2nd District candidates trade barbs, call for unity

MOUNT PLEASANT – It didn't take long for Republicans seeking their party's nomination in Iowa's 2

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District to make politics personal when they met at a front-porch forum May 26.

The candidates traded barbs, even as they pledged to support the winner of the four-way primary June 8 to determine who will face U.S. Rep. Dave Loebsack. If they agreed on nothing else, the candidates, Christopher Reed and Rob Gettemy, both of Marion, Steve Rathje of Cedar Rapids and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Ottumwa, it was that there is an urgency to defeat Loebsack this year.

Liberals have driven the ball to the one-yard line and it's up to conservatives to “hold the line this year” because it may be a long time before they get another chance to change the course of the federal government, Gettemy said.

Gettemy told the crowd of about 100 people sitting on the lawn outside American Outdoors south of Mount Pleasant he offers the best opportunity to defeat Loebsack because voters are looking for a fresh face, “not a politician.”

His rivals have all run before and lost – “lost big time,” Gettemy said.

Without mentioning names, he noted that Rathje and Reed, who faced off in a U.S. Senate primary two years ago, are still fighting that battle and Miller-Meeks is willing to change her comments to suit various audiences.

It's not enough to pledge to support the primary winner, Reed said, but voters should demand candidates promise not to work against the nominee.

Rathje, he said, never took down his campaign signs after losing the Senate primary in 2008, asked his supporters not to support Reed and launched a write-in campaign.

Rathje said he wasn't there “to say anything disparaging about anyone. I'm here to make a difference.”

Miller-Meeks, Gettemy said, has talked up the Tea Party movement in sympathetic crowds and referred to it as sloganeering at other times, run hot and cold on opposing abortion and opened the possibility of legalizing marijuana.

“We have to be who we are. We have to run as conservatives and be true to core,” Gettemy said and promised he'd “never waver in my beliefs.”

“You can tell it's campaign silly season, Miller-Meeks said. “I've been smeared so many times that I feel like a bug on a windshield.”

She called for uniting the fiscal, social and constitutional conservatives. “We need all three tent poles” to defeat Loebsack, she said. Miller-Meeks and reminded her rivals that “whatever we do before the primary can be used by the Democrats after the primary.”

United, Miller-Meeks said, the 2

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District can become “the Massachusetts of the Midwest – not in ideology, but in victory.”