I ran into Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, at the Agriculture Summit in Des Moines. More exact, Texas Ted ran into me. He made a beeline, in fact. Ted likes the camera. He feeds off it. His slender shoulders seem to widen, his chest expands, his eyes narrow into thoughtful repose whenever one is around.
He’d interrupted my cigarette, but I pride myself on preparation, and quickly mustered a question about his views on immigration. He said he was pretty much against it. He wanted the border zipped up and a concrete fence erected—making him the first candidate I’d heard of to propose a great wall along the Mexican border. Furthermore, he did not support any road to citizenship for those who had sneaked into the United States of America. Period.
I am the son of an immigrant who came fifty-eight years ago from Cuba—came legally, Cruz emphasized as we stood out in the chilly parking lot of the state fairgrounds. And I think Americans are agreed that amnesty is wrong, he added.
Cruz was wearing a tie and no jacket. Midwesterners love a guy who takes his jacket off. Makes him look like he knows what he’s doing.
Cruz was shorter than I’d expected, with a tablespoon too much hair product and a suit wrinkled by miles on the cabbage patch stump. The race for the White House had already begun and we were still a year and three-quarters out from election day. But this wasn’t even Cruz’s first trip to Iowa or his second. By my unofficial count, he had made more trips to the Hawkeye State than to the Texas border since becoming the Lone Star State’s junior senator two years prior. Forget the women and children flooding in from Central America. If you wanted to be president, you had to be in Iowa.
That was the conventional political wisdom, anyway. But I wasn’t so sure. The nexus of politicos and media pundits, however, had a stranglehold on the process. They controlled the message, the location, and the rhythms, thereby creating the blandest, most poorly rated, most expensive reality show in the world. Agricultural Summit, ladies and gentlemen. Ethanol credits! Manure retention ponds!
Out there in America they were talking about war and retirement, the workingman who was resorting to turning his underpants inside out to get twice as much use out of them. Regular people were talking about the jobs going to foreign lands and the foreigners coming here to compete for what was left. The inexorable swirl to the bottom. But never mind them. We’re talking compensation to retire farming acreage here!
According to the press handout, there were more than 250 media outlets at the summit. With nothing to do, no stories to tell from the state fairgrounds parking lot, they saw that I had Big Ted on the hook, and they swarmed like fish flies. Ted wasn’t saying much, something about getting back to the values of the Iowa farmer. I had no idea what he was talking about, but a Japanese reporter shook her head appreciatively.
Yes, thank you, Mr. Senator. Domo arigato.
Iowa, by virtue of being the first state to hold a caucus, got the attention first. As far as I could see, the whole show needed to be canceled. But it would roll on for months with a stale energy of its own. I felt sorry for the political press who seemed unaware that their souls were becoming calcified.
Ted went on, puffing like a blowfish at the magnification of attention being paid him: If we allow people who came here illegally to be put on a path to citizenship, that is incredibly unfair to those who follow the rules, he opined.
Biscuits like that had helped make the senator a Tea Party darling and the bus driver of the far-right express. He was a Latino whose stump speech about his father’s “legal” path to the American dream was by now a well-polished plum that recounted a Tony Montana–esque journey from Cuban political prisoner (the old man had actually fought alongside Fidel Castro) to Texas dishwasher to Canadian oilman to American evangelical pastor.
Indeed, Cruz’s immigration stance was a tough yet hypocritical one from a guy taking big money from Wall Street and hoping to get big money from Big Agriculture, the very entities profiting off the labor of foreign workers without working papers.
In preparation for the Ag Summit, Bob and I took a two-hour drive to Denison, a small town in western Iowa. Located in Crawford County, it is chock-full of hog and cattle slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. The sign on the town water tower reads “It’s a Wonderful Life,” an homage to Donna Reed, a local farm girl who made good and starred in the famous Hollywood picture of the same name opposite Jimmy Stewart.
Present-day Denison looked nothing like small-town Bedford Falls. Parked outside the Tyson beef plant at shift change, Bob and I filmed the workers on their way home. To the naked eye, there was not one white or black person filing out of the factory. It was a sea of Latinos. According to the U.S. Census, Denison’s population was nearly half Hispanic, an overwhelming number having migrated from Mexico. This was no accident. Back in the mid-’80s there were virtually no Hispanics living in Denison. The packing plants were unionized and paying more than $10 an hour, with benefits. Across the country, Americans made a livelihood working in the meat plants, bought a house, raised children, sent them to college, and retired. Americans worked these jobs. And the companies made money. But competition within the industry, a push for higher profits, and calamitous union strikes in Denison and across the United States led to steep wage and benefit cuts. Then the Latinos began arriving.
I’ve worked in slaughterhouses in both Alaska and North Carolina. The jobs are grueling, low-wage, and mostly filled by Mexicans. The average hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, had fallen in the nation’s meatpacking plants by 50 percent over the last three decades, according to both government and industry statistics. In the meantime, the retail price of meats—again adjusted for inflation—had gone through the roof. The price for a pound of bacon over those same thirty years, for instance, had risen by 60 percent.
Falling wages, rising prices. So what happened to all the money? It wasn’t at the Los Primos laundromat located at the corner of Main Street in Denison or the Carlyle Memorials headstone company next to that. Had we become a nation of Louis the XVIs unwilling to prepare our own breakfast sausages? Or had we been priced out of the American way of life by Third World labor and a push for profit by the Invisible Hand of Wall Street and their pets in Congress?
One thing was sure, the Third World man was living and working like a burro in Iowa, sending his dollars home where he would convert them into a fleet of taxicabs, or a convenience store, or a discotheque, preparing his retirement as a Second World man. The Invisible Hand had created more middle-class Mexicans than Mexico ever had. And in that time, the Mexicans had become the biggest influx of foreign-born workers in the history of the United States.
The First World man, on the other hand, the one born in Iowa, would lose ground, worry about his home and his retirement because the only export from his small town was his children to the Big City. He would retire a Second World man. That might be encouraging mathematics for the CEOs and the Think Tanks in their employ. But to the First World man, the proposition was a calamity.
As the Agricultural Summit media confabulation was being convened, some of the country’s largest meat producers, including Tyson, were announcing record earnings. Somewhere in those balance sheets lay the answer to declining wealth and earning power in rural America.
In Iowa there are six hogs to every human. And most of the humans are white, Christian, and attached to farming in some form or another. But look past the stereotypes and you see a streak of libertarianism here, a live-and-let-live manner of conducting oneself. Iowa voted for Barack Obama twice in the presidential elections. It was the third state in the Union to sanction gay marriage. And then again, despite its people’s work ethic, Iowa was the top recipient of government welfare to farmers. Tens of billions of dollars of free money to prop up farming poured in every year from Washington, most of which went not to Ma and Pa Kettle, but to the wealthiest agricultural oligarchs. For example, the summit’s host, Bruce Rastetter, had grown so rich from federal ethanol subsidies for gasoline additives that he was able to summon most of the Republican hopefuls to come to the frozen ground of Iowa to kiss his boots. He was also a hog baron, and there was no telling how many, if any, illegal immigrants were employed at his factory farms.
The summit was packed with Iowans in tracksuits and overalls and plaid shirts. They were kept away from the candidates by cordons and wooden barricades. The protesters—Chicken Man, Cow Boy, Growth Hormone Girl, and more—were kept outside altogether and across the street from the pavilion. The press too were forbidden to approach, roped off as the candidates strutted to the stage along a rubber carpet. As a member of the press, one could dutifully watch the officially sanctioned “conversation” between Rastetter and the White House hopefuls from a large video screen, and afterward, if the candidate was desperate or dull enough, he would come to the “spin room” to speak with the press, the room being nothing more than an attached wedding tent just off the toilets—staffed with Latinos.
¡Es una vida maravillosa, mi amigo! It’s a wonderful life, my friend.
¡Sí, sí! Muy cierto, mi amigo. How true, my friend.
There was old Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina, standing around the snack table laden with ham sandwiches waiting to be noticed. Good old Lindsey. A true 1 percenter—I’m talking 1 percent in the polls here, not in the pocketbook. Good old Senator Graham, growing stiff along with the bran muffins.
Hey, there’s Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas. Huck’s drawing a crowd after delivering the best zinger of the day when Hog Baron Bruce asked him about undocumented agricultural workers.
The question is, Huckabee told the crowd, what do we do to stem the tide of people rushing over because they have heard that there’s a bowl of food just across the border?
It got big applause, what they call red meat for the base, but it was more hypocrisy all the same. Tyson Foods is based in Arkansas. John Tyson was a big contributor to Huckabee. Tyson and Huckabee are great pals. Huckabee granted in-state tuition in Arkansas for the children of undocumented immigrants. This guy was a walking contradiction. I wormed my way close: Hey Gov, you been to Denison? If we run all the illegals out of Iowa, who’s gonna butcher the bacon?
Huck half dodged the question with an answer about securing the border first and then worrying about the illegals after that, which said nothing about the workers and deteriorating wages today. Perfect politico response. Blame it on Washington. Refer the problem to Washington. Wait thirty years for nothing to happen in Washington. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. In the background, Huckabee’s sour-faced handler was silently motioning for security to have me hauled out of there. She looked like a spawning salmon as her lips pantomimed the words: Get him out.
No problem, lady, I got what I needed, which was a whole lot of gas, nothing, emptiness. I’ll show myself out. As Bob and I stepped away from the surging scrum, another camera filled our space.
The scene was what is known in the business as Bad TV. No access. Empty sound bites. Blue power suits. This would never do for our local viewership across the country. You want empty political-speak, you tuned in to nightly network news or cable TV.
We had to do something, and quick. A friend from a national political magazine pointed out to us that the candidates were arriving by the side door in the so-called “secure area,” where police and Secret Service types were keeping the presidential hopefuls safe and away from Chicken Man. The satellite trucks were also parked in the secure zone, broadcasting the obtuse event live to the world. I was quite sure not a solitary soul in the world was watching.
Bob and I walked around to the gate of the secure zone and I told the state trooper manning the entrance that I needed to speak with the engineer in the satellite truck.
ID please.
NEWS MEDIA PRESS OFFICIAL IDENTIFICATION.
The trooper waved us through.
Not being one to misrepresent myself, I knocked on the door of the truck, introduced myself to the befuddled engineer, shook his hand, asked about his children. Good. Good. Very well then, nice to meet you. Then we stood off to the side and waited for their Lordships to arrive.
First it was Jeb! Please call him Jeb. I put my arm around Jeb, he slid his around my waist. Real pals now, me and Jeb. You in the race, Jeb? My mom wants to know.
Really?
Well . . . no . . . not really. She thinks you’re the lying establishment a-hole. And don’t you believe your pals in the smoke-filled backroom, Jeb. You don’t have a shot. That pathway to amnesty thing for illegals? Brave. Humane. But it’s not going to fly, Jeb. Besides, you’re taking big money from Tyson too. That’s okay. So is Hillary. Good flight home, Jeb. Say hey to your brother.
And hey, where is Hillary, Governor Rick Perry? She was invited by Hog Baron Bruce too. You think she’s shredding email this afternoon? Nothing? You gotta go? Good luck with that grand jury indictment, sir.
Governor George Pataki. Swell guy. Yes, let’s hug it out. New York in the house. I may have voted for you before. I’m not sure. Anyway, sir, you say leave the question of same-sex marriage to the states. But isn’t it all same sex after you’ve been married long enough? Not for you, maybe? Ha! Haa! Good one, sir.
Shit, Governor P, here comes Ted. I’d run. He’s wishing you good luck. Break a leg, he says? Don’t trust him, Gov. He wants you to break a leg, then you just may have to sign up for Obamacare. Imagine the headlines: Pataki Campaign Limps Along. No sir, avoid him.
Of course, Senator Ted, you may just add one little thing to the last ten minutes of nothing you said before. Mmm-hmmm. Yes. Yes. I see . . . Hey, Ted, give me back my microphone.
There’s Scott Walker over there. The front-runner. The union buster. Governor Walker. Governor, sir! A moment. Can you clarify your position on evolution, sir? Is Darwinism a left-wing conspiracy, sir? No comment. Sir? Your flip-flop on ethanol welfare. You’re for it now? Or against it still? Sir, I’m noticing those are Wisconsin plates on your vehicles. Are you using Wisconsin government property to interview for a new job? If so, how is that fiscally responsible . . . sir?
Walker slipped away without a word. Weasel. I knew then his campaign was doomed.
It was obvious something was missing among the Republicans. They were not ready for prime time. Unless this was prime time. If it was, then we were in worse trouble than I’d thought. When the dude in a chicken suit squawking out front is making more sense than the dozen front-runners, you know something was missing. What the Republicans needed was someone with pizzazz, someone possessing some sizzle. Collectively, this field was a subprime slab of meat: Vienna weenies, flank steak, chuck filet. Pick your metaphor.
What this show required—and would soon get—was some red meat royalty, a Sir Loin of Beef wrapped in bacon and dipped in Marla Maples.