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I drove to Iowa and back yesterday, about 10 hours in the car for a handful at the Iowa State Fair. What a hoot. So much fun. There are more foods on a stick there than I have ever seen anywhere else in my lifetime combined I think. Pork chops on a stick. Never mind that there's a bone you can hold on to, it's on a stick. The winner, until heartburn kicked in, was Breakfast Sausage Wrapped In A Waffle On A Stick. Holy forking shirtballs was it incredible.
Anyway.
Gillibrand talks like she's reading a children's book aloud to toddlers and I couldn't possibly dislike her more. "EVERYbody told me YOU CAN'T DO IT, and do you know what happened THEN? I DID IT." Like, bruh, you gotta be able to talk to people like they're adults that's just job one of running for POTUS, let alone serving. She's still using that "Clorox the Oval Office" joke, which doesn't land because it starts with the highly implausible "When I'm President....." and you just tune out after that. She brought her kid on the stage with a giant blue stuffed animal and was like "my kid won this....no really he did.....he won it by himself" and after like the fourth time I was like I don't think this kid won this animal solo let's be real here the secret service guys probably shot the eyes out of something for him and now you're parading him up here with your mute husband to be like "Sup, Iowa? I'm just like you!!!!"
Booker closed the day, was impassioned, sweaty, fired up, gave a good stump speech that was all about morality in the United States and ver tough on guns, the crowd was in to him. Admittedly my bias was that the guys I saw all around me wearing camouflage hats and t-shirts with dumb cartoons on them would not be into a message of gun control from a Stanford-educated black guy from New Jersey but even Booker's toughest words on guns--framed around keeping our kids safe and the morality of gun freedom--won applause. I would say I'm probably more into Booker after his speech, he's still not my candidate but he was great.
I didn't see Tim Ryan speak but did see Tim Ryan in an apron pretending to cook pork chops. That's probably the most I need to see of Tim Ryan in this campaign.
Kamala was fine. Like a solid B. She neither made me more interested or less interested in her simultaneously, other than saying that she'd give Congress 100 days to fix guns and if they didn't she'd issue an executive order on the matter. Her attempts at folksiness were hit (re Trump she used the phrase "Dude gotta go") and miss. I can't remember any quotes or anything, but that thing where you're talking to the crowd like you're old buddies and it's not landing for you. I've never really seen her much outside the debates, where she has been awesome once and awful once, and she didn't really thrill me.
Warren, my political crush runneth over for her, I could go on for days about how great I think she is. There's nothing phony or scripted. She's genuine. She also had the biggest and most enthusiastic crowd by a long long margin, with the caveat that Sanders is today and I'm back home in IL so I didn't get to experience him, his speech, his crowd. She spoke about her family and about her journey from poor young woman to US Senate via affordable college. Every candidate made some kind of effort to say "Iowa, I'm just like you" but hers came across as real without her patronizing them. Booker was like "My grandparents lived here" or something similar and Klobuchar was "We can see Iowa from our front porch in MN" and so on, but Warren just told her story without explicitly going "Iowa: I get you, I'm one of you" and it was great. They gave out hand-held fans to the crowd that read "I'm A Warren Fan" which I thought was a pretty clever move. She only spoke for like 10 of her 20 minutes and I thought said more things of substance than Klobuchar or Gillibrand or Kamala did in the full 20. After her speech she spent a LOT of time talking with people, she has that Bill Clinton thing where you can tell she really likes people and is engaged and listening when in conversation with them. It's a very good quality to have, especially since we have a narcissistic egomaniac who lacks the ability to empathize with any other human in there now.
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