Cory Booker visits Iowa in first campaign stop, talks Medicare, education, farming

MASON CITY, Iowa 2019-- This is where Cory Booker’s presidential campaign began in earnest Friday: in a 27,000-person city in Northern Iowa, where vicious winds whipped snow across the roads and the minus-eight air temperature felt like minus 30.

Hundreds of miles from gritty Newark, N.J., the former mayor and now New Jersey senator began his first campaign swing as a formal candidate, meeting with Iowa Democrats as he tried to convince party faithful to choose him next year, above a teeming crowd of contenders.

A week after announcing, Booker found an audience of more than 100 who filled folding chairs in the basement of the First Congregational United Church of Christ. There were glazed donuts on a table, and Booker 2020 signs taped to a green chalkboard. He took questions on health care -- suggesting that expanding Medicare to people aged 55 and up might be more attainable than Medicare for all -- college costs, the $15 minimum wage, and, this being Iowa, farming.

But first, Booker, began with a flub, thanking the bundled-up gathering for coming to see him on a Saturday morning. “Friday!” they called back in correction, many laughing.

He told the group he was there, a senator and presidential candidate, because of “a conspiracy of love,” returning to one of his catch phrases and tying his campaign theme around his life story. He described how real estate agents had excluded his family from suburban Harrington Park, N.J., until they took part in a sting operation to expose the racial discrimination. When the Realtor realized what happened, Booker said, the man sicced a dog on the senator’s father.

“Every time my dad would tell the story, the dog would get bigger,” Booker said, to more laughter.

His opening went for about 20 minutes, before Booker turned to the famous civil rights march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. He described how a lawyer in New Jersey watched the police beating the marchers that night, and decided he had to act -- and would later become the attorney who helped his parents move.

The audience was rapt, and one woman called out “oh” as Booker brought the point home. He cited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s saying that people are tied together “in a single garment of destiny.”

“I am running for president because that garment, that fabric, has been ripped, it has been torn and we must repair it,” Booker said. When he later concluded, he drew some of his most enthusiastic applause by saying “I don’t think that you are going to win back this country by talking about what you’re against. You have to talk about what you’re for.”

His prepared remarks never directly mentioned President Donald Trump.

He frequently, however, told the crowd heavy with Iowa Hawkeyes gear that he played college football - and also proved he’s adept at doing his homework.

At one point, Booker talked about putting more rules on CAFO’s (pronounced K-foes), or confined animal feeding operations, often called “factory farms” by opponents. The facilities, common in Iowa, are blamed for runoff pollution.

“I was super-impressed,” said Sarah Willis, 50, who previously worked for an all-natural meat company and was surprised that the New Jersey senator had an eye on such a rural concern. She also praised Booker’s upbeat tone. “That opposition message, that negative message, pointing fingers at each other, is tired.”

The stop in Cerro Gordo County was the first event of six in the state Friday and Saturday before Booker travels to South Carolina, a state likely to prove vital to his hopes of winning the Democratic nomination next year. Iowa’s caucuses, as ever, will present the first test for a sprawling and still growing Democratic field.

“I’m shopping,” said Dianne Stoltenberg, a 72-year-old Mason City resident who came to see Booker, but also wants to hear from other candidates.

Most of Booker’s Iowa swing is centered on urban centers where Democratic voters are most heavily concentrated. Rural Cerro Gordo, however, supported Trump in 2016 after twice backing Barack Obama. It was part of a national swing that saw rural regions with Democratic roots break away from the party, and the kind of place Democrats hope to win back if they are to capture vital swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Chris Laritsen, a retired representative for the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, began the questioning by telling Booker he could only support a candidate who backs a $15 minimum wage and “works his ass off” for single-payer health coverage.

Booker is on board with the minimum wage hike, and has co-sponsored a Medicare for all bill, but suggested that smaller steps might be more attainable. He noted that Democrats have to win a lot of Senate seats to advance legislation there, but that they came within a single vote not long ago of advancing a Medicare expansion to people aged 55 and older.

“We’ve got to start looking at what our goal is: full coverage for everybody. And if we don’t have the vote in the Senate how do we build the kind of coalitions necessary,” to get there, he said.

Laristen later said that “if you speak politician, he didn’t answer about single payer.”

But he still said he was leaning toward supporting Booker, though he also liked Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), with whom he sided in the 2016 caucuses.

Asked about college costs, Booker called for allowing students to refinance their loans, and said more apprenticeship programs could help people who don’t want to attend college, arguing that machinists can make more money than new college graduates in their first jobs. He pledged to be “a champion for public schools," despite questions from some liberals about his embrace of charter schools in Newark. He called for paid family leave.

At one point, when a questioner’s cell phone rang, Booker reached into the man’s shirt pocket to take the phone, and say hello to the man’s wife.

And

And Booker defended his support for the Green New Deal, an aggressive plan to make the U.S. carbon neutral by 2030, which has been criticized as unrealistic, and potentially devastating to the economy.

“Our planet is in peril and we need to be bold,” Booker said. “If we used to govern our dreams that way we’d have never gone to the moon.”

He said he was rejecting Super PAC spending and the influence of money in politics, but faced questions from reporters about a college classmate, Steve Phillips, who as recently as Thursday sent out an email seeking donations to his Super PAC to support Booker, and has established a Web site for the effort, dubbed Dream United.

“That’s really frustrating to me,” Booker told reporters when asked about the group. “I don’t think Super PACs should be in this campaign for anybody, including Donald Trump, so I don’t support the Super PAC. I don’t’ want the Super PAC to be there for anyone.”

Asked if he would tell the group to stop its activity, Booker said, “I’m not going to be talking to the Super PACs.” (By law, candidates are not allowed to coordinate with such groups).

For the most part, Booker received a positive reception, though few were ready to commit. . He spoke for about 20 minutes, took questions for an hour and stayed after for dozens of selfies.

"Iowans are used to looking all the candidates right in the eye, shaking their hands and asking them questions,” said JoAnn Hardy, the Democratic committee chair in Cerro Gordo.

“It’s a huge field and they’re mostly on the same page on the issues,” she said, so to stand out a candidate has to “be inspiring, be somebody that we want to work for, that we want to see win."

Above all, she said, Democrats will want a candidate who can win.

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