Politicians Eating to Impress

Me back in September:

I don’t wanna be a cranky old man but when did it become de riguer that our vote for the leader of the free world should hinge on how irresponsibly he or she’s willing to eat at town carnivals? 🤔

I guess one of my celebrity super-fans read this and decided to find out an answer:

The Iowa State Fair is not important to the campaign cycle simply because every candidate shows up there over the span of a week to snarfle corn dogs and lay down a stump speech about Iowa values like hard work and ethanol. Most people I spoke to there didn’t care about the candidates at all — they were at the fair to spend time with family and friends, and to eat. This might seem like classic American political disengagement, but for lots of people in Iowa, the political circus regularly invades spaces they care about because politicians are trying to co-opt their emotional connections to a place. No wonder some people resist it. For the Iowans who come year after year, the fair holds their history, especially their state’s agricultural history, preserving a time when more people owned family farms than worked for the agribusiness that swallowed them up. The specific connections specific people have to the fair are often lost in national politics, which treats the fair like a synecdoche of a core American myth: that the best of our country is found in the rural and bucolic regions, which are also implicitly white. (A 1932 novel about the Iowa State Fair, titled, appropriately, State Fair, was made into a movie three different times in the 20th century.) That story was never true, and the further we move from that history, the more absurd it is that it still lives at the heart of our politics.