Des Moines, Iowa: They heard a paean to the newly planted corn “when hope springs eternal.” They heard a promise to launch a drone attack on any American thinking of joining Daesh. They heard a candidate noting this was his latest stop on “the rubber-chicken circuit.”
More than 1,300 Republican stalwarts at the Iowa state party’s Lincoln Dinner listened to the biggest field of 2016 presidential hopefuls to visit the state so far. In tightly paced speeches of 10 minutes each, 11 contenders displayed the broad spectrum of ideologies and personal styles in the party’s unsettled, chaotic race.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, whose supporters had bought nearly a dozen tables at $750 (Dh2,754) apiece, delivered one of the most unusual speeches, describing an operation on an unborn twin whose head was dangerously swelling, meant to show his ability to solve problems despite his lack of governing experience.
The formally dressed crowd was more subdued than the audiences at gatherings of specialised interests such as evangelical Christians. The crowd never came to its feet during the evening. Red-meat lines that draw whoops in other rooms fell flat in a cavernous convention centre ballroom in downtown Des Moines.
The biggest reaction of the night was to a borscht-belt line by Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, about whether a woman’s hormones would prevent her from serving as president.
“OK, ladies, this is a test,” Fiorina said. “Can anyone think of a single instance in which a man’s judgement was clouded by his hormones?”
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who broke into the top tier of candidates by exciting a conservative Iowa crowd in January, was more subdued. Instead of a fiery description of his battles with unions, he told of a recent helicopter tour of Israel and showed a 40-year-old photograph of himself and his brother holding an Iowa flag. He had raised the money to buy it for the city hall as a child in Plainfield, Iowa.
Inviting the audience to join him in a party suite after dinner, he promised, “We’ve got cheese, we’ve got ice cream, we’ve even got a Harley parked.”
Jeb Bush, who earlier in the week disappointed many activists by announcing he would skip the Iowa straw poll this summer, was probably the candidate with the biggest question mark over his head. On a sweep across the state Saturday, starting in Dubuque, Bush continued to clean up remarks he had made about the Iraq War.
“I was asked a question; I answered the question wrong,” Bush said after a fund-raiser in Iowa City. “We’re all going to make mistakes.”
Bush, who is lagging in Iowa polls even as he far outstrips the field in fund-raising nationally, assured Iowans that he would not skip the state if he enters the race.
“I’m going to campaign here,” he said. “I just don’t do straw polls.”
Turning the question back on reporters, he said: “Can I ask you a question? I mean, would you aspire to fourth place in anything, or sixth place? That’s out of my DNA.”
Earlier, in a closed-door fund-raiser, Bush, whose positions on immigration and education are out of favour with some conservatives, delivered a message that implicitly criticised the party’s most ideological elements.
“We lose elections because of the harsh voices of some in our party,” he said, his words audible through the walls.
He urged the Republican crowd to “get outside our comfort zone,” specifically by campaigning in Latino communities and “in places that Republicans haven’t been seen in a long, long while.”
Few of the candidates at the Lincoln Dinner took swipes at one another. An exception was Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who took subtle, but unmistakable aim at Bush for saying last week that he would have invaded Iraq in 2003, even knowing what he knows today.
“The question was asked of one of our candidates this week: Was the Iraq War a mistake?” Paul said. He never gave his own answer.
Paul also engaged in a volley with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina over the legality of collecting bulk telephone data in the name of national security.
Paul, who opposes it, said, “Must we be so frightened that we give up on what our founding fathers fought for in order to catch terrorists?”
Graham, one of the Senate’s military hawks, has supported bulk data collection. It was Graham who said he would order a drone strike on Americans thinking of joining Daesh and dispense with getting a judge’s order.
A more common target was Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democratic candidate. She was called unfit to be president by Paul because of her failure to protect the US ambassador to Libya in Benghazi in 2012, when she was the secretary of state, and by Fiorina for dodging questions from the media.
Fiorina, the most regular critic of Clinton in the Republican field, said that since declaring her candidacy last week, she had answered “372 on-the-record questions,” including whether she laced into Clinton because she was a woman.
“I’m criticising Hillary Clinton because I come from a world where a title is just a title and actions speak louder than words,” Fiorina said.
