“First’s” new, ah, Iowa correspondent follows up here on his first pass at Beto. This reporter will look to provide close-ups of other Democratic candidates as they roll through Iowa in the coming months…
Sandwiched between two splendid spring days, Sunday April 7th here in Iowa City was dreary enough to make attractive our planned attendance at Beto’s “town-hall style” appearance, so the Boys and I got ourselves there. The hall was on the second floor (Beto as second-story man?) of a university building (thus reinforcing that “town” was indeed for style points), and we had to sign in before being allowed to ascend. At the stairs there were security guards who checked our passes (Beto bumper stickers) and searched any bags that were being carried. They were older Iowa men in bright Hawkeye Gold shirts and did not inspire either fear or confidence. A few uniformed police were also in evidence.
The hall, a ballroom with a stage at one end and a balcony up along one wall on which photographers and their equipment were perched, was neither the largest nor, one hopes, the best ventilated in the building. The crowd, which would number some 200, was diverse, in our Iowa City sort of way: a handful of African Americans; somewhat more Asians; no notable skewing female or male; tattoos not much in evidence; and while baseball caps were common, backward-wearings were no more popular than were tattoos; ages ranged from infants to elderly.
Although the age range was large, it was skewed. The Boys had previously attended a Sanders event, also on campus, and one of them noted that Beto’s crowd was older than that for Sanders: lots of “grey hair and no hair” at this one, but not so for Sanders, whose crowd had been predominantly young. The crowd here was gathered around a raised platform and walkway, a sort of thrust theater stage/podium, that formed an isthmus upon which Beto would walk and pace amidst, yet above, the sea of anonyms gathered round, and below, him.
Eavesdropping my way around and through the crowd as we waited, I (over)heard nothing about Beto or politics more generally. People were talking about their immediate lives; all politics may be local, but not everything local is politics, it seemed. Our congressional representative, a Democrat first elected back in 2006 and, before that, a professor at a nearby, small, good liberal-arts college, was present, moving about, shaking hands, engaging in nearby, small, good, liberal talk. I spoke briefly with him, about the college where he had worked, which seemed to animate and please him before he had to move on.
Then music started. Rock, which I, inevitably, did not recognize at all. I asked one of the Boys, who, also inevitably, did: “AC/DC”. Beto bounded out, wireless microphone in hand, Hawkeye baseball cap on his head. He immediately started thanking, beginning with “the AC/DC”, eliciting a smile from my Boy.
Beto wore what I guess is His Look for the campaign: sleeves rolled up on an open-collar shirt that’s tucked into belted jeans, bottomed-off with soft shoes (the better to dance you with?). It works well. He’s tall, broad shouldered, and slim through the waist and hips; he rowed heavyweight crew in college, and it still shows. The jeans could, I suppose, be a bit more fitted, but I also suppose that none of this is accidental or left to chance, and, for whatever reasons, that’s not the Look he (and his) want to project..
Beto was suitably high-minded and, no doubt, inspiring. He also, as one Boy noticed, speaks in long sentences, pretty much all of them full and completed, though often enough circuitous as well. A recurrent theme was that we “got trouble[s], my friend[s], right here, I say, trouble[s] right here in [Iowa] City” and that only We All can solve them. Undaunted by the Iowa provenance of Meredith Willson, Harold Hill, and the Music Man, and despite one’s expectation and his reputation, Beto did have at least a couple of surprising moments.
One came when talkin’ ’bout an education. After paying his obligations to student-debt, he said that those who graduate high school but do not seek or wish further formal schooling should be “career ready” and that there should be apprenticeships available so that they can move into good UNION jobs. Yes, he said “union”—not what one has heard from most Democrats in this century and the last part of the previous. As I have been reminded, over that same time period those good union jobs have been intentionally destroyed. One might, then, take it that Beto wants to change that state-of-affairs . . . one might.
The other moment was about (im)migrants and refugees. He spoke at length on this, not implausibly stressing his El Paso credentials, but that wasn’t what stood out. It was when he told the (well-known) story of the MS St. Louis in 1939 carrying Jews escaping from Nazi Germany (the “Voyage of the Damned”). Beto’s point was that it was Democrats—led by “President Franklin Delano Roosevelt”—who refused to let the ship land in the US. It was Democrats who refused to accept any of the Jews. It was Democrats who more or less said that the US was “full”. Therefore (!) it’s not enough now merely to (correctly) oppose the Don Trump Family and the Donaldicans on this. No: We All are responsible when the country acts, so We All need to get together, We All can’t be divided by partisanship or party or (fill in the blank), We All have to make things right because only We All can . . . or so We All were told. And a tallish Beto shall lead us/US, presumably.
He is very good, and one can sympathize with his saying he was “just born to be in it” about the POTUS potlatch when seeing just how passionately at home, how vehemently comfortable, he is on his pedestal. There were tells, of course: “Medicare for America” (not “Medicare for all”); “access to healthcare” (not “healthcare”); and, more generally, responses (not answers) to questions, most tellingly on this day concerning the Middle East, despite his characterizing as a “racist” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (whose name surely ought to be transliterated “Netenyahoo”). I could not help but think of our Congressguy, and how it was totally unimaginable that he might be Up There instead of Beto. Congressguy has years in The House, and years before that as a professor, so he’s very practiced in standing and talking to more-or-less interested folks, but it’s hard to think of him as having, or conceiving of himself as having, an audience in the way that Beto appears to.
Now, to be a bit fair, there’s nothing in principle wrong with having–and enjoying–an audience in this sense. An audience in this sense has to be live and therefore many, but not all, sorts of performers have them. (There is a story about movie megastar Marilyn Monroe entertaining tens of thousands of troops in Korea and telling her then-husband about having thousands and thousands of people screaming and yelling and clapping and whistling for her: “You can’t imagine what it felt like!” “Yes I can,” replied Joe DiMaggio) The rest of us often value performers for their ability to, as we like to say, “feed off of” the audience, and it’s easy enough for that rest of us (well, one of us, at least) to imagine that after having had such experiences, performers would want more of them.
But the “but” is obvious: being an elected public official in an (official) democracy is not being a performer, and (potential) constituents aren’t an audience. Of course there are moments and aspects of campaigning that (seem to) require performerism, and of course there are moments and aspects of being constituents that can overlap with audiencing. But just as it is wrong to choose a boss to “run the country” so it is wrong to choose a performer who “connects with the electorate.” We All can do better than that.
The question period revealed some of what needs to be better. Many—most—of the questions came from the assembled Agenders (persons-with-an-Agenda—the folks who could have ruined Oscar Wilde’s evenings). That’s no surprise, given the occasion and its place on the calendar (close to a year before the Iowa Caucuses), nor were the agendas (e.g., climate/energy, Middle East, Judiciary, Sexual Assault/Rape on campus). Two questions stood out, however. They were long, repetitive, personal, anguished-too long, too repetitive, too personal, too anguished. One was the last question of the event. The speaker was clearly someone with what we today call “mental health issues” and who in an older, cruel/der idiom would have been styled “mad”, I think. It was incoherent and painful to hear. The other was a self-identified expatriate who spoke in general about the unfair tax situation the nine million expats face, and then went into excruciatingly specific detail about one such case (guess whose). It was, indeed, excruciating–and unintelligible. Beto responded to each with thanks for their presence and for their speaking,and allowed that he didn’t know much about their respective situations but he would be open to learning more.
One noteworthy feature of the questions was an unexpected convergence between the Agenders and the Two. Neither opened a space for dialogue, or perhaps better, dialectic. That, among other things, was obviously so with the Two, but was really not (much) less so with the Agenders, with their well-prepared texts and minds. Given a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the exteriority of the Agenders and the solipsisms of the Two, what seems needed is some stance for more ordinary citizens to inhabit, one that affords civic (not civil) communication inside that gap. To his credit, I think Beto senses this need, but I don’t think he understands what it doesn’t take: “I would not lead you into the promised land if I could,” explained Eugene Debs, “because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out.” (Sanders, by the way, made a documentary about Debs back in 1979.)
My own thoughts about the event return less and less to Beto and more and more to the Two. It is their indignant sense of being wronged, their obvious feelings of distress, and their plaintive need to speak, even in a setting that made so little sense, that stays with me. Their distinct but somehow overlapping needs are no less real than the need for civic dialectic, but surely require their own respective (and respectful) solutions. I am reminded: Attention must be paid. But where? But how? And by We All . . . ?