Monday, October 29, 2007

Fox: Forget Sticks and Stones, Lou Dobbs Really Hurt

STORM LAKE -- Reversing the schoolboy "sticks and stones" rhyme, former Mexican President Vicente Fox says words can hurt.

During a news conference held as part of a two-day visit to Storm Lake, in northwest Iowa, Fox said the anti-immigration rhetoric from some U.S. public opinion shapers is not only driving a policy debate but fanning hatred and even violence. In fact, Fox singled out CNN's Lou Dobbs, known for his strong views on immigration.

"There is confusion that immigrants are terrorists which is abosolutely false," Fox said. "The decision process is being guided by the xenophobics, the Minutemen in Arizona, the violent, and I'm sorry to say violent like Lou Dobbs."

Fox, who served as president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, said language used by some anti-immigration forces spawns more violence than what results from those who would be "using the stick."

"There are many using violent words like Lou Dobbs, which is moving public opinion to divide, which is bringing in violence to local communities," Fox said.

In other remarks during his time in Storm Lake, Fox said the effect of building a wall along the Mexican border is "terrible" for the image of the United States.

"I couldn't conceive anything worse that building a wall."

Fox added, "Walls don't work. The Chinese Wall didn't work against their enemies. The Berlin Wall didn't work against freedom. The West Bank wall is not working and this one won't work. We should be building bridges instead of walls."

A recent report shows Iowa is in desperate need of more workers. Meanwhile, U.S. Census data reveal that a Latinization of some cities in western Iowa is the primary reason for their growth, and that other communities, without the Hispanic influence, are aging dangerously where commercial and industrial matters are concerned.

If ths clear need for workers were being met with Canadians or Germans would there be the level of negative of reacion?

"No, they would not," Fox said.

Fox wonders what happened to the United States of globalization and free trade and competition.

"The champion and the leader today isolates from the rest of the world now that we learn to compete," Fox said.

Over the weekend, Fox spoke four times on the campus of this northwest Iowa private college. Fox is another in a long-time of distinguished speakers to visit the campus of part of the William W. Siebens lecture series. In the news conference, he fielded questions from Iowa Independent and other reporters, most in English but one in Spanish from the western Iowa newspaper, La Prensa.

Lorena Lopez, editor of the western Iowa Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa, said Fox's remarks, while motivating for many in the Hispanic community, were clearly aimed at "Anglos."

"It's not much, every year, every day, that a president from Mexico comes to the United States and speaks English," Lopez said. "I think it is important that he let people know that Mexico and the United States are neighbors and need to work together. He just confirmed that immigrants come here to work and improve their lives and they don't want to be here forever. I liked what he said. He said we need one another. The United States needs part of that labor from workers from another country. Immigrants need the good money that is paid here."

Fox has been in the United States in recent weeks in large part to promote his book, "Revolution Of Hope."

"The book is addressed to my heros, to my beloved Mexicans that are here in the United States, making this economy prosper, bringing in quality of life to every home, making the economy productive and competitive in front the Asian challenge, China's challenge," he said.

Fox said here are some obvious reasons the United States and Mexico are "complimentary" economies.

Mexico's average income is one-sixth of that in the United States, and America needs more labor to see continued economic growth, Fox said.

"As long as we have that difference, that gap, people will be looking for a better life and people will be trying to come here," Fox said.

Fox said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told him that city would "collapse" if it weren't for the Latino immigrants.

Fox's book contains several references to President George W. Bush, including one in which he referred to the Texan as a "windshield cowboy." Fox suggests in the book that Bush is actually afraid of horses.

"It's my first candid impression," Fox said in Storm Lake.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Iowa Independent, La Prensa Interview Dodd



Chris Dodd is interviewed by Lorena Lopez, editor of La Prensa, and Douglas Burns of the Carroll Daily Times Herald and Iowa Independant on 10/25/07 at the Moose Lodge in Carroll.

The interview with the Democratic presidential candidate and veteran U.S. senator from Connecticut is in both Spanish and English with Lopez asking the first three questions and Burns the following four.

Monday, October 22, 2007

4 Questions For Hillary



The Hillary Clinton campaign arranged for local media to spend more than 30 minutes in a question-and-answer session with the Democratic presidential candidate at Sam’s Sodas & Sandwiches in downtown Carroll on Saturday.

The media session took places after Clinton spoke to an estimated crowd of more than 600 people at Northwest Park.

Clinton, a U.S. senator from New York and the former First Lady, fielded four questions fromIowa Independent contributing fellow and Daily Times Herald writer Douglas Burns. Here is the transcript of those exchanges:


Iowa Independent: Senator, Fortune magazine has an interesting story out about how women are finally starting to mentor other women. Having read your book “Living History” you had a very good mentor in Marian Wright Edelman.
Your numbers are really good with certain demographics of women. Your biggest applause line today was with women, when you talked about 90-year-old women coming up to you.

But I have to say over the last eight or nine years some of the most vicious comments I have ever heard in covering politics have come from other women about you. Why don’t women do a better job of mentoring and supporting other women and why do some women have this almost irrational hatred of you?

Clinton: I’m not completely sure. I know that when I started running in New York there were a lot of stories like that, that women wouldn’t support me and that certain kinds of women, professional women, would not support me.

But what I found is that over the course of the campaign that began to recede, and that’s what I’m finding over the course of this campaign.

I don’t know all the reasons for it. I mean some have to do with what people have heard about me or what they think about me and their own lives and their own political leanings. But I don’t really think about that a lot.

I think my job is to get out every day, meet as many people as I can, say what I would do as president, and I really believe that I will pick up more and more support, and that seems to be what’s happening around the country.




Iowa Independent: Senator, a couple of days ago I covered your colleague Sen. Joe Biden who was in a smaller community outside of here (Lohrville). (Former) Sen. (John) Edwards has obviously been campaigning around here, too. And both of those gentlemen have raised concerns that they have with your vote in identifying some of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as terrorists.

Biden spent a good deal of time on it and suggested that you hadn’t learned your lesson from the first vote on Iraq, and that you were complicit in setting the stage to give President Bush carte blanche to start another war.

It’s something we printed. Out of fairness to you do you want to comment on that and defend yourself?

Clinton: I have the highest regard for him (Biden). He’s a good friend and colleague but I think that’s a misunderstanding of what we voted on.

We had 76 votes including people like (Sen.) Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and (Sen.) Carl Levin (D-Mich.) who did not vote in 2002 to give the president authority but who believe that this is a necessary action to force the Bush administration to actually engage in diplomacy.

There is nothing in that resolution that in any way provides authority, and I think if you read it, that’s clear.

Obviously, people don’t trust the Bush administration. I don’t trust the Bush Administration. But the idea behind it was to state the obvious, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard supports terrorism like Hezbollah. They have supplied weapons and advisers to people fighting and killing Americans in Iraq, and we have very few diplomatic options available to us other than sanctions, which we’ve got to figure out how to get more countries to agree with us on.

It’s ironic because many of the people who are criticizing this vote have previously signed on to either identical legislation that calls them a terrorist organization or said something along the same line.

I think what we need to do is take a deep breath and say, look, if your goal is to get the administration to engage in diplomacy with Iran, which is my goal, then it makes sense to give them some leverage.

Giving them the leverage of being able to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard I think makes sense in a diplomatic context.

If I were in the White House right now, I would be having negotiations with Iran. I wouldn’t ask them to give up their nuclear ambitions before they came to the negotiating table because that’s what the Bush administration has done. That means there will never be any negotiations.

There is in the resolution, which you remember is a non-binding resolution passed by one house, there is language from (Defense) Secretary (Robert) Gates saying that this will help us move to diplomacy.

I understand why people don’t trust George Bush, but distrust him but don’t confuse what we voted on with the premise of distrusting George Bush and Dick Cheney.
I sent out a mailing to a lot people with a letter explaining what I voted for with a long quote from Dick Durbin who basically said, “Would I have ever voted to give George Bush any kind of leeway for going to war? Of course not, that’s not what this is about.”

So I just think we ought to just stick to the facts. I can understand some of the rhetorical attacks and the deep-seated distrust we have of Bush, but let’s not confuse one with the other.

Iowa Independent: If you look at the numbers on the people who are serving in Iraq, rural America as you know is serving a disproportionate share of the burden there.

We’re all one or two degrees of separation away from a number of people who are friends or family serving there.

The numbers of people from rural counties are staggering.

Do you have any thoughts on Iraq in many ways being rural America’s foreign war? Are we just more patriotic out here in rural America or do we have less opportunities that are forcing our young people to seek those options instead of college?

Clinton:
I don’t know all the answers. I think some of what you said probably has some truth to it.

When you see Norman Rockwell up on the wall there (pointing to a picture on Sam’s wall) when we think about small-town America we think of really deeply rooted patriotism, a desire to serve, helping out your neighbor, answering the call and so I’m sure that is a very strong feeling in a lot of young people growing up, that they want to be part of that, that they want to make a contribution.
There’s a great history of patriotism and service in rural Iowa. People know about fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers. I think there’s a sense of tradition as well.

I don’t know all the reasons but now that we have an all-volunteer military people make those decisions for all kinds of personal objectives. Some do it to get education money. Some do it to see the world. The thing I worry about is with an all-volunteer military the whole country is not involved. This war has now gone on a very long time. It’s the longest war we’ve ever fought with an all-volunteer military, so I think it’s important that the rest of the country do its part, and we haven’t been asked to make any sacrifice.

As you say, you know people who know people who know people. Many of my friends have sons and daughters serving. I’ve had two members of my staff leave to go and enlist, so I see it all the time, and I do a lot of work with veterans, with active duty Guard and Reserve, and I just regret that the president didn’t seize the opportunity after 9/11 to summon the country to service. Then I don’t think it would be quite so out of balance as to where people are coming from, where the sacrifice is really rooted as it appears to now.



Iowa Independent: On Sept. 12, 2001, I think most Americans assumed that by Oct. 20, 2007, there would have been another major terrorist attack on our soil. We were just expecting that it was imminent. It hasn’t happened.

In your estimation why hasn’t that happened? Has the Bush administration maybe done some things that are good to prevent it or was the threat exaggerated from the beginning?

Clinton: Well, as a senator from New York I don’t think the threat was exaggerated. The terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. They attacked our embassies. They attacked the USS Cole. They have since 9/11 attacked in Spain, Morocco, Great Britain Indonesia, India.

They’ve attacked many other places. They’ve attacked American targets, and I think there are lots of reasons at work here.

If you read what bin Laden has said, which I have, unfortunately, been required to do, he may have gotten what he wanted by pulling us into the war in Iraq. He wanted to sort of suck America into a war in the Muslim world.
So they may have figured that they’ve made some progress, that they’ve used that as a recruiting tool, a training ground. There certainly is evidence that they have been vigorously recruiting and training that we know from Great Britain, Germany, other places.

They’re also very patient. Just because we haven’t been attacked doesn’t mean that they’re not engaged in doing whatever they can to bring that about.

After they attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, a lot of people, including Rudy Giuliani who put his police headquarters back in that area, would have thought, “Well, OK fine.” They were determined to go back to the same place because they feel that sends a signal.

We have done some things better than we were doing. I’ve been deeply involved in trying to make sure that New York City got what it needed to protect itself.
But I don’t think we’ve done enough and I think that there has been an increase in the potential recruits to this cause of extremism, jihadism against the West that is a result of how we handled our response.

Terrorism has been around a long, long time. It goes back thousands of years. Europe was subjected to it during the ’70s and ’80s. You had the IRA in Northern Ireland and in the course of the 30 years of troubles there approximately the same number of people died as in one day with us on 9/11.

We just have to remain vigilant, and we have to be aware that in the globalized, interconnected world it is very easy and a lot of the devices that are used to kill our young men and women in Iraq are easily transportable. There is nothing fancy about them. We’ve got to figure out how to be smarter.

This Q&A is crossposted at Iowa Independent.com.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Storm Lake Times Endorses Biden

In an early newspaper endorsement the Storm Lake Times is supporting U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, Del., for the Democratic nomination for presidency.

Art Cullen, the editor and co-owner of the northwest Iowa newspaper, and a journalist Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Gartner calls one of the two best editorial writers in the state, wrote the editorial that is published today. Biden campaigned in Storm Lake Thursday.

Biden is astounding with his sheer command of world politics and conflict. He has distinguished himself by offering the only workable plan to get us out of harm’s way in Iraq. He advocates a loose federal system under which the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds would each control their own territory, somewhat similar to the notion of American federalism. He would remove American troops to a safe distance in friendly environs — Kurdistan and Kuwait, to name two — and let the Iraqis solve their own problems. The Senate on a bipartisan vote recently endorsed the Biden-Brownback plan, which dovetails into the thinking of the most prescient politician on the issue, Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Penn., who led the charge against deeper involvement in Iraq that turned the 2006 Congressional elections.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Biden Looks To Gain Ground On Richardson In Iowa

LOHRVILLE — Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, now making some incremental gains in the polls, Thursday spent more than two hours in Lohrville campaigning with 25 people in that Calhoun County town’s library.

Biden, a veteran politician from Delaware and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sought to portray himself as a steady, experienced hand prepared to lead the nation in perilous times.

“A lot of us tell you what you want to hear, not what you need to know,” Biden said.


He urged people to consider experience in making their caucus decisions.

Calhoun County Democratic Party co-chair Faith Blaskovich, a teacher and long-time library advocate, said she is supporting Biden because he fits the true definition of a “statesman,” which she actually read from the dictionary in introducing Biden.

Blaskovich told Iowa Independent she thinks leading Democratic candidates are pandering to voters.

“That’s what I feel when I hear Hillary talk, when I hear Obama talk,” Blaskovich said, referenced U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

Biden showed a command of old-school Iowa campaign tactics, approaching people and putting his hands on their shoulders and looking intently at them as he answered questions. Biden even got down on bended knee to answer a question from a woman who said she was undecided and would base her vote on Iraq. Using a blank wall as a backdrop Biden at one point pantomimed the history and geography of Iraq and its neighbors.

With the latest Des Moines Register poll showing Biden at 5 percent, up from 3 percent, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson falling from 10 percent to 8 percent in Iowa, a recent Biden campaign memo referenced Richardson twice. Clinton leads Iowa in that poll with 29 percent followed by former U.S. Sen. John Edwards, 23 percent, and Obama, 22 percent.

“All of them combined, including Richardson, do not have as much experience as me,” Biden said.

Biden mentioned Richardson several times Thursday in Lohrville, saying the New Mexican’s plan for troop withdrawal from Iraq was ill-conceived and unrealistic, and could leave Americans at risk in the exit strategy.

The Delaware senator also contended that he has deeper relationships with international leaders because of his years of foreign policy work in the Senate. Richardson, a former U.N. ambassador, frequently references his international credentials and claims they are superior to others in the Democratic field.

When asked by Iowa Independent if the many references to Richardson specifically in his speech and answers to questions from the Calhoun County audience revealed a strategy for moving into the key fourth spot in the polls — a place from which he could pull an Iowa upset — Biden said he and Richardson simply have a “friendly competition.”

“I have liked him for years,” Biden said.

Biden challenged Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s vote on a non-binding measure sponsored by U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, a move some senators, like Virginia’s Jim Webb, see as setting a pretext for another war.

“The president, I think, is hell-bent on going to war with Iran,” Biden said.
He said the resolution gives President Bush an opening for military action with Iran.
“What do you think that does for George Bush?” Biden said. “Look how he bastardized a resolution we gave him to stop a war.”

For his part, Biden was successful recently in getting a plan passed in the Senate 75 to 23 that, according to the Baltimore Sun, requires the United States to work to support the division of Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions, each governed locally by its dominant ethnic and religious factions, the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.

The regions would have dominion over police protection, jobs, utilities and other municipal functions, supported by a weaker federal government in Baghdad. All three regions would share in the country’s oil revenues, The Sun reported.


Biden’s Lohrville stop came after a long day of campaigning in western and central Iowa. He had appearances in Storm Lake, Laurens, Cherokee and Sheldon as well.
In Lohrville, Biden spent his time almost exclusively on foreign policy and Iraq.

He did make some references to the economy, expressing concerns that China is graduating more engineers than the United States and blasted Bush economics for creating more disparity in the income classes. Biden said the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States made 22 percent of the money last year.

“This economy is out of kilter,” Biden said. “The middle class is getting slaughtered.”

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Obama releases rural plan

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama today released his plan for rural America, one he says blends initiatives for farms with small-town economic development. Obama discussed elements of his "rural plan" with Iowa Independent and other media on a conference call today.

The Obama-crafted plan is not only significant in Iowa and the intra-party process, but also in the general election as studies reveal that rural voters played determinative roles in recent presidential elections.

Highlights of Obama's plan include a limitation of $250,000 on federal farm payments and the banning of livestock ownership by meat-packing operations.


Obama said he hoped elements of the 11-page plan, like country of origin labeling, would not be controversial and have widespread acceptance.

In the area of education, Obama sees strong support of community colleges as vital for rural Iowa, as studies show that large percentages of graduates of these institutions stay in the state and fill skilled positions.

Obama's plan eliminates income taxes for seniors making less than $50,0000 annually.

If that part of the plan gets some play it will be important for the Illinois senator as 64 percent of the people who participated in the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2004 were 50 years or older.

In a revealing statement considering the percentage of Americans who make their living as farmers -- fewer than 2 percent according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture -- Obama said there is a philosophical underpinning to his rural plan.

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson said, “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”


Obama said during the conference call that the plan is the result of a series of 32 rural rountable discussions. Obama was in Adel and Tama personally for the events in those two central Iowa cities.

"Out of the conversations I believe we've developed a plan that will strengthen family farms, will foster economic development in rural communities, will create the kind of sustainable agriculture that will balance the concerns of conservation that I think people in Iowa believe are important and that will also harness the enormous energy that can be obtained from biofuels and other major energy sources," Obama said.

In a previous interview with Iowa Independent, Obama talked about his Midwestern, rural credentials as both a U.S. senator and Illinois state senator who worked on issues in Illinois that are similiar to ones facing Iowans.

Monday, October 08, 2007

Storm Lake Times To Harkin: 'What The Hell' Can Congressional Democrats Do?

Editorial writer Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times, a well-regarded progressive in northwest Iowa, led a spirited dialogue with U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin on the Iowa Democrat's most recent conference call with print and radio media.

Cullen, the editor and co-owner of the newspaper, and a journalist Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Gartner calls one of the two best editorial writers in the state, challenged Harkin to explain what Cullen clearly believes is a lack of backbone from congresional Democrats -- particularly from U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

At one point, the famously blunt Cullen asked Harkin this of congressional Democrats: "What the hell can they do?"

In fact, just moments after speaking with Harkin, a fired-up Cullen penned an editorial entitled, "Cowering Congress."

After the exchange I called Cullen and talked to him about it. Cullen views Harkin as something of a lonely voice and said his questions were aimed at drawing out the senator on the Democratic congressional leadership.

Here is some of Cullen's editorial:

As it stands, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans deserve support in November 2008. At least the Republicans continue to stand on principle, even if it is wrong. The Democrats have not identified the principle that voters handed to them. They need a spine, and maybe they’ll get one before it is too late. But we doubt it, based on what Congress has not done so far.


The following are some excerpts from the Cullen-Harkin exchange.

Cullen: Voters elected a Democratic Congress and if they were hoping for a reform-based farm bill they will be disappointed. If they were hoping to get out of Iraq they'll be disappointed. If they had hoped for a modest expansion in the SCHIP program they're going to be disappointed. And it sounds as if you might be joining the 80 percent of Democrats who are disappointed with the Democratic leadership in Congress ... Are you among those 80 percent who are as fed up with the Democratic leadership as the polls would indicate? Are you among them?

Harkin: Well I just know how difficult it is to make changes especially in agriculture. As I've said many times, Art, you know, this big engine of agriculture doesn't make sharp turns. It has to go around the bend and hopegfully we are bending it a little bit. I think we started a little bit in 2002 with green payments. We'll have a Dickens of a time continuing it. I make no bones about that. As I responded to someone who was diappointed in what we are doing -- the comments you just made -- is the answer to that to put more Republicans in the Senate and House who will go the opposite direction -- or to elect more progressive Democrats?

Cullen: Do Democrats deserve to be re-elected if they can't get us out of Iraq, they can't pass a reform-based farm bill, they can't pass an SCHIP program? What the hell can they do?

Harkin: As I said, one you only have a one-vote margin in the Senate, and that one vote is basically an independent. It makes it pretty difficult.

Cullen: But the problem's in the House isn't it?

Harkin: Not necessarily. Keep in mind also that we're going through a wrenching time of trying to get our budget under control. If we just emulated what the Republicans did for the last five years, and said "to heck with it, we'll just put it on our grandkids backs," we could do some things. But we're saying we're going to have a pay-go budget. We're going to tighten down on things. But the one millstone around our neck is still the Iraq war. When we're spending $12 billion a month that is a big millstone around our neck.

Cullen: Then on your central premise, you've got to get out of Iraq first to do anything else, why are the Democrats laying down?

Harkin: We've got to do two things: Get out of Iraq, elect a Democratic president who gives us a good Democratic secretary of agriculture for what we want to do and a president who has different priorities than this one. That's the answer right there.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Dan in Real Life (Trailer)

Iowa Movie 'Final Season' Celebrates State's Small Schools

A Google search for the phrase "if you build it, they will come," the signature line from "Field of Dreams" and one of the more memorable delivered in cinema history, yields more than 53 million hits, with many of the references citing the exact phrase with its intended meaning.

Such is the power of a baseball movie in Iowa.

Filmed in Dyersville, "Dreams," hit the big screen in 1989.

Now, nearly two decades later, another baseball movie filmed on location in Iowa is being released. "The Final Season," a chronicling of the wildly successful Norway High School baseball team, will open nationally Oct. 12. The movie celebrates small town Iowa in 1991 as a rural community, Norway, struggles with an impending school consolidation -- a post-Farm Crisis issue that faced hundreds of hamlets here. Not all of these towns, though, had a baseball team with 19 state baseball titles (and a 20th in its last season, the year examined in this movie).

Here is the trailer:



The town of Norway is expecting to see tourism and other develpment related to its new-found fame.

As for the movie, Tom Wheeler, manager of the Iowa Film Office, says it was filmed primarily in Norway with some work in Cedar Rapids.

"The bulk of the action takes place on the original field," Wheeler tells Iowa Independent.

Besides Iowa native Tom Arnold, the movie features Powers Boothe (in what, if you are moved by trailers, looks like a star turn as the cagey old coach), Sean Astin and Rachel Leigh Cooke.

Another main character: the Union Pacific Railroad.

Like other towns along the UP lines in Iowa (including my hometown of Carroll which is split down the middle by the tracks) the trains are a living (almost human) and noisy part of life, forcing people standing within blocks of the trains to suspend conversations until the last boxcar passes.

The UP tracks run right by the field in Norway. It posed problems for filming because of obvious sound concerns. The UP can't re-route its trains or change its schedule to accomodate a movie set so the "The Final Season" team just included the train as a key part of the movie, adding atmosphere and, reportedly humor, to the movie.

"The train is really kind of a character in the movie," Wheeler said. "Some of it is ambience and some of it is disrupting practices."

In fact, the UP is such a star in the movie that locomotives roaring across the nation will soon display promotional designs for "Season" on their sides.

"Season" has a hard act to follow in "Dreams," the latter being the most significant movie filmed in Iowa, for Iowa, Wheeler said.

The classic line, "if you build it, they will come," is a cliche to most Iowans. We are at the eye-rolling point when we hear it in political speeches.

"It's kind of funny to us," Wheeler said. "We're the choir."

That said, it is wonderfully representative of the Iowa work ethic and is pure marketing gold for the state, Wheeler said.

In fact, Wheeler had a Google Alert set up for the phrase. It produced several references recently from all of places The Pacific Islands, Wheeler said.

This story is crossposted at Iowa Independent.com.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Farm Talk: Obama Stresses Rural Illinois Resume

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s biography may best be characterized as one with a wide-ranging geographic background.

But Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois who served in the state legislature there, says he’s very much a Midwesterner — in style (he goes for the practical not ideological) and temperment as well as interests.

In representing Illinois, Obama has parlayed some of his celebrity status, what that can mean when he stumps for other candidates, into, among other things, legislation he believes will provide significant benefits to the growing biofuels industry.



As a result of Obama-championed legislation gas stations are now eligible for tax credits for installing E85 ethanol refueling pumps. The tax credit covers 30 percent of the costs of switching petroleum pumps to E85. The tax credit will help create the infrastructure to support more flex-fuel vehicles. Obama also sponsored legislation requiring oil companies, that made at least $1 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2006 to invest at least 1 percent of their total reported first quarter 2006 profits into installing E85 pumps.

“We still don’t have enough places where people can buy the stuff (E85),” Obama said in an interview. “As a consequence, not enough people are purchasing flexible-fuel vehicles and we’re not seeing enough of a growth in the market.”

Obama thinks the federal government can send a strong message with its own purchasing decisions.

“One of the things that we can also do is have the federal government have a fleet of flexible-fuel vehicles to sort of spark the market to encourage the use of what is a cleaner burning energy, cleaner burning fuel,” he said.

Aiming for a multi-faceted approach to development, Obama is crafting a rural affairs strategy that is expected to include calls for investment in broadband Internet, wireless networks and doing energy “right” to tap into the potential for an “enormous job creator” in rural areas.

“The priority has to be economic development in these areas,” Obama said. “Young people recognize great quality of life in rural areas but if they don’t have jobs where they can afford to raise a family they’re not going to live there”

Obama said it’s vital to coordinate rural development with community colleges and other schools.

“Finally, we have to make sure that local communities that are trying to bring industry into the area are given the kind of community development block grants and other resources to help them attract businesses to the community,” he said.

Obama is certainly not the only candidate in the presidential race appealing to rural voters, talking about interests in the countryside. But Obama, who spent his younger years in Hawaii and Indonesia and later attended college in California and New York before moving to Chicago, notes that his work in Illinois has provided a solid, Midwestern understanding of issues in Iowa.

“There’s no doubt that as a consequence of living in the Midwest I’m very familiar with many of the issues that we’re dealing with on a regular basis in Iowa,” Obama said. “You’ve got a very similar economy when you’re talking about downstate Illinois. We are highly dependent on agriculture. The farm economy is important. I’ve spent a lot of time on family farms and talking to farmers and working on legislation that is of import to them.”

But his connection with the Midwest goes beyond that, Obama said.

“There’s a certain common sense we pride ourselves in the Midwest,” Obama said. “People I think are less ideological and less concerned with scoring political points and more concerned with just getting the job done. I think that attitude is one that the American people are looking for from their next president.”