Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds bolstered her party’s electoral appeal to suburbia with a well-crafted and winsomely delivered speech Tuesday night.
Indeed, large portions of Reynolds’s remarks, which came as the official Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, could prove like catnip to soccer moms — except this catnip contained real nutritional value. And by emphasizing her own humble, up-by-the-bootstraps story, she also forged a bond with laborers. After years of Republicans making strong pitches either to suburban women or to blue-collar workers but not both simultaneously, as if such appeals were mutually exclusive, Reynolds showed the way to a useful synthesis.
First, though, in two sentences that surely resonated with anyone older than about 45 (or anyone who knows history), Reynolds deftly and appropriately skewered Biden’s record.
“Instead of moving America forward, it feels like President Biden and his party have sent us back in time to the late ’70s and early ’80s when runaway inflation was hammering families, a violent crime wave was crashing on our cities, and the Soviet army was trying to redraw the world map,” she said.
Later, after listing Biden’s international failures, she was again concise: “Weakness on the world stage has a cost, and the president’s approach to foreign policy has consistently been too little, too late.”
Polls show a majority believe these things about Biden. Reynolds’s words, delivered sorrowfully in a tone of disappointment rather than sharp criticism, were effective.
Even more compelling was her personalizing her experience as a young mother 40 years ago with no college degree battling inflation while “work[ing] evenings at the local grocery store.” Then, having successfully tapped into the fears of inflation that now bedevil Americans from all economic strata, she reached the heart of why so many people are rebelling against Biden’s embrace of command-and-control wokeness.
“Americans are tired of a political class trying to remake this country into a place where an elite few tell everyone else what they can and cannot say,” she said. “What they can and cannot believe. They’re tired of people pretending the way to end racism is by categorizing everybody by their race. They’re tired of politicians who tell parents they should sit down, be silent, and let government control their kids’ education and future.”
And: “It seems like everything is backwards. The Biden administration requires vaccines for Americans who want to go to work or protect this country but not for migrants who illegally cross the border. The Department of Justice treats parents like domestic terrorists, but looters and shoplifters roam free. The American people are left to feel like they’re the enemy.”
And then, the crowning appeal to suburban mothers, the one involving their children:
“What happened, and is still happening, to our children over the last two years is unconscionable,” she said. “Learning loss. Isolation. Anxiety. Depression. In so many states, our kids have been left behind, and many will never catch up. That’s why Iowa was the first state in the nation to require that schools open their doors. I was attacked by the Left; I was attacked by the media. But it wasn’t a hard choice. It was the right choice.”
“And keeping schools open is only the start of the pro-parent, pro-family revolution that Republicans are leading in Iowa and states across this country,” she added. “Republicans believe that parents matter. It was true before the pandemic and has never been more important to say out loud: Parents matter. They have a right to know, and to have a say in, what their kids are being taught.”
This was a winning message winningly delivered.
