TIPTON, IA — Sen. Bradford Welk spent eleven minutes inside the Crossroads Café on Saturday morning, which his press secretary described as “a meaningful conversation with Iowa voters” and which the café’s morning waitress, Carleen Voss, described as “a man who ordered toast and then didn’t eat any of it.”
Welk, a third-tier candidate polling at 2 percent in the aggregate, is the eleventh presidential hopeful to visit Tipton (pop. 3,221) since New Year’s Day. He arrived in a black SUV at 7:42 a.m. and left at 7:53. The photographer who travels with the campaign had arrived at 7:31 and was still adjusting a softbox by the pie case when Welk walked back out the door.
“He said hello to Marv, but Marv’s been dead since November,” Carleen said. “We didn’t have the heart to correct him.”
According to Brett Lankford, a regional analyst with the Plains Civic Forum in Cedar Rapids, the eleven-minute stop has become the industry standard. “The optics window is between nine and fourteen minutes,” he said. “Anything shorter looks like contempt. Anything longer and they have to answer a question.” Lankford added that the campaign budgeted roughly $1,400 for the visit, most of it for the b-roll.
The senator ordered two eggs over medium, white toast, and black coffee. He took one bite of egg, no bites of toast, and three sips of coffee before checking his watch. He tipped $4 on a $9.40 check, which Carleen described as “about right for a man running for president,” and then asked where the bathroom was, which she said he never used.
Six of the eleven minutes were spent outside the café. Three were spent on his phone in the SUV. Two were spent posing in front of the Crossroads’ chalkboard with a man named Don, who later told reporters he had assumed the senator was the new propane guy. The eleventh minute is unaccounted for and is presumed to have been spent thanking the photographer.
The campaign’s official statement called the visit “an authentic morning with Iowa farmers and the everyday Americans who built this country.” There are no farmers in downtown Tipton at 7:42 on a Saturday. There is Don, who manages a self-storage facility, and Earl Hochstetler, who is retired and was eating what he eats.
By 7:54 the SUV was gone. By 8:10, two more campaign vans had pulled in. By 8:45, the Crossroads had cycled through three additional candidates, one former Cabinet secretary, and a man Carleen could not identify but who left a coin from a country she didn’t recognize. None of them ordered anything she would describe as food.
Welk’s next stop was a Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast in West Branch, where he was scheduled for fourteen minutes. He stayed nine.