Campaign Diary home >> Leaving Sioux City
Leaving Sioux City
Date: Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Location: Sioux City, Iowa
Place: John's Café
Sioux City is a blue-collar town of 85,000 people. Work here has always been hard. Work here has recently been hard to find. Today, Sioux City is in decline.
I watch John Edwards take questions at John's Café, just across from the Cargill vegetable oil refinery. The senator listens to stories about industrial jobs lost to Mexico and IT jobs lost to India. Free trade is killing Sioux City.
I notice in the small crowd an apparent absence of people between the ages of 25 and 45, and herein lies the tragic reality of Sioux City. The college-educated leave because the town cannot offer them a future.
People like Melissa Ballard will leave. Barely old enough to vote, Melissa already edits the county newspaper.
People like Libby Green will leave. At 18, Libby is the civic-minded one in her family. Yesterday, she brought her parents to a rally for Howard Dean.
People like Melissa Lanzourakis will leave. Still in college, Melissa produces, writes, films and reports on camera for the local NBC affiliate.
And people like Mercie Wolff will probably leave. Mercie is still in grade school, but she has met all the presidential candidates actively campaigning in Iowa. She is a big fan of John Kerry's free-spirited wife, Teresa Heinz.
In truth, I do not know which, if any, of these young women will leave Sioux City.
I do know that they are extraordinary people. And I know it is an extraordinary tragedy that many like them have left, and many more will leave.
Next stop: Algona
Duke senior Justin Walker, a "political junkie" from Louisville, Ky., is on the Democratic Party campaign trail as part of an independent study project. He is filing periodic dispatches for the Duke Web site.
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