August 2019 | Rolling Stone | 47
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a child at a department store. Maybe this one?
How about her, or him? This is an extension of
a phenomenon that began in the second half of
the last GOP primary, when the press tried lav-
ishing compliments on the “real” candidates
they hoped would stop Trump. The internet
remains littered with the wreckage of these ef-
forts, in headlines like SIGNS OF ‘MARCO-MEN-
TUM’ FOR RUBIO IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.
Then as now, in their zeal to find someone,
anyone, to beat Trump, the press is once again
too focused on the candidates themselves, ig-
noring warning signs that are almost always sit-
ting right there in front of them, in the crowds.
Winterset, Iowa, a Monday afternoon in July.
AMY AMY AMY read the alternating green and
blue signs on cafe walls, as a packed house
awaits Klobuchar. Gently spinning ceiling fans
mark the passing time in this classic Iowa cam-
paign stop. The Northside Cafe was founded
in 1876, in the heart of Madison County — yes,
that Madison County, the one with the bridges
— and its comfort food, saloon walls covered in
handmade quilts, and entranceway portraits of
hometown hero John Wayne are familiar scen-
ery for campaign journalists.
The rear of the cafe buzzes. Reporters love
Klobuchar. She cracks jokes, gives good quotes,
and reminds everyone of a relative. Maybe her?
“She’s great,” someone whispers from the nest
of tripods. “And funny too!” Some are repeating
their favorite Klobuchar lines, like her bit about
Trump being “all foam and no beer.” This is the
Minnesota version of “all hat and no cattle,” a
standby that holds the record for being told
the most times by the most politicians without
earning a genuine laugh.
Klobuchar plunges into her speech. It’s
border crisis, climate crisis, and jokes about
Trump. “All foam and no beer” takes a turn as
a metaphor for Trump’s tax plan: “All the beer
went to the wealthiest people.”
A 55-year-old cancer survivor named Sue
Baeth ke stands up and asks Klobuchar what
she thinks about H-1B visas. Such visas are for
“specialty” positions, and are supposed to be
used only if companies can’t find a qualified
local hire. In practice it’s an insidious loop-
hole that corporations use to replace high-pay-
ing American jobs with cheap foreign labor —
a kind of government-enabled offshore temp
program.
“Under current law,” Baethke asks, “can
American companies lay off American high-
tech workers and replace them with H-1B visa
workers, and pay them less than U.S. wages?”
“Well, they shouldn’t be able to do that,” says
Klobuchar, losing eye contact momentarily to
take a swig of coffee. She mentions that she’s
working on legislation with Sen. Dick Durbin,
and says, “You have to have these qualifications
in place if you’re going to continue to have H-1B
visas,” which, she says, “we’ll probably con-
tinue to have.”
Thinking the matter settled, Klobuchar starts
to look to the other side of the room. But Baeth-
ke’s husband, Morgan, a lean, bright-eyed man
with a farmer tan and close-cropped hair, inter-
rupts. He asks the senator if she’s going to dothrough comprehensive immigration reform,
which all Democrats are for, she says.
The original questioner, Sue Baethke, tries
to point out that H-1B visa holders aren’t immi-
grants, but Klobuchar ignores her. “It was really
a big deal that we had comprehensive immigra-
tion reform,” Klobuchar says. “It would solve so
much of our problems right now at the border,
if we’re able to give a path to citizenship to peo-
ple that are following the law.”
She turns to the audience. “That’s where this
president has completely failed us economical-
ly, that we don’t have comprehensive reform.”
Klobuchar by now has completely changed the
subject, but no one in the room seems to no-
tice. She moves on.
The event ends. In the Des Moines Register
the next day, Klobuchar will get excellent re-
views, in a story titled ALL FOAM AND NO BEER:
BACK IN IOWA AFTER THE DEBATES, KLOBUCHAR
DOUBLES DOWN ON TRUMP. It cites audience
members at multiple Klobuchar events saying
she’s “steady,” “believable,” “thoughtful,” “in-
telligent,” and “down-to-earth.” It even quotes
an attendee from the Winterset event as say-
ing Klobuchar is like a “female Joe Biden with-
out the baggage.”
After the Winterset event, the Baethke cou-
ple, both old-school liberals, open up. Sue’s
first husband was a farmer who died in the
Eighties. Widowed at the dawn of the NAFTA
era, Sue did what members of both partieswere telling all Americans to do at the time:
She retrained for the post-industrial economy,
getting an IT degree at a local college. She got
a tech job with a financial-services company
whose pitch was “We’ve never laid anyone off,
not even in the Great Depression.”
When Sue met Morgan, the two made a deal.
Sue would be the breadwinner and health-in-
surance-holder. Morgan, with just a high school
education, would work a farm. This worked out
fine until Sue got cancer and lost her job to an
H-1B visa worker in India making 1/20th of her
salary. “My company said, ‘She’s old, she’s sick,
and she’s expensive,’ ” she says. This forced
Morgan off the farm and into the only job avail-
able to a lot of people in the area. He works at
Walmart for $11.50 an hour.
Sue and Morgan say they have been ask-
ing presidential candidates the same ques-
tion about H-1B visas for five election cycles.
They’ve been getting the same answers over
and over, with promises for better enforce-
ment and smart-sounding speeches about
right-minded legislation that will fix things.
This pattern — of politicians who think
they’ve given a good enough answer being met
with still more questions from disgruntled au-
diences — isn’t uncommon. The dynamic that
popped into view in Winterset is one that might
hold back Elizabeth Warren.
Papers like The New York Times, The Wash-
ington Post, and the Boston Globe ran stories
suggesting Warren’s campaign might be fatal-
ly “wounded” before it even began in January,
because of her too-liberal politics and her infa-
mous claim to Native American heritage. But
she persisted and suddenly looks like one of the
favorites. Numerous stories about the Iowa race
point out that she has the largest paid organiza-
tion in the state, with 50 staffers here.
Her policy prescriptions are detailed and
bold, including a two percent overall “ultramil-
lionaires tax” that measures by net worth in-
stead of income (theoretically closing a giant
loophole), along with the cancellation of stu-
dent debt and the breakup of Silicon Valley
monopolies.
In late spring, the same media outlets that
pummeled her in winter began swooning over
a Warren “surge,” in a lovefest that frankly was
just as phony as the previous reports of mo-
mentum for Harris, O’Rourke, Mayor Pete, and
Biden. But at least the pundit predictions of her
campaign dying before birth were wrong.
The problem for Warren is “I’ve got a plan
for that!” is a dubious strategy in an era in
which the campaign promise itself is a declin-
ing currency. On paper, she’s done just about
everything right. But if she advances, voters
will soon be introduced to the fact that plans
and promises similar to the ones Warren is
making have been made many times before.
It’s not a referendum on her but on how much
belief is left out there.
Her “economic patriotism” plan, which envi-
sions the government using levers like the Fed
and the Treasury to protect jobs, has earned
praise from left and right (Tucker Carlson gave
it an “attaboy” on Fox). But theBE THE
CANDIDATE
2020
contender
and self-help
author
Williamson in
Des Moines in
June. “The
political
establishment
has the veneer
of a deep
conversation,”
she says. “They
think their
dialogue is
sophisticated.
But it’s very
unsoph-
isticated.”anything to “retroactively” address the prob-
lem, i.e., help people who’ve already lost jobs
due to this program.
Klobuchar shakes her head. “Yeah, I’ll have
to look at that. I just know that we’ve been try-
ing very diligently to put in some checks and
balances on that program.” She reiterates that
Democrats have already introduced protec-
tions to make sure companies don’t give jobs
to foreign temp workers unless there’s a qual-
ification issue.
Moreover, she says, Democrats have pro-
posed raising fees for H-1B visas to use the pro-
ceeds to retrain those who’ve lost their jobs to
more-skilled workers overseas. Even better,
there’s an opportunity to strengthen the law[Cont. on 94]