Iowa rejected Biden, but president back to sell rural plan

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Iowa rejected Biden, but president back to sell rural plan

2022-04-12 12:05 Last Updated At：12:10

Iowa has never been fertile ground for Joe Biden.

His 1988 presidential bid imploded in a plagiarism scandal sparked by comments he made at a debate there. He abandoned his 2008 White House run after a fifth-place Iowa caucus finish. And his 2020 campaign limped to a fourth-place finish in the state's technologically glitchy caucus.

After bouncing back to win the Democratic nomination, Biden returned for a rally at the Iowa state fairgrounds four days before Election Day 2020, only to see Donald Trump win the state by 8 percentage points.

Biden heads back to Iowa for the first time as president on Tuesday at a moment when he's facing yet more political peril. He's saddled with sagging approval ratings and inflation at a 40-year high while his party faces the prospect of big midterm election losses that could cost it control of Congress.

The president is set to promote his economic plans to help rural families struggling with higher costs at the gas pump and elsewhere, while highlighting the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law enacted last fall. It includes money to improve internet access, as well for modernizing wastewater systems, reducing flooding threats and improving roads and bridges, drinking water and electric grids in sparsely populated areas.

Proponents of an emergency waiver that would allow year-round sales of gasoline mixed with 15% ethanol are hopeful Biden will use his trip to announce the move, which they say would help ease rising gas prices.

Biden will be visiting a biofuel company in Menlo, a farming community west of Des Moines, Iowa’s capital. It is in Guthrie County, which backed Trump over Biden by 35 percentage points in 2020.

“Part of it is showing up in communities of all sizes, regardless of the results of the last election,” said Jesse Harris, who was a senior adviser to Biden’s 2020 campaign in Iowa and directed get-out-the-vote and early voting efforts for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.

Harris said most presidents who come to Iowa typically visit the state’s largest cities. Hitting an area like Menlo “does speak to the importance the administration places on infrastructure broadly, but also infrastructure in rural and smaller communities.”

The Biden administration plans to spend coming weeks pushing billions in funding for rural areas. Cabinet members and other senior officials will travel the country to help communities get access to money available as part of the infrastructure package.

“The president is not making this trip through a political prism," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki. "He's making this trip because Iowa is a rural state in the country that would benefit greatly from the president's policies.”

Iowa State University political science professor Steffen Schmidt said part of Biden’s trouble is that key social issues that are driving the national Democratic agenda — including gay rights and combating institutional racism — can turn off moderate voters in the heartland.

“Iowa’s a traditional, rural state, and even Democrats are middle-of-the-roaders,” he said.

To win over voters more focused on pocketbook issues, administration officials have long suggested that Biden travel more to promote an economy that is rebounding from the setbacks of the coronavirus pandemic. The number of Americans collecting unemployment has fallen to the lowest levels since 1970, for example.

But much of the positive jobs news nationally has been overshadowed by surging gas, food and housing prices that have pushed consumer inflation to 7.9% over the year ending in February. That's the sharpest spike since 1982. Inflation figures for March, due out Tuesday, are likely to bring more bad news for the Biden administration.

“Maybe a trip back to Iowa will be just what Joe Biden needs to understand what his reckless spending, big government policies are doing to our country,” Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said in a statement.

After Iowa, Biden will visit Greensboro, North Carolina, on Thursday.

Psaki blamed Russia's war in Ukraine for helping to drive up gas prices, and said the administration expects the consumer price index for March to be “extremely elevated” in large part because of it.

Members of Congress from both parties have urged Biden to issue the ethanol waiver.

“Homegrown Iowa biofuels provide a quick and clean solution for lowering prices at the pump and bolstering production would help us become energy independent once again,″ said Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley. He and eight Republican and seven Democratic senators from Midwestern states sent Biden a letter last month urging him to allow year-round E15 sales.

Most gasoline sold in the U.S. is blended with 10% ethanol. Farmers in corn-rich Iowa have pushed for widespread sale of a 15% ethanol blend. That product is banned in the summer because of concerns that it adds to smog in high temperatures.

The Environmental Protection Agency has lifted seasonal restrictions on E15 in the past, including after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The Trump administration allowed for selling E15 in the summer months two years later, but saw the rule struck down by a federal appeals court.

The price of ethanol peaked in December but has been falling more recently. Wholesale ethanol has traded about $1.20 per gallon cheaper than gasoline, though not all savings are passed on to drivers.

Associated Press writer Matthew Daly contributed to this report.

Chants of ‘shame on you’ greet guests at White House correspondents’ dinner shadowed by war in Gaza

2024-04-28 11:56 Last Updated At：12:00

WASHINGTON (AP) —

The war in Gaza spurred large protests outside a glitzy roast with President Joe Biden, journalists, politicians and celebrities Saturday but went all but unmentioned by participants inside, with Biden instead using the annual White House correspondents’ dinner to make both jokes and grim warnings about Republican rival Donald Trump’s fight to reclaim the U.S. presidency.

An evening normally devoted to presidents, journalists and comedians taking outrageous pokes at political scandals and each other often seemed this year to illustrate the difficulty of putting aside the coming presidential election and the troubles in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Biden opened his roast with a direct but joking focus on Trump, calling him “sleepy Don,” in reference to a nickname Trump had given the president previously.

Despite being similar in age, Biden said, the two presidential hopefuls have little else in common. “My vice president actually endorses me,” Biden said. Former Trump Vice President Mike Pence has refused to endorse Trump’s reelection bid.

But the president quickly segued to a grim speech about what he believes is at stake this election, saying that another Trump administration would be even more harmful to America than his first term.

“We have to take this serious — eight years ago we could have written it off as ‘Trump talk’ but not after January 6,” Biden told the audience, referring to the supporters of Trump who stormed the Capitol after Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election.

Trump did not attend Saturday's dinner and never attended the annual banquet as president. In 2011, he sat in the audience, and glowered through a roasting by then-President Barack Obama of Trump's reality-television celebrity status. Obama's sarcasm then was so scalding that many political watchers linked it to Trump's subsequent decision to run for president in 2016.

Biden’s speech, which lasted around 10 minutes, made no mention of the ongoing war or the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

One of the few mentions came from Kelly O’Donnell, president of the correspondents’ association, who briefly noted some 100 journalists killed in Israel's 6-month-old war against Hamas in Gaza. In an evening dedicated in large part to journalism, O’Donnell cited journalists who have been detained across the world, including Americans Evan Gershkovich in Russia and Austin Tice, who is believed to be held in Syria. Families of both men were in attendance as they have been at previous dinners.

To get inside Saturday's dinner, some guests had to hurry through hundreds of protesters outraged over the mounting humanitarian disaster for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. They condemned Biden for his support of Israel's military campaign and Western news outlets for what they said was undercoverage and misrepresentation of the conflict.

“Shame on you!” protesters draped in the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh cloth shouted, running after men in tuxedos and suits and women in long dresses holding clutch purses as guests hurried inside for the dinner.

“Western media we see you, and all the horrors that you hide,” crowds chanted at one point.

Other protesters lay sprawled motionless on the pavement, next to mock-ups of flak vests with “press” insignia.

Ralliers cried “Free, free Palestine." They cheered when at one point someone inside the Washington Hilton — where the dinner has been held for decades — unfurled a Palestinian flag from a top-floor hotel window.

Criticism of the Biden administration's support for Israel's military offensive in Gaza has spread through American college campuses, with students pitching encampments and withstanding police sweeps in an effort to force their universities to divest from Israel. Counterprotests back Israel's offensive and complain of antisemitism.

Biden’s motorcade Saturday took an alternate route from the White House to the Washington Hilton than in previous years, largely avoiding the crowds of demonstrators.

Saturday's event drew nearly 3,000 people. Celebrities included Academy Award winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Scarlett Johansson, Jon Hamm and Chris Pines.

Both the president and comedian Colin Jost, who spoke after Biden, made jabs at the age of both the candidates for president. “I’m not saying both candidates are old. But you know Jimmy Carter is out there thinking, ‘maybe I can win this thing,’” Jost said. “He’s only 99.”

Law enforcement, including the Secret Service, instituted extra street closures and other measures to ensure what Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said would be the “highest levels of safety and security for attendees.”

Protest organizers said they aimed to bring attention to the high numbers of Palestinian and other Arab journalists killed by Israel's military since the war began in October.

More than two dozen journalists in Gaza wrote a letter last week calling on their colleagues in Washington to boycott the dinner altogether.

“The toll exacted on us for merely fulfilling our journalistic duties is staggering," the letter stated. “We are subjected to detentions, interrogations, and torture by the Israeli military, all for the ‘crime’ of journalistic integrity.”

One organizer complained that the White House Correspondents' Association — which represents the hundreds of journalists who cover the president — largely has been silent since the first weeks of the war about the killings of Palestinian journalists. WHCA did not respond to a request for comment.

According to a preliminary investigation released Friday by the Committee to Protect Journalists, nearly 100 journalists have been killed covering the war in Gaza. Israel has defended its actions, saying it has been targeting militants.

“Since the Israel-Gaza war began, journalists have been paying the highest price — their lives — to defend our right to the truth. Each time a journalist dies or is injured, we lose a fragment of that truth,” CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna said in a statement.

Sandra Tamari, executive director of Adalah Justice Project, a U.S.-based Palestinian advocacy group that helped organize the letter from journalists in Gaza, said “it is shameful for the media to dine and laugh with President Biden while he enables the Israeli devastation and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza."

In addition, Adalah Justice Project started an email campaign targeting 12 media executives at various news outlets — including The Associated Press — expected to attend the dinner who previously signed onto a letter calling for the protection of journalists in Gaza.

“How can you still go when your colleagues in Gaza asked you not to?" a demonstrator asked guests heading in. "You are complicit.”