Can Obama be the Maytag repairman?
Plant closing stings Iowa town, but political solutions are few
NEWTON, Iowa -- They waited patiently for Barack Obama at the tiny diner, Maid-Rite Sandwiches, a gathering place since 1926 -- one of the few historic enterprises left in this town that Maytag Corp. built and is now hanging out to dry, closing its headquarters and plant under its new owner, Whirlpool Corp.
They were crowded in the booths and standing in the narrow aisles of the diner: owner Dan Holtkamp and his wife, Pam, his daughter Danielle Cool and her children, Caroline, 3, and Madelyn, 2 months, and friends like Danielle Hamilton, the dentist's wife, and United Auto Workers members such as Vicki Duchene, and visitors wandering through town like Katy Balbun, a parole officer visiting the local correctional facility, who heard Obama was going to the diner and ran out to buy his book Dreams From My Father, so he could sign it.
The stop was meant to be one of Obama's attempts to create intimacy with voters in Iowa. Most of the crowds he receives number in the hundreds, like the visit he made earlier that day at a local school, BC Berg Middle School. But Iowans aren't used to that; they like less formality.
Little Madelyn, in particular, had been primed for Obama's visit. "Where is Barack Obamba?" she asked her mom impatiently as the hour wore on and he was late.
And then he appeared, posing for pictures and joking with the patrons and giving triathlete Katy Balbun advice on how to quit smoking. "Nicorettes," he advised. "I smoke a pack a day," she said. "Can you smell it on my breath?"
And after a few more photos and greetings, he headed for a tour bus so he could travel to Pella and talk in private with some local UAW workers and Jasper County Democratic activists, about 15 people. These were people, including UAW member and Maytag employee Duchene, who had questions, lots of questions, about the future of the middle class in America.
On Oct. 26, the Maytag operations will be shuttered forever, after 114 years, in this town of about 16,000 just a 45-minute drive east of Des Moines. This is where Maytag was invented and where everyone either worked at Maytag or knows someone who did. Great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers toiled in the plant or the head office, and so did their children and their children's children.
Duchene, 56, who has been employed at the washing machine manufacturer for 23 years, who raised her two, now adult, boys alone, and who is facing a retirement without a pension or benefits. She's not quite sure what she is going to do.
She has an idea of maybe opening a hair salon with her youngest son in Ames, where Iowa State University is, but they haven't figured out the details. "I've been going over it in my head," she told me. "It's forced most of us to do the things we were thinking of doing down the road, when we retired." And so she was keen to get on the bus and hear what Obama had to say about fixing the economy.
Another of Obama's ideas is to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which makes joining a union much simpler -- an idea vocally supported by John Edwards and the progressives but only recently embraced by Obama. Unions are invaluable for low-paid workers in service industries such as hotels and restaurants, but I wonder how the Free Choice Act would have saved Duchene's job or improved the economy? Joining a union no longer means job security. As Duchene notes, "We went from 3,000 in our local to 700 or 800 people." And it will be axed again in October when Maytag closes.
"It's not, I think we here in Newton are unique or special," Duchene says. "This is happening across America." Yes it is, sadly. But I haven't heard any real solutions yet from Obama or many of the other Democrats, although Edwards with his anti-poverty platform is thinking hard about it. And the Republicans? They've made the top 1 percent of our population who is rich even richer, and that rising tide that John Kennedy talked about lifting up the rest of the population began to ebb some time ago.