In fact, I'll offer a prize tonight to anybody in this auditorium or anyone watching on television, if you can find Barack Obama's specific plan on any of those items, I will come to your house and cook you dinner.
All right, that was former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and he was there voicing his criticism of President Barack Obama in tonight's Republican presidential debate.
And over the last few months, Governor Pawlenty has spent a lot of his time and frankly his money right here in Iowa. He's hoping for a very strong showing in Saturday's all-important straw poll.
But tonight he's here live on "Hannity," Governor Pawlenty. All right, so you're offering free dinner or a choice, or cutting the lawn, but Romney only gets one acre? What is up with that? Discriminating against your fellow candidate?
Tim Pawlenty made it clear that homeowners might have a new, inexpensive gardener at their disposal. If they could find a crop of specific entitlement-reform plans anywhere in Obamaland, he said, “I’ll come to your house and mow your lawn.”
It was a cute bit. Problem was, I’d heard it before, two days earlier, when he appeared briefly at a coffee shop in the town of Sully, his campaign Winnebago zooming in, his campaign Winnebago zooming out. Then again, I’d already heard most of what Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney said at the debate, too. The moderator, Bret Baier, had implored everyone “to put aside the talking points” and “polished lines,” but that was like asking aardvarks to go easy on the ants. A species can’t be denied its subsistence diet.
In advance of Saturday’s straw poll here, Republican presidential hopefuls descended on Iowa, traveled its breadth, paid homage to the butter cow at the state fair and provided the most concentrated glimpse of campaign 2012 to date.
It was an intensely dispiriting spectacle, because it was an entirely familiar one: the same old same old at a moment of extraordinary global uncertainty and profound national anxiety. Americans are more frightened and pessimistic — and Washington is more dysfunctional — than they’ve been in a very long time. But the script in Iowa was unchanged.
Photo op followed photo op. Prefabricated one-liners abounded. Strenuously, speciously folksy riffs and poses prevailed. And candidates vying for the opportunity to lead a diverse nation nonetheless played a tired game of Excite the Right, dwelling on their opposition to gay marriage and trumpeting their anti-abortion credentials. Those aren’t and can’t be the issues this time around. Not with the European debt crisis threatening to become a worldwide contagion, London burning, the Arab world convulsing, the Dow jackhammering and America’s crisis of joblessness grinding on and on. Not now.
It’s time for nobler, smarter, more substantive politics. It’s past time, actually. But that’s not what Iowa presented.
In Sully, where only about a dozen voters turned out to see him, Pawlenty reached so far for attention-getting metaphors that he landed in a smelly field. Deriding President Obama as someone too quick to dispense blame, he likened him to “a manure spreader in a windstorm.” Just hearing the phrase, I wanted to take cover — and a shower.
I didn’t make it to Rick Santorum’s appearance the previous day at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Iowa Falls, but I wish I had, because it was there that he equated gay marriage with both incest and a square, moderately absorbent crumb remover.
I’ll explain.
Santorum was saying that when you speak of two men or two women as married, you indulge in a fiction. An impossibility. “This is a napkin,” he announced in an angry voice, abruptly ripping one from a dispenser and holding it high. “I can call this napkin a paper towel. But it is a napkin. Why? Because it is what it is.”
So while someone might assert that “marriage could be between fathers and daughters,” he added, “It doesn’t make it marriage.” Agreed. It makes it a crime, and to mention that in the same breath as same-sex couples is nothing short of appalling.
Santorum was competing for the same evangelical voters who seem to have taken such a shine to Bachmann. On Sunday she visited two Iowa churches, the second one in the town of Waukee, where the pastor, Jeff Mullen, told congregants, “we inherently know that homosexual behavior is immoral and unnatural.”
“God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness,” Mullen said, reading from the book of Romans, according to news reports. His sermon was supplemented by a video in which a man testified to having converted from homosexuality to heterosexuality with God’s help. No more gay. All prayed away.
In Iowa he talked repeatedly about his 25 years in the private sector, and at one point stressed that he spent only four years — his one term as Massachusetts governor — in elective office. It’s clear already that the issue of experience will play out in a fascinating way in 2012, with Obama’s critics faulting him for too little preparation but trying not to seem like veteran politicians themselves, lest they run afoul of an anti-incumbent mood. Romney walks that fine line by focusing on his career in business. He says it gives him economic chops Obama will never have.
Speaking of chops, Romney went to the state fair on Thursday and donned a red apron to grill pork, because grilling pork is of course a vital part of being commander in chief. He also made remarks from a makeshift stage with bales of hay in the foreground. Bales of hay seem to emerge out of nowhere and creep into the camera frame whenever politicians touch down in farm states, where those politicians tend to talk like they’re on “Hee Haw.” Over several days I heard Romney say “sure as heck,” “fella” and “darn well.” I half expected him to take a pitchfork to that hay.
Rick Perry wasn’t around, but that didn’t preclude a constant discussion of him, my favorite bit of which was a CNN segment in which it was revealed that his father-in-law had performed his vasectomy. I’m not sure where on the spectrum of family values that falls or why voters need to know it.
If politicians exhibited some silliness in Iowa, so did reporters. Like hounds heeding a whistle, they swarmed to Sarah Palin when she dropped by the state fair on Friday, again rewarding her coyness about the presidential race with extra-rapt attention. She dithers; we drool.
She was asked if the president was to blame for the nation’s credit downgrading, and said yes. “Because from the top, leadership starts from the top, the leadership of our country,” she said, syntactical as ever.
She was also asked if she was looking for votes. “I’m looking for fried butter on a stick and a fried Twinkie as soon as I can get there,” she said. She deserves as much. And we deserve something much, much better.
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