Political steak

by Brendan Mackie & Evan Petrie

Six presidential candidates and former president Bill Clinton speak to five thousand last Saturday at the annual steak-fry hosted by Senator Tom Harkin

Former president Bill Clinton speaks to an enthusiastic crowd last Saturday while Tom and Ruth Harkin look on.

photo by Evan Petrie

The hot Air Balloon Field in Des Moines, with its throngs of people, mud and blaring Led Zeppelin music, seemed more like a music festival than an established political gathering. But last Saturday, over five thousand people, sixty-seven of whom were from the Grinnell campus, attended the 26th annual Harkin Steak-Fry, a regular Democratic Party event hosted by Iowa Senator Harkin. This year the steak-fry featured six presidential hopefuls and former president Bill Clinton.

While last year’s steak-fry attracted seven students from Grinnell, this year’s brought 67 students to the Darby parking lot in the pouring rain. The students piled onto an assortment of private cars and a big yellow school bus to get to the event, courtesy of Dean for America.

“It was unusual to see the Dean campaign spend the money it did to provide us with the tickets,”said Nick Fogg, head of students for Dean. Prior to the steak-fry, the Grinnell group was brought to a pre-fry rally where they were treated to a special speech by Dean, and given free T-shirts and posters to parade around the grounds.

At the Dean rally before the main event, Dean highlighted the importance of the internet in organizing the grassroots element of the campaign: “We have a way of spreading the word faster … we don’t have to wait for ‘fair and balanced’ anymore.”

At this moment, Dean is the most popular candidate, with 23 percent of caucus-goers supporting him, according to a recent Zogby International poll. It is unknown what Tuesday’s announcement of retired general Wesley Clark’s intention to run will do to the candidates’ standings.

Bill Clinton was the keynote speaker of the steak-fry, delivering a twenty minute speech filled with jokes and rhetoric.

“Clinton is what [the presidential nominees] are all aspiring to be,” said Jared Swanson ‘04. “Clinton is the unifying force of the party. When he came on stage everyone pulled out ‘We miss you Clinton’ signs.”

“The last election was tight as a tick,” Clinton said, “That election was not a mandate for radical change, but that is what we got.”

Skye Hibbard ‘04 agreed. “What I think Clinton meant is that the last election was a signal to Democrats that we need to become active and engaged in order to ensure that our priorities and values are met by the next president.”

Clinton criticized almost every aspect of Bush’s presidency, from foreign policy to economics. “In a world where you can’t kill or jail all your enemies you’ve got to make more friends and fewer terrorists,” Clinton said.

There was a unifying strain in all the varied speeches: animosity toward Bush and nostalgia for the Clinton era. Howard Dean referred to the Democrats as “the party of fiscal responsibility” and the Bush presidency as “the credit card presidency,” referring to growing national deficit.

“[M]ost people in America would gladly pay the same taxes they paid when Bill Clinton was president,” Dean said, “if only they could have the economy they had when Bill Clinton was president.”

John Kerry’s campaign produced inflatable bludgeoners affectionately called “bushwhackers”, while Senator Harkin compared the Bush presidency with a deviant child who steals the family car and then crashes it.

In his speech Clinton urged Democrats to “be nice to Republicans,” to use humor to highlight the contradictions of the Bush presidency. Clinton noted that Bush has called for the lower class, middle class and the armed forces to make a sacrifice.

“What’s the sacrifice that’s being asked of people who make more than $1million a year?” said Clinton. “It’s the energy that they have to expend opening the envelopes containing their tax cuts.”

“They gave me a tax cut and kicked kids out of after school programs,” Clinton said.

Bristol Ivy ‘07 particularly responded to this portion of the speech. “I felt like when he related the tax cut to himself it made things clearer to know what was being cut so that the upper class didn’t have to pay their taxes.”

Although the Grinnell students in attendance responded most positively to Clinton and Dean, several of the Democratic candidates have support on campus. Dean, Kerry and Gephardt all have student groups.