The Des Moine Register’s soapbox is situated on the south, and somewhat shadier, side of the Grand Avenue Midway at the Iowa State Fair, about halfway between the entrance and the butter cow; instead of a podium they have piled up several bales of hay. A corny touch, but Iowa enjoys being Iowa.
Several Republican candidates are speaking there in the late morning and noontime on Friday, after the Washington Examiner-Fox News debate Thursday night. But Mitt Romney, who’s participating in the debate but not at the straw poll he won four years ago, is hightailing it out of the state thereafter and so he is speaking Thursday morning. Democrats are clearly out here to heckle him—perhaps part of the Obama campaign’s (unfortunately named) “kill Romney” strategy–with a handout thanking him for supporting in Massachusetts features of what became Obamacare and with a group of hecklers seated in the front row ready to ask him angry questions, as my Examiner colleague Hayley Peterson describes. Romney, in chinos and a dark polo shirt, is pumped up in the high 80s heat, gives a shoutout to former Iowa Republican Chairman Brian Kennedy, and notes that Iowa leads in agriculture but also in manufacturing.
Then he launches into Barack Obama. He notes that the recession was deeper and the recovery more tepid than people expected. “The President’s policies are the exact opposite of what we needed.” He made several interesting points on policy. He charged that the Obama administration was not adhering to the rule of law when it gave General Motors shares to the United Auto Workers rather than to secured creditors and when the NLRB general counsel brought a suit against Boeing’s building an aircraft plant in South Carolina because the state has a right-to-work law. He said that Obamacare—no specific mention of the mandate—“tramples on the principle of the Tenth Amendment.” He noted that when the National Anthem is played Americans place their hands over their hearts in a practice encouraged by Franklin Roosevelt—without noting that Obama on occasion has not done so, though I suspect many in the crowd realize that.
Others have noticed that when a heckling Democrat called for increasing the ceiling on the Social Security tax, Romney not only opposed it as a tax increase but also noted that half of American households don’t pay income tax. When the guy called for increasing taxes on corporations, Romney said “corporations are people”—certainly an intellectually defensible statement, but one more often heard from corporate activists. Romney also gave an unusual definition of tax loopholes, saying they were tax provisions which provided tax relief that was unintended. That was in response to a Democrat’s question about a tax provision change he supported in Massachusetts and was perhaps an accurate description of it. But of course the tax loopholes that are really wide and are arguably in need for plugging are those which provide tax relief for people particularly situated that was very much intended.
I see that much is being made on the Internet of Romney’s verbal tussles with the Democratic questioners. I suppose they make good video and he did show a certain amount of spunk, especially when he said they should probably vote for someone else. But I thought some of his other comments more worthy of note.
