Immediately after the photo op, a quick stop at Star Bucks on the way to the airport.
Via WaPo:
The weather was unseasonably warm, the steak seasoned just right and the Democrats were nervous. At the inaugural Polk County Steak Fry, their party’s rising stars confirmed every bad thing that Iowa had heard about their leaders.
“We’ve left behind Americans who run lunch counters and small businesses across this great nation,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (Mass.).
“Sometimes, we come off as so anti-business,” said Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio).
“It’s a knife to my heart that there are some in the Democratic Party who just want to write off districts like mine,” said Rep. Cheri Bustos (Ill.), “that think we should just be flown over.”
It was a stark message for an event designed to set up Iowa’s Democrats for a comeback. In Washington, the clock was running out on the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Saturday, the day of the steak fry, was the day that the 2017 budget resolution expired, and the day after Secretary Tom Price left the Department of Health and Human Services in disgrace.
In Iowa, those victories hardly registered. The battered state party had watched loyal Democrats switch en masse to the Donald Trump-led Republican ticket, then watched a Republican-run legislature pass bills that undercut labor unions. Democrats had won most of the year’s special elections, but the trauma of 2016 lingered.
For Polk County’s Democrats, urban progressives who worried that they had lost touch with their rural neighbors, one response was the resurrection of what used to be the Harkin Steak Fry, the fundraiser hosted for decades by former congressman and senator Tom Harkin where meat was grilled and activists were revved up by star political guests.
Harkin retired in early 2015, with Hillary Clinton working the grill at his last hurrah. This year, local Democrats revived and re-branded the event but were clear from the outset that they were not holding a presidential cattle call.