GRUNDY CENTER- U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar is going all in on Iowa, and as part of her 99-county strategy, she visited Grundy Center last Wednesday to host a panel discussion on childcare and family leave at the Natural Grind—the first public event that any Democratic hopeful has hosted in Grundy County during the 2020 election cycle.
The roundtable included Klobuchar, Iowa Children’s Policy Coalition Co-Director Jill Applegate, Popcorn Heaven Founder Reshonda Young of Waterloo and Iowa Association for the Education of Young Children Executive Director Jillian Herink, and it drew of a crowd of around 50 on the night before Thanksgiving. Applegate told the audience that even more than jobs, health care and the environment, children’s issues should be the highest priority for the next president.
“What we want to do to make it the political leader issue that it is… is even taking it beyond the kids in the high chairs. It’s even families that want to be able to work. It’s really about businesses that want to be strong and hire people,” she said. “When you make those arguments, you’re bringing even more people in… You’re bringing in a lot of people that want to see change.”
Klobuchar, who some have deemed Iowa’s “adopted Senator” from the north, introduced her husband John and daughter Abigail, both of whom were in the audience, and shared her own experience as a so-called “submarine mom” before transitioning into the story of how motherhood led her into politics in her native Minnesota. When Abigail was struggling to swallow, Senator Klobuchar took on an insurance company stipulation that new mothers leave the hospital within 24 hours—and won. It also left her with a deep appreciation for children with disabilities and their families.
“Childcare and family leave, those are challenges in front of us, but they’re good challenges to have,” Klobuchar said. “If we can’t stand for this, what do we stand for? We’ve got to stand for this because it’s a working families issue.”
She went on to note that affordable childcare still remains elusive both in Iowa and around the country, and in Iowa specifically, about 75 percent of families have two parents in the workforce. Paid family leave has been another hot topic in recent months as Republicans and Democrats alike have supported varying proposals but have not reached a consensus on how to fund such a program.
“The Republicans talked the talk about this at their convention, as you remember, but they never really got anything done,” Klobuchar said.
Proposals that the Senator touched on during her remarks included a cap on childcare expenses, raising the minimum wage, incentivizing new childcare centers, providing subsidies for paid family leave and creating a forgivable loan program for childcare workers.
Klobuchar deflected a question from a man in the audience regarding late term abortion and responded that while she was firmly pro-choice, taking a baby from a mother’s arms is a crime, and she wanted to keep the focus of the event on childcare and family leave. Near the end of remarks, she chided President Trump for seeking to assign blame to others for what she saw as his own failures, with targets as wide ranging as immigrants, the Federal Reserve Bank, the city of Baltimore and even the nation of Denmark.
“Who does that?” she asked.
With the Iowa caucus just two months away, Klobuchar is still hovering around two percent nationally and lagging behind the current frontrunners, former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. She has, however, polled as high as nine percent in recent Iowa polls—trailing only the aforementioned top tier candidate. Klobuchar sees a strong performance on February 3 as crucial to eventually securing her party’s nomination before building a “Blue Wall” around Obama-Trump states like Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania—and, in her own words, making Donald Trump pay for it.
“One of my things that I’m trying to do is reach out to people and say ‘We’re all in this together, and you’re part of this too,’” she said after the event. “I think that in 2016, President Trump acted like he had a monopoly on rural America, and that’s not true anymore. Ask the soybean farmers in Iowa. Ask the people that are running the biodiesel plants. They want something different.”
Before spending Thanksgiving with her family in Des Moines, Klobuchar visited several other small north central Iowa communities including Clarion, Hampton, New Hampton, Charles City and St. Ansgar. Grundy County was the 68th Iowa county the Senator had visited, by far the most of any Democratic candidate. She plans to hit two more this week to bring the total to 70.
“This is going to be a real resurgence for small town America in this election. Donald Trump thinks he can just show up and then not follow through—whether it’s with farm policy or what he did with oil waivers,” she said. “But I don’t think he gets that the people in rural America actually are watching, and they know what they need. And they know he hasn’t kept his promises. And they know there’s not childcare and the kinds of things they want to raise their families, and that’s why we’re going to win.”
