Thompson's Iowa closing tour
Posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 7:31 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC/NJ’s Adam Aigner-Treworgy
CORALVILLE, Iowa -- Day two of Fred Thompson's "The Clear Conservative Choice: Hands Down" bus tour rolled through the Iowa River Power restaurant here today for a radio town hall with KCJJ. Today's was the second in a series of daily radio town halls that the campaign is holding throughout this bus trip.
The most interesting exchange of the afternoon came when a Native American man in the back of the room asked Thompson a question about what the government could do to improve life on Iowa's Indian reservations.
"We've got rules and social safety nets for everybody in this country," Thompson said. "We've got special rules for Native Americans, and they have special rights in some respects, but where are we falling short? Where are we missing the mark in terms of what you think the federal government ought to be doing?"
The man -- who said he was rancher and a member of the Meskwaki Tribe out of Tama, IA -- launched into a long response that spanned the need to honor the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, Clinton's failure to pardon Native American activist Leonard Peltier and the need to "introduce something from the corporate America that will help them, so we're not relying on the government so much."
Seeming a little overwhelmed by the breadth of the man's concerns, Thompson responded by saying he'd "look into" it: "You've raised my consciousness level on some things that I'll look into,” he said. “I can't give you a lot of answers to what you're talking about in old treaties and Leonard Peltier."
The final question of the afternoon was on the need to become energy independent, and Thompson responded by taking a subtle dig at the frontrunner in Iowa, Huckabee, who often pledges to help America become energy independent in five years.
"One of the great opportunities we missed after September 11 was to have a renewed dedication of the American people to doing the things necessary to diversify us from an energy standpoint," Thompson said. "Now don't let anybody kid you that we're going to become energy independent in five years or 10 years. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. That's a politicians promise, and they probably know better, and if they don't know better I think that's even more troublesome than if they do know better."
On the nature of the bus tour, which continues through the weekend, the "hands down" portion of the tour's title was added after Thompson's performance in last week's Des Moines Register debate.
When moderator Carolyn Washburn asked for a show of hands for which GOP candidates believed global warming was a serious problem caused by humans, Thompson refused to participate and when asked why, he demanded a whole minute for his answer. The campaign trumpeted this as a very Reagan-esque moment, and Thompson's campaign manager Bill Lacy even sent out an e-mail to supporters comparing it to a similar moment in Reagan's 1980 campaign "when he refused to kowtow to a belligerent moderator."
Today, as he prepared to take questions from the audience, Thompson asked questioners to raise their hands saying, "It sounds kind of funny for me to be telling other people to raise their hands. I won't do it anymore."
This tour is the Thompson campaign's closing argument with voters in Iowa. As the bus tour kicked off yesterday, his press staff circulated some statistics. According to the campaign, Thompson has spent 14 days in Iowa since he announced his candidacy on Sept. 6. He will spend 15 days between the start of his bus tour and the Iowa Caucuses. It's hard to say whether those numbers show how dedicated the campaign is to doing well in Iowa, or how neglectful they were of the Hawkeye State for the past three months.
Today, when asked what he can do on this bus tour to woo the large number of undecided voters, he said, "People who I think are serious about their country and are going to elect a leader for the United States of America and the free world and not base their vote on how many times somebody visited Iowa, quite frankly, are going to be people that at the end of the day, I think are going to think real seriously about supporting me."
So what does that mean for voters, Iowans, in particular, who do base their support on how many times a candidate has visited Iowa?
