campaign headquarters today for an scheduled media event, I saw plenty of people displaying evidence of diminished mental capacity — and I’m not just talking about the MSM reporters.

Two busloads of smelly hippie scum from the “Occupy Iowa” movement were on the scene, engaged in their usual feeble-minded parody of “civil disobedience” protests. Just before I arrived, at least one Occupier had been arrested, and the rest of the scummy mob were exiting the parking lot under orders from the local police. Chanting, beating drums, giving media interviews and — as you will hear at about the 35-second mark of this video — unwittingly disclosing their next protest target:

STUPID OCCUPIER DUDE: “Hey, are we going to Perry next? … OK. I think I –“
HOMELY OCCUPIER CHICK: “Hey, we don’t want to say that very loud.”

I immediately alerted my friend Barbara Espinosa, who is working as a volunteer for Perry in Iowa, that they could expect this influx of subnormal semi-human detritus to show up at their campaign headquarters later. Whatever evil things I might have said about the Perry campaign, nobody deserves to be ambushed by these “Occupy” vermin. I suggested to one of the police officers that they should start randomly tasing and pepper-spraying the filthy hippies, just on general principles, but my advice was evidently ignored.

At the door to the headquarters, I saw Bachmann’s press spokeswoman Alice Stewart, flashed my business card and got inside, where I encountered a different kind of mob: Reporters surrounding the candidate as she joined her volunteers in making phone calls to Iowa voters.

Perhaps you can spot Congresswoman Bachmann amidst that massive media mob. The way you can tell the difference between the media and the Occupiers is that the media are usually somewhat less liberal and more likely to have had a bath in the past week.

OK, enough sarcasm for one post. It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m planning to celebrate it here in Iowa to the best of my ability. And surely the loyal readers who have helped make this trip possible by their contributions to the Shoe Leather Fund will want me to have a good time on one of the rare nights during this campaign trail trip when, fortunately, I don’t have a deadline to worry about.

Hit the freaking tip jar!





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Michele Bachmann Flyer Omits Comparison to Records of Santorum, Paul

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JOHNSTON, Iowa
During my visit to the Iowa headquarters of Michele Bachmann in nearby Urbandale today, I picked up a copy of a slick full-color flyer being distributed by her campaign (see front and back photos below).

The 8½-by-11-inch flyer urges Iowa Republicans to “Vote for a Consistent Conservative” and includes an issue-by-issue comparison between the Minnesota congresswoman and three of her GOP presidential rivals, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Click the image to enlarge:

Who’s missing from that comparison? Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. One might speculate as to why certain candidates were chosen for that comparison and others omitted, including the possibility that Romney, Gingrich and Perry are the three Republican rivals whom Bachmann likes least in the current field.

You can click on these images to view them larger: