A Year in Iowa

This time around, Iowa is McCain's audience

Feb. 17, 2007

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- You can't come off looking like the grim reaper if you want to get elected to anything other than, well, grim reaper.

That isn't the easiest thing to avoid when you're 70 years old, you're about to discuss deadly serious global issues, and you're on a campaign schedule that would beat down people a half-century younger. Like Chicago last night, Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa on this day, South Carolina tomorrow, and onward.

So Arizona U.S. Senator John McCain tries to warm crowds with old chestnuts of jokes before soberly explaining why he believes the U.S. must maintain and increase its military presence in Iraq.

"Two inmates at a state prison are in a chow line,'' McCain told a crowd of about 450 this afternoon in a ballroom at the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel. "One of them said to the other one 'The food was a lot better in here when you were the governor.' "

"Do you know the difference between a lawyer and a catfish? One is a scum-sucking bottom-dweller and the other is a fish. There goes the lawyer vote.''

"Following Phil Gramm (who introduced McCain here) sometimes, I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband where on the wedding night he said 'I know what I'm supposed to do, I just don't know how to make it interesting.' That's the kind of line that goes over better at Republican women's club meetings.''

Jokes about Zsa Zsa Gabor's long line of marriages faded from comedians' monologues back when Ronald Reagan was president. McCain referenced Reagan four times here, but in more relevant contexts. But hey, Zsa Zsa is newsworthy again, so maybe McCain's on to something there. Her eighth and current husband, Frederic von Anhalt, filed papers in California this week seeking to establish paternity of the late Anna Nicole Smith's daughter. Which some have found pretty funny in itself.

But McCain is running for president. Like he did seven, eight years ago. Unlike seven, eight years ago, he isn't bypassing campaigning for support in the Iowa caucuses to focus on the New Hampshire primary. He used the phrase "my friends" at least a dozen times in addressing this gathering of people who were almost entirely strangers to him. He's looking for all the new friends he can grab, since his support of the Iraq War and President Bush's intent to send another 21,500 troops there isn't an overwhelmingly popular stance these days.

And, the sprinkling of his old jokes aside, his tone was very serious. So was his audience.

"We lost the Vietnam War and we came home,'' he said. "All we had to do is heal the wounds of that war and of those men and women who had suffered so grievously in that conflict. But (the North Vietnamese) didn't follow us home. If we leave Iraq, I am convinced (Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists) will want to follow us home. Why am I convinced of this? If you read al-Zawahri, if you read bin Laden, if you read these people, it's not Iraq they're after. It's us they're after. It's us. It's the United States of America.

"This is now, whether it was before, another part of this great struggle betwwen good and evil, and real evil as you know it. People that enjoy cutting off peoples' heads on the Internet. People that enjoy torturing and killing people just because they happen to be Sunni or Shiite or some other religion."

Had Joe Biden not changed his schedule on this Saturday, two men with a total of 54 years of service in the U.S. Senate would have been at presidential campaign appearances just three blocks apart on the same Cedar Rapids street. They would have touted two vastly different philosophies on what the nation should do in Iraq. But Biden interrupted his weekend trip to Iowa to fly back to Washington Friday night for Saturday's Senate vote on a nonbinding resolution rebuking the president's deployment of additional troops into Iraq.

McCain called the nonbinding resolution "a publicity stunt," skipping it to stay in Iowa. So, he probably got more publicity from this trip than he would have otherwise.

Funny how that worked out.

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