The honor – and occasional curse – of delivering the Republicans’ rebuttal to the State of the Union speech has fallen to Iowa Republican Joni Ernst, who has only been a senator for two weeks, but has credentials the party hope they can pivot to reorient the electorate’s perception of the GOP.
The House speaker, John Boehner, said they picked Ernst for the speech, designed to lay out the Republicans’ position for the next year and leading up to the 2016 presidential election, because her life is “a quintessential only-in-America story”, – pig castrating experience included.
That “only-in-America story” includes some Senate superlatives that will distinguish her from the primarily white and male political party.
Ernst is the only female combat veteran to serve in the Senate. The former army lieutenant colonel served in Iraq and could use that experience to deliver the party’s criticism of Obama’s approach to Isis and other military operations.
Because Barack Obama has been celebrating US economic successes in the weeks leading up to his speech, the Republicans are expected to lunge on his foreign policy initiatives, or lack thereof.
Just a few years after the Republicans endured cries against their “war on women” in the 2012 election, Ernst is one of six Republican women in the Senate.
Dianne Bystrom, director of Iowa State University’s Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, said Ernst delivering the rebuttal was a logical choice for the GOP.
“They have chosen people to give a response that have a younger and different face of the Republican party, instead of older, white representatives,” she said.
It is the second consecutive year the Republicans have chosen a woman to give the rebuttal speech. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican representative from Washington who is the fourth most powerful Republican in the House, delivered a smooth, if uneventful, rebuttal last year.
“The number one piece of advice I got last year was to hydrate,” McMorris Rodgers told the Washington Post, a reference to the moment in 2013 when the Republican senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, grabbed a bottle of water and drank from it in the middle of his speech.
NBC producers said Ernst will stand in front of an American flag, an Iowa flag, and the four flags of the military. Behind her, will be a desk littered with trinkets from Iowa, a key battleground state in the 2016 presidential election.
“Any candidate is going to call on her when they visit the state,” the Iowa GOP strategist Tim Albrecht told Real Clear Politics. “Every single candidate is going to want her in the room when they come here, and I think it’s safe to say she will be the most popular person in the room.”
The speech could be a key moment for Ernst to cement a spot on the national stage, but it also comes with the potential for career collapse.
In February 2009, the Louisiana Republican Bobby Jindal was a rising star in the party with presidential ambitions. That came to a rapid halt with his response to Obama’s first address to a joint session of congress. NPR said Jindal’s speech seemed: “Impertinent, immature and self-important all at the same time.”
The beliefs Ernst has espoused on the campaign trail led some to expect a speech loaded with provocative ideas – like her support for the idea to make English the national language and a since-reversed opinion that a UN proposal would give the organization control over Iowa farmers and their land.
She was also the only candidate in the 2014 elections to appear in a campaign ad wearing leather, riding a motorcycle and shooting a gun at Obamacare, but that aggressively conservative tone petered out in the general election. In an ad released months earlier, she said she learned how to castrate hogs while growing up on a farm, and would use those skills in Washington.
“I think she flipped her message during the general election and was much more moderate in her tone,” Bystrom said.
Bystrom, who studies political advertisements, said it is not unusual for candidates to be more conservative, or liberal, in primary campaigns. To break out ahead of the crowd of primary election candidates, Ernst ran ads touting that she is “a mother, a soldier and a proven conservative”. When it came time for the general election, however, Ernst became: “a Mother. Soldier. Independent Leader.”
