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A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Speaking to about 400 people in the county seat town of Audubon, Iowa recently, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said that his personal background, well-chronicled in his two books and by the media, can change the face of America — that when he talks to leaders of other nations they’ll know that as a son of a Kenyan father he has relatives living in another part of the globe.
“I’ve lived in Muslim countries even though I’m Christian,” Obama said.
The line was a winning one that night with the audience in the southwest Iowa town of about 2,200 people 30 miles south of Carroll.
But with only days until the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, some of Obama’s Democratic opponents are stressing that his foreign-flavored biography and family (he has an Indonesian sister named Maya Soetoro-Ng) are no match for the foreign policy credentials of more experienced pols with their stamped-up passports and long lists of nations visited.
“Fresh doubts over Barack Obama’s foreign policy credentials were expressed on both sides of the Atlantic last night, after it emerged that he had made only one brief official visit to London — and none elsewhere in western Europe or Latin America,” The Times of London reports.
When asked about this in a phone interview this afternoon Obama said he’s quite familiar with Europe.
Here is Obama:
I’ve been to Europe multiple times. I haven’t taken an official congressional delegation meeting to Europe, but I have to tell you, official delegation meetings to Europe, that’s not how you get to know Europe. You get to know Europe by its people and its culture and its traditions. Obviously, knowing some of the players there is important. This is sort of the silly season in politics where people try to make assertions like this just to underscore their point which is that there are others who have been in Washington far longer than I have.
When asked specifically about Obama’s foreign policy experience — and the Times report on European travel that Obama disputes — on Christmas Eve, presidential candidate and veteran U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., said he had some thoughts on it because “problems are mounting up by the hour.”
“This is not a time for on-the-job training and I say this with all due respect for people who have just sort of arrived on the scene without any proven ability to bring people together to make a difference,” Dodd said.
Added Dodd, “This is not a time for celebrity here. Iowans know that. They’ve managed to cut through that fraud in the past of celebrity and choose candidates who can go on and win a general election.”
Dodd said he was not making the comments on a personal level but rather as fact.
“If anyone thinks that you’re not going to hear that being wrapped around the neck of a candidate come next fall here, about the lack of experience, they’re deluding themselves here,” Dodd said. “Be prepared as we look at these issues here of having people who have experience, the ability to produce results.”
Some bloggers critical of Obama are making the case that if elected the Illinois senator would be the first president since Calvin Coolidge to have so little European experience.
Former Iowa Lt. Gov. Art Neu, a Republican, said U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton has more experience than Obama. No question there, Neu said in an interview.
“On the other hand we’ve seen people with experience who weren’t very good presidents.”
Clinton frequently notes that she has visited more than 80 nations as First Lady and a U.S. senator from New York.
“That’s certainly one point Clinton has over Obama is on foreign policy experience,” Neu said. “There are so many intangibles you really don’t know who would turn out in the end to be the best president.”
Pedro Rodriguez, an Hispanic activist in Denison, says Obama has a bird’s-eye view of many cultures — something no other candidate in the field has.
“He’s got a knowledge of how to approach things from a different cultural level,” said Rodriguez, 51, a supervisor with a packing house in Denison.
For his part, Obama can make the case that he doesn’t need to travel to understand foreign nations, that through the less formal, deep bonds of family, he connects with the hustle and flow of life outside of the United States.
“As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a U.N. General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe,” Obama writes in his best-selling book, The Audacity Of Hope.
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