Ramaswamy campaign makes Southeast Iowa appearances

WASHINGTON — The campaign tour bus of Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy spent last weekend “barnstorming” Southeast Iowa, in its own words, making stops in Burlington, Washington, Mt. Pleasant and Ottumwa, among other cities, on Friday and Saturday.

At the Washington Pizza Ranch Friday afternoon, Ramaswamy addressed a packed room with a 30-minute speech emphasizing culture war talking points. A pamphlet distributed at the event included a handful of statements like “God is real,” and “There are two genders,” and “Capitalism lifts people out of poverty,” and “Reverse racism is racism.”

While the candidate also discussed a handful of policy goals, he said his campaign was more about meeting people where they were at than it was about enacting specific reforms.

“Sometimes it’s good to have a president that’s going through the motions, and is an implementer of policies that somebody else can hand over to them,” he said. “I don’t think we live in a moment now where that works. I think we need a president who deeply understands what ails the heart of this nation … it’s going to take someone from the next generation, from the outside, that understands the ‘Why.’”

Ramaswamy pitched his candidacy as effectively independent, despite running on a Republican ticket with an evidently conservative platform. He noted that the majority of his campaign funding came from his own wealth and from small, first-time donations, rather than big benefactors.

He claimed that other front-runners in the presidential race were “paid for” by their donors, who he called “puppet-masters” of the election process.

“Corruption, money, the influence of mega money here in the United States, (is) not just the Democratic Party,” he said. “I see it in the process, I’m an outsider … the super PACs are a cancer on American politics.”

Ideological issues aside, the candidate made plenty of campaign promises as he addressed the crowd. The list included pardoning former President Donald Trump from the four cases of criminal charges against him, requiring voter IDs nationally, increasing military presence at the U.S.-Mexico border, and requiring high school students to pass the same civics test as people who apply for citizenship.

For the most part, however, the policy side of the 38-year-old entrepreneur’s pitch to voters on Friday focused on big picture ideas.

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The first item on his domestic agenda, Ramaswamy said, was to gut bureaucracy by slashing the sizes of — and perhaps existence of — several federal agencies, while also enacting term limits on people in their decision-making positions.

“The people who we elect to run the government today, they’re not even the ones who actually run the government,” he said. “That is how you drain the swamp … there are government agencies that should not exist, like the FBI or the ATF or the CDC, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the U.S. Department of Education. We’re not just going to tinker around the edges, we’re going to get in there and shut them down.”

Also on the homefront to-do list is a new budget approach. Ramaswamy said the fiscal process should start each year at zero dollars of spending, and only add freshly justified items, rather than being based off the previous year’s numbers.

“That’s how you solve our national debt, that’s how you unlock this economy,” he said. “That is how you revive the integrity of the republic that our Founding Fathers set into motion.”

As far as priorities abroad, Ramaswamy said his administration would adopt an economic “declaration of independence” from China.

The Republican claimed the nation was effectively in a cold war with the U.S. already, but that unlike with the Soviet Union in the ‘60s, “We depend on our enemy for our entire modern way of life,” citing China’s export of semiconductors, shoes and pharmaceuticals.

He said one step to severing those ties was to end any government focus on controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

While Ramaswamy did not specifically deny the scientific consensus that climate change is both real and largely caused by humans, he argued that the policy goals of what he called a “climate cult” left America at an economic disadvantage against countries that allow for more air pollution.

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“The climate change agenda is a hoax,” he claimed. “The same people who are against carbon emissions in the United States are somehow perfectly fine with shifting those same carbon emissions to China … The same people who are against carbon emissions in the United States are also against nuclear energy.”

Ramaswamy is running somewhere between fourth and sixth place in Iowa, according to polls of the state posted by FiveThirtyEight since Sept. 15.

Asked Friday about his strategy to get ahead in the race, the Republican said he was banking on a big finish in Iowa come primary election night on Jan. 15.

“You guys have a unique privilege and opportunity and responsibility to decide this and get this right,” he said. “We’re meeting hundreds of you a day, but there are hundreds of thousands who participate in this process who just swallow what they’re force fed … so we’re going to do this bottom-up. And if we’re going to succeed, it is going to be because of patriots like you in this room.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com