This isn’t the first time I’ve heard a story like this one from Iowa during the last couple of weeks of campaigning.
Dianne Bauer opened up her cafe in Council Bluffs to Mitt Romney and his campaign for a small round table
Romney in an Iowa Cafe… just like you and me!
discussion last Friday morning before his speech at Bayliss Park.
Bauer has made her cafe available to politicians before with no problems:
“With Rick Perry he made a point of stopping in the kitchen before he ever went to the other side to address the public and the media to thank us and introduce himself to us. That’s what I thought we would get here, just normal. This was all out, like you’d think Obama was here.”
Bauer’s issues with the campaigns staffers started the night before when they started staging the cafe for the event.
She described them as “arrogant” and said her cafe was not treated with the respect it deserved.
“Stuff got broke. My table cloths they just got ripped off, wadded up and thrown in the back room,”
The campaign told her to send them an itemized list of anything that was broken, and they would pay for it, but Bauer says that won’t fix everything.
“My dad’s picture, an emblem my dad gave me, it got broke. Those aren’t things you can replace,”
Bauer didn’t even get to meet the candidate she closed half of her restaurant down for.
“Every time we tried to go out or look, secret service was right there.”
She was complaining about the event to a friend when reporters overheard her and posted about it online. Romney apparently saw the post and called Bauer himself. He explained that it was just a misunderstanding that she did not get to meet him, but the phone call didn’t smooth things over for her.
“He responded ‘well, I’m sorry your table cloths got ripped off, wadded up and thrown in the back room’ and I took it as mocking. “We’re the ones he’s wanting to get the votes from, you’d think we would have been treated better.”
She says the whole experience left her wondering:
“With how he treated me, is that how he’s going to treat others? You know, if he gets in office is he going to be that way to us little people?”
But one thing is for sure, she won’t be letting any more politicians through her cafe doors.