Remember Joni Ernst? She’s the Republican who won election to the U.S. Senate from the state of Iowa, and along the way she ran a campaign ad in which she bragged about castrating hogs on her family farm. Pigs, it’s safe to say, did not vote for Ms. Ernst. At least, not the ones who walk around on four legs.
You may also recall that in January Senator Ernst was chosen to give the official GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union address. In that response, Ernst mentioned that she wore bread bags over her shoes as a child. This was her attempt to show just how modest her upbringing had been in rural Iowa. She remarked:
?We were raised to live simply, not to waste. It was a lesson my mother taught me every rainy morning. You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry.?
Most of us, I’m assuming, heard that and said, What?! Bread bags over her shoes?! I gotta admit, that was the first time I’d ever heard that one. Granted, I’m not a country boy; I was raised in the Atlanta suburbs and had more than one pair of shoes.
The “bread bag” comment raised a lot of eyebrows in Washington, and PolitiFact even did an investigation to see if kids in Iowa today were still putting bags over their shoes. Some rural Iowans said they did indeed use bread bags in conjunction with their shoes or boots, but that they wore them inside the boots to keep them from leaking, not outside of the shoes.
During an interview yesterday, Ernst said she did indeed wear bread bags over her shoes because, she explained:
?The point was I didn’t have the boots.?So I did have a nice pair of tennis shoes or a nice pairs of shoes that we would wear to school, so to protect those nice shoes, we wore bread bags over those shoes to protect them from the mud and the rain.”
I don’t know about you, but I feel so much better now that we’ve gotten to the bottom of this important issue. Though I have to admit I will never look at an empty bread bag the same way again.
