Lazy days, busy pols - Tom Tauke's Senate campaign against Tom Harkin in Iowa

National Review, July 23, 1990 by Richard Brookhiser

I had come to the Burlington Steamboat Day Parade to see Representative Tom Tauke (R., Iowa), who is challenging Tom Hark-in (D., ADA: 95) for his Senate seat. It was a summer day of that hellish heaviness peculiar to places that are hundreds of miles from any coast. But my heart leapt up when I saw the paraders. There were twirlers, bagpipers, and square-dancers. There were fezzed Shriners on motorcycles, making figure-8s. There were a T-Bird, a Packard, a Chrysler Airflow, and a Ilama in a truck. There was a man in a bathtub dressed as Spuds Mackenzie (how he avoided death by dehydration I don't know, unless he had a Bud in his muzzle).

The Tauke campaign's contribution to the line of march was a pickup truck with a three-foot-tall plush elephant roped to the hood. Tauke workers ranged up and down the curbs, passing out Indian feathers with the message, I'M FOR TAUKE, on the headband. (A brilliant stroke: what Democrat is going to tell his kid, "Pull that off, you're not a Republican Indian"?) But their best attraction was the congressman himself, who preceded the truck on foot, simply bounding with energy as he criss-crossed Main Street, waving and shaking hands. I could barely walk upright; I admired the performance enormously.

It was more than an exercise in Americana, however, for a late-May poll commissioned by Iowa NBC and CBS TV affiliates showed Tom Harkin at 46 per cent, only nine points ahead of his challenger-soft support for an incumbent this far before Labor Day. The humidity-resistant congressman has a good shot at replacing him. Part of the reason is local patriotism. Iowans have a habit of turning out incumbent senators-no one has won this seat twice since 1966-and the suspicion that a lawmaker has forgotten his roots is a large factor in this pattern. Tauke exploits this determinedly: Tom Harkin's 'home" in Iowa, he says, is a post-office box, and less than a fifth of the money Harkin has raised so far has come from Iowa.

Another important component of Tauke's campaign is his tone of voice. The day before I arrived in Burlington, the state Republican Party took the occasion of Flag Day to tweak Harkin on the issue of flag burning. Tauke feels that the Supreme Court erred in equating action and speech, but he also says he wants to avoid "taking a few emotional issues and exploiting them to divide the electorate." His manner is earnest, informed, slightly high-school-teacherish. There were moments, frankly, when I missed Al Sharpton. But Iowa is a state with a strong tradition of goo-goo highmindedness, and this is probably the right way to approach it.

Tauke's position on taxes and spending is that he takes a dim view of both. "George Bush was right in 1988: No new taxes."' (Better change that, Tom.) What would you do with the peace dividend? he was asked at one stop. "If you stop spending money you don't have," he replied, You have an obligation to save it."

Tauke believes there should be a peace dividend, for his defense and foreign-policy views reflect the dovishness which has been roosting in the Midwest for 75 years or so. He tells his audiences that he opposed 'the Ronald Reagan build-up." He wants to cut the number of American troops abroad now-"we can't continue to defend the borders of Europe." He is, however, a supporter of SDI, in order to prevent Third World weapons ... landing on Cincinnati or some place."

On the social issues, the word "empowerment" has spread among Republicans like the kudzu vine, and it has taken root in Tauke's rhetoric. His wife, Beverly, worked in the CabriniGreen projects in Chicago, and he cites them as a text for a sermon on the need for tenant management. He supported George Bush's approach to child care-aid to families, not social workers-before Bush did. For twenty years," he says, "the incentives of our social programs have been for dependence, not independence."

The one emotional- issue that can't be handled in high-school fashion in Iowa this year is abortion, and Tauke is prepared to meet it head-on. Harkin is pro-abortion down the line; Tauke wants a constitutional amendment recognizing "the personhood of the unborn." "When NARAL comes into the state," Tauke says, "I'm not going to sit back and take it." He won't have to wait long. Abortion inflamed the Democratic gubernatorial primary this spring. The Des Moines Register, which endorsed Tauke in most of his congressional races, will undoubtedly go with his opponent on account of this issue.

Tauke's opponent, the junior senator from Iowa, calls himself a populist, and his voting record is indistinguishable from those of many liberals. But Tom Harkin's roots were in the Left. He was the photographer, accompanying a congressional fact-finding trip, who snapped the South Vietnamese "tiger cages"-oubliettes in which the Saigon government supposedly stuffed its enemies. The "tiger cages" were not in fact as hellish as Harkin shot them, but his pictures, when they appeared in Life, did their bit to persuade America that the South Vietnamese were unworthy of freedom. When Harkin's first run for the House failed, he incubated at an EPS spinoff in Iowa until his next try, in 1974, which succeeded.