A Year in Iowa

Citizen has many presidential 'horses' to chase

Jan. 30, 2007

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa. -- Tony Loyd is a blogger.
 
He doesn’t have some high-powered blog on a major Web site. His work isn't known to political junkies across the nation and beyond. He's just a 48-year-old man from Cedar Rapids with a video camera and a blog (rfdblog.com). But he has questions for people running for president. Pointed ones.
 
Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, made Cedar Rapids his first campaign stop in Iowa as an official presidential candidate Tuesday night. He met people upstairs in the house of Peter Abolins, who was hosting a fundraiser/rally for his brother, Republican Linn County Auditor candidate Dan Abolins of Marion. Then he went to the basement to do interviews with a few assorted media.
 
The last questioner was Loyd. He asked Brownback if, as president, he would hope to reverse Roe v. Wade, if he would hope to end the death penalty, if he supported extraordinary rendition, and if what he called “Cold War items” in the military budget should be sliced and directed to other national priorities.
 
The answers weren't quite as direct as the questions, though Brownback said he would “appoint Supreme Court justices who would stay within the confines of the Constitution” and is “for a very limited death penalty myself.” On the latter two questions, he instead talked about other measures he supports.
 
Before Brownback joined reporters in the basement, Loyd told me, “I find that candidates are really good at taking your question, making maybe a little segue way statement, and then coming back to being on point and saying what they wanted to say in the first place. And they make you feel really good about that, when they’re never really answering your question.”
 
Loyd would have asked the senator many more questions, but Brownback asked to stop at four. He wanted to return upstairs to mingle with possible Iowa Republican presidential caucus attendees. By then, however, Loyd had become 2-for-2. On Jan. 20, he asked Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards four equally direct questions. The video of that Q &A is on his Web site.
 
Loyd calls himself an independent, though he's helping promote the Cedar Rapids Democratic Party Meetup Group . The “rfd” in “rfdblog” stands for “Republicans for Democrats.”

“I didn't leave the Republican party,” Loyd says on the site. “It was hijacked by neo-cons.”
 
So now his mission is to see as many presidential candidates as he can. “I'd go see (Mike) Huckabee tomorrow at 11 (in Cedar Rapids), but I'll be in Waterloo working.” He said he's a manager of “a large company whose name I won't mention because I don't want to drag them into this.” He doesn't sound like he craves the publicity for himself, either.
 
“I do it for my own benefit,” Loyd said. “There’s a lot of people that read it that seem to get something out of it, just people discovering it, friends e-mailing friends.”

Upstairs a moment later, I told Brownback that he had just spent eight minutes answering that single blogger's questions.
 
“Yeahhh,” he said in what could have been construed as a verbal sigh. “You do expect that, because so many people get information off the Internet. You’ve got to work on the new media and all media. It has changed campaigning, no doubt about that.”
 
But if just 40 Iowans see Loyd’s video of Brownback’s answers, that would be the same number as those who met the senator at this campaign stop, where he spent over an hour. So maybe it behooved him to give Loyd that time.
 
At any rate, Loyd has many other candidates left to interview. “I want to know, and there’s a lot of people out there around the country who want to know what the different horses in the race stand for,” he said.
 
“It’s not what I do for a living, it’s just what I do. And you know what? If nobody reads it, I'd still do it. Writers write, right?”

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