Giuliani Leaves Two Young Would-Be Supporters Wanting
May 4, 2007
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- As long as you have a crane and a forklift handy, you might as well use them to hold up an oversized -- and I mean oversized -- paper U.S. flag.
So it was late Friday morning in an equipment and parts shed on the grounds of Rexco Equipment, where a somewhat hastily planned Rudy Giuliani campaign stop was held. Word got out to enough of the Republican faithful in the Cedar Rapids area and beyond, and a crowd of 125 got shelter from a light rain inside the shed.
"You here for the event?" a Giuliani staffer asked a senior female as she entered the shed.
She wasn't there to pick up a rough terrain forklift.
Actually, most of the skid loaders and excavators and backhoes Rexco sells to contractors and housing developers were cleared from the shed in favor of chairs and a few small sets of bleachers for the attendees and a platform for Giuliani. A local business was hired to bring in a sound system. The music, almost all country, was selected by the Giuliani campaign. Just how much country music has the Italian-American from Brooklyn enjoyed over the years?
Amid the GOP loyalists ranging from young adults to retirees, two faces stood out. One had a thick chain draped around his neck. His hair was dyed scarlet. The other wore a corduroy jacket with a patch on its back that was attached by four safetypins and said "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols." That's the 30-year-old album by the Sex Pistols that was a punk rock celebration of disgust, nihilism and raw guitar. Rolling Stone helped me write the previous sentence.
They were Kennedy High School seniors James Woodell and Derek Hamilton, 18-year-olds. Are they anarchists? Nothing of the sort. Although, Woodell did lead a group of 20 Kennedy students last April in protesting the school's policy of mandatory attendance for its spring sports assembly. Here, however, they were attentive audience members with "RUDY" signs.
"Rudy's kind of a different face,'' Woodell said. "I think he'll be able to bring the two parties together. It's all politics, no policy anymore."
"It's the candidate more than the party,'' said Hamilton. "It's not like I think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat. I want to vote for whoever I think will run the country the best.''
"It's not about partisanship anymore,'' Woodell said. "We have to move past that if we're going to develop as a nation. Partisanship is what's tearing us apart. We've just done terribly of handling these last few years
"We're just hoping for something to change, something better, so we're trying to fight for that. We believe in voting very strongly, we believe in personal citizen action. We're just trying to get informed about the issues. I think that's a big problem. People just don't know enough anymore. We just don't care, especially the youth.''
Hamilton said his other interests included "life itself, really. I just like taking everything in, like music and philosophy. I'm into studying everything about the universe, like biology and anthropologies."
So these were two bright, engaged kids about to become high school graduates in a month. They also were skipping school.
"We probably should be in class,'' Woodell said. "But we figured it was more important to get active-learning here. This is real-world stuff, not book-learning. This is what's going to matter the next four years when we go vote. This is a big deal. Missing one day of school's not going to kill us."
What the two young men learned from the 45 minutes they spent listening to Giuliani was they weren't in sync with the candidate as much as they thought or hoped they would be. Giuliani was very partisan in his remarks, clearly portraying himself as a pro-Iraq War Republican. That played well to the majority of the crowd, but not so much to the two fellows who can attend the Iowa caucuses for the first time next January.
"Personally, I don't agree with a lot of his policies,'' Hamilton said as Giuliani posed for photos after his speech and question-and-answer session.
"I'm a little bit disappointed that he's a big supporter of the war,'' said Woodell. "He keeps talking about how he's going to cut taxes, but we spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. What else is he going to cut? Is education going to be cut? Are subsidies to farmers going to be cut? I'm just a little bit worried about where he's going to go with this.
"But he's definitely the best on the Republican side. If the Democrats don't get it together they're going to lose to him."
Then the two friends filed out of their active-learning classroom and into that light rain, still holding on to their RUDY signs, perhaps not knowing quite what to do with them.
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