Thread: Tancredo - Candidate turns to conservative pig farmer

Candidate turns to conservative pig farmer
By M.E. SPRENGELMEYER
May 8, 2007


Sow Number 68 is a little sluggish these days.
She's a new mom again. She recently gave birth to about a dozen more little piglets. She's looking a little skinny. And she's moody, too.

The friendly farmer knows she needs a little extra attention.

Long and lanky Bill Salier stoops in his patched-up jeans. He stares her in the snout. He tells a visitor how he wants her to regain her strength before he lets her out of this musty, farrowing shed and back to the barnyard with her muddy-hooved lady friends.

Suddenly, there's a call on the cell phone that's always wired into the farmer's right ear.

It's somebody from Rep. Tom Tancredo's presidential campaign staff.

They talk for a few minutes about the congressman's next round of Iowa barnstorming. Salier tells the caller they need to get the best voter database anywhere.

No worries. They're on it.

Sow Number 68 does her business while the farmer is doing his.

Salier laughs. Then he says so long to the campaign worker and gets back to running his farm.

There's so much to do here. It's late afternoon. Dozens of hungry hogs are stirring outside for their supper. Their squeals and grunts sound more desperate each time the sun ticks a little lower in the sky.

Nearby, 250 acres of the world's finest dark topsoil wait to be planted for the season. That won't happen on this day. It has been raining like a son of a gun lately, and the mud would just gobble up the cultivator.

Each year, this patch on the outskirts of tiny Nora Springs produces about 30,000 bushels of corn, 6,000 bushels of soybeans and 4,000 young hogs. That's around 1,500 tons worth of America's food supply.

Salier, 38, does most of the work with just a few loyal helpers - his wife, Karla; his 71-year-old mother; and "a young fella" he hires for seasonal work.

He still has the crew cut and swagger of a former Marine, so he says the farm is mostly "a one-man fightin' hole."

Now, on top of all these other messy chores, he's leading Tancredo's Iowa offensive, too.

Salier is the kind of political operative that only Iowa could produce. He looks like he's straight out of Hollywood's central casting.

Karla calls him a study in contrasts.

"You'd expect some high-powered politician type to be at the level he is in (Tancredo's) campaign," she says over coffee. "But here he is in his coveralls feeding hogs. And yet, they want him."

When Tancredo decided to follow through with his long-shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination, he turned to this unlikely place: the farmhouse with the bright green roof that can be seen a mile away.

He brought on Salier as the Iowa campaign chairman - a fixer of sorts for a Colorado suburbanite trying to score points in the countryside.

Why Salier? Because besides his skills as a hog-breeder and corn farmer, he has a proven record harvesting hard-line conservative votes in Iowa.

In 2002, he was a first-time candidate when he ran for the U.S. Senate. Salier pushed an unbending anti-abortion, anti-taxes, anti-big-government message. In the Republican primary, he was out-spent 10-1 by a sitting congressman, Greg Ganske. Salier accused Ganske of being "too liberal." Ganske won the nomination, but not without a scare.

The under-funded Salier took 41 percent of the GOP vote - an "impressive" showing that demonstrated Ganske's weakness among conservatives, says Des Moines Register political columnist David Yepsen.

Now, Salier's base represents the kind of hard-right bounty that all GOP presidential contenders dream of having in this crucial, first-in-the-nation caucus state.

So the big campaigns started calling. First Sen. John McCain's people. Then Sen. Sam Brownback's people.

"I thanked them for their interest," Salier says. But he took a pass.

Salier had heard of Tancredo. Sounded like his kind of guy. He was known for fighting illegal immigration, and Salier liked that. But Tancredo also opposes abortion, hates big government and, like Salier, wants to blow up the tax code.

The farmer told his wife: "If he would get in, I'd work for that guy."

When the call finally came, "It literally was a second to decide," Salier recalls. "He called and I said, 'I'm in.'"

So now, they're an odd-looking pair on the Iowa campaign trail.

Tancredo is short and slightly pudgy, and some might call him a city-slicker. But when he enters a campaign event in Iowa, his shadow is a buff, 6-foot-2, crew-cut young fellow who's arguably more famous here, at least in parts of Iowa farm country.

"As with all endorsements, I'm not sure they mean much," Yepsen says. "(But) Salier knows all the nooks and crannies of the Iowa GOP and will be helpful getting Tancredo with the right people in the right places."

This is one high-stakes way for a pig farmer to spend his rare off hours.

Just like on the farm, Salier has just a few loyal helpers for Tancredo's state campaign staff. But that's enough, he says. By the time the Iowa caucuses roll around, in January, he's hoping to reap just enough votes to stun the Republican establishment. "Of course, the objective is Tom Tancredo as leader of the free world," Salier says. "In a broader sense, it's bigger than that. It's the nation moving toward what we believe."

Chuck Laudner, a friend of Salier's who now is executive director of the Iowa Republican Party, thinks Tancredo scored a coup by reaching out to what was once dubbed "The Salier Corps."

"Those conservative firebrands, those fire and brimstone speakers and those that have a true grasp of the right wing of the party are a rarity here," Laudner says. "There's not a lot of home-grown talent at that end of the bench, and Salier's one of those guys. It goes a long ways toward securing that social-conservative, fiscally conservative caucus."

Tancredo's pet issue, immigration, is getting bigger in Iowa, especially in towns where once high-paying packing plant jobs have been going to lower-paid immigrants (both legal and illegal) in recent years.

Marshalltown, Iowa, about a 45-minute drive northeast of Des Moines, was the site of one of the nationwide immigration crackdowns at Swift & Co. packing plants in December. There and in other small towns across Iowa - places that once resembled the fictional, homogenous town of "Mayberry" - Latin American stores are popping up on Main Streets.

Salier, who barely touched the immigration issue in his 2002 campaign, now echoes Tancredo's disdain for people who are in the country illegally and who will not assimilate into American culture.

"There's certainly a cultural shift that people note in their home towns," Salier says, leaning against a fence post while dozens of sows squeal for their supper.

"It's the change from a good-paying job that Americans will do and raise a family on, and it is Main Street, U.S.A., exemplified, to (now) importing cheap labor of people who don't have a legal right to be here," he says.

He's asked if some Iowans are racist or worry about losing the all-white character of their small towns. No, he says. Iowans are not racist. But he says they are offended by immigrants who won't assimilate.

"I heard the Iowa National Guard advertisements in Spanish," he says. He called the Guard to complain. "I said, 'What are you doing? How are you going to have command and control over your military if you don't advertise in your language?'"

"That's the cultural shift I'm talking about."

http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/politics/ar ... 27,00.html

Go Tom Tancredo!!! WE NEED YOU!!

Great news! Go Tom, we're with you!

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO TOM!

This is how our founding father's envisioned the political system in America. The common man giving of his time for his country. Not a bunch of rich elitists sniffing down their noses at us and telling us how to live our lives.