Branstad now looks beyond the toasting, celebration

CEDAR RAPIDS - It happens every four years. No, not Iowa's precinct caucuses.

Iowans elect a governor and engage in a lot of pomp, circumstance, pageantry and partying to install him - him in this case because Iowa has yet to elect a woman to serve as its chief executive - into office and his new digs at Terrace Hill for a four-year run.

Inauguration 2015 style was a mix of military regimen with Midwest charm, something organizers called elegant but not too extravagant in marking six-term Gov. Terry Branstad's persistent march to becoming the nation's longest-serving governor ever and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynold's second stint as his political sidekick.

'Inaugurations are celebrations. Not the celebration of any one election, but the celebrations of our heritage, our history, our democracy - and of everything that is good and right and cherished about Iowa,” Branstad told about 1,200 onlookers who witnessed his oath of office this past Friday.

Iowa inaugurations occasionally attract big-name participants. This time New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was the most-noteworthy invitee, having raised a major chunk of change to support Branstad and other Iowa Republicans and placing him in the first-class section as Iowa's first-in-the-nation presidential shuttle rolls into town.

At previous inaugurations, singer Al Green and comedian/actor Tom Arnold - a native Iowan - regaled guests during Gov. Chet Culver's 2007 proceedings that included separate festivities at the Old Capitol building in Iowa City and a train ride to promote passenger rail. Former Gov. Tom Vilsack busted out rock legend Chuck Berry, some sheepish dance moves and a wife with a penchant for hats as Iowans partied like it was 1999 (because it was).

For Branstad, this year's inauguration was his seventh - six in which he was sworn in as governor and a 1979 ceremony that installed him as former Gov. Robert Ray's lieutenant governor. That proved to be one of his most memorable, he said.

'There was a terrible snowstorm that night,” he recalled. 'We had people sleeping on the floor in the house that we lived in, and there were people who got stranded at rest stops along the interstate.

'We didn't sell tickets in advance, so the inauguration lost money, and at Governor's Day in Clear Lake, Gov. Ray and I were raising money to pay off the debt for the inauguration,” he noted. 'We learned, hey, sell the tickets in advance and get the money because you never know what can happen.”

That wasn't a problem this go-round, noted Tommy Schultz, communications director for the Branstad-Reynolds inaugural committee, who said the event raised more than $1.25 million - roughly $800,000 of it that will go toward a scholarship fund. The committee received more than 2,000 responses for the Inaugural Ball and expected the cost for putting on the ceremonies and celebrations totaled about $400,000.

While inaugurations are a time for what former House Speaker Brent Siegrist called 'speechifying,” and a time for Iowans to dress up and get down, the bipartisan toasts now give way to the hard realities of the governor finding middle ground in a split-control Legislature. Or as current House Speaker Kraig Paulsen put it in his weekly newsletter, 'We are off to the races.”