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Monday, December 4, 2006
On the road in Iowa: Bayh on Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Des Moines, Iowa— One of us, the one with only slightly less seniority, has been been sent here on the specious theory that journalists, like peas, travel best when frozen.
Iowa is not Georgia, nor vice versa.
For one, Iowa has a better class of roadkill. Possums here have been superceded by unfortunate pheasants, blown by icy winds from their hiding places in decimated cornfields into the line of traffic.
Seventy-mile-an-hour truckers on I-80 discourage those who would harvest birds lining the shoulders of the interstate.
Another, more important difference can be found in this newborn political season, the embryonic days of the ’08 presidential race.
In Georgia, few Republicans have openly parted ways with President Bush on Iraq. Even Democrats speak about the war in the Middle East with studied circumlocution.
People are not so kind in Iowa. It is a topic of fervent conversation among Democrats. The most loyal Republicans shake their heads.
Keep in mind that Iowa has a history of isolationism, and was an early source of opposition to the Vietnam War.
Evan Bayh, the U.S. senator from Indiana with ’08 ambitions, was here on Monday, talking to a small group of business leaders. It was Bayh’s ninth trip here in the last year, and followed the formal entry of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack into the race by only a few days.
Nothing rivals the intimacy of presidential politics in Iowa and its sister harbinger, New Hampshire.
The Bayh event consisted of four tables, each seating eight, surrounded by five TV cameras, two still photographers, and yet another taking pictures with a cell phone. (The latter was a TV reporter who wanted to give his station a leg up on his station’s web site.)
Bayh spoke of education, energy dependency, bipartisanship, and the federal deficit. Bayh is not a passionate fellow — he is, after all, selling Midwestern restraint.
What ardor Bahy had, he reserved for Iraq. His money lines:
— “We can be both tough and smart. We tried tough alone. That’s not good enough.”
— On what Bush should be saying: “I’m not in the business, as President of the United States, of asking our brave boys and girls, to die for people who are unable or unwilling to get their own act together…I’m not going to ask people to die to prevent the inevitable.”
Here and here are two Iraq sound bites from his speech. Pardon the pen-scratching. It’s the sound of a reporter at work.
Newt Gingrich, freely speaking on free speech
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You’ve no doubt heard about the stir that former House speaker Newt Gingrich, in the midst of a non-campaign for the ‘08 GOP nomination for president, has caused with his New Hampshire comments suggesting that free speech may have to be curtailed in order to fight terrorism.
Said Gingrich last week: “Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people.”
Many liberals have expressed outrage. Then there’s the web site that says Gingrich “proposes to turn the U.S. into a police state.”
Not so leftish, that one. It belongs to the John Birch Society.
