Rand couldn’t make it because he was busy with his personal Kentucky Derby. Overturning that law that he can’t appear on the ballot for both the Senate and POTUS.
A couple of others were also no shows. With only three weeks advance notice, Dr. Ben and Ms. Fiorina couldn’t fit an agriculture briefing session into their schedules before the event. Rubio opted to attend a wedding.
Otherwise it was a full house with notable ag specialists Governors Chris Chris and Jeb Bush and George Pataki and Senators Cruz, Graham and Santorum, the farm boys Governors Perry and Pataki, Governor Walker who grew up near farms (and his daddy was a preacher), and Governor Huckabee who may or may not have preached that pray is the best answer for good crops.
Pigs are an Iowa crowd pleaser as the new pig castrator Senator demonstrated. So, JEB! went with it:
Calling the Environmental Protection Agency “a pig in slop,” Jeb Bush said, “We have to begin to rein in this top-down driven regulatory system.” Asked how to achieve that, the former Florida governor said, “The first thing you do is you change presidents.”
That’s called throwing down a gauntlet. And hoping it goes unnoticed that in a combined twelve years his daddy and bro didn’t fix the “pig slob.”
Graham was apparently humorous. (No, not about his “why not run for President?” campaign that some of us thought was a joke.) He and JEB! stood out by supporting some way for undocumented workers in the US to become documented. The “Christian” preacher asked,“What do we do to stem the tide of people who are rushing over because they’ve heard that there’s a bowl of food just across the border?” (Huck and Christie then rushed out because they heard the free donuts and corndogs tent was open.)
On corn ethanol, Cruz (who also has a daddy preacher) was edgy:
“The answer you’d like me to give is, `I’m for the RFS, darnit,’ ” Cruz said. “But I’ll tell you, people are pretty fed up, I think, with politicians who run around telling one group one thing, another group another thing, and then go to Washington and they don’t do anything they said they’d do.”
Papa Cruz might have to do a bit more preaching to those Iowa corn farmers after that his son’s moment of honesty.
Christie is down with ethanol. Christie will verbally kiss any butt (including Sheldon Adelson’s) if that’s what it takes. Santorum moaned about the loss of US manufacturing jobs that may or may not have been in response to the ethanol question, but doesn’t matter because he already answered that one four years ago. The current Iowa front runner, Walker said,
he would continue the subsidies for now but phase them out once ethanol producers are assured access to markets. “I think eventually you can get to that,” he said. “But you can’t get to that unless you deal with market access.”
He either screwed up his talking point or it was code only ethanol producers understand.
It’s going to be a long ten months.
