Joni Ernst’s Iowa campaign is making quick work of the "war on women"

Only 38 percent of Iowans approve of Barack Obama’s performance. Braley, a past president of an Iowa trial lawyers association, is as awkward as Ernst is ebullient when campaigning. And the Democratic Party’s single idea — the trope that Republicans live to wage a “war on women” — leaves Ernst bemused: “I am a woman, and I have been to war and this is not war.” A 5-foot-2 grandmother, she is a National Guard lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq.

Although outspent by her chief opponent 10-to-1 in the first quarter of this year, she won a five-candidate primary with 54 percent of the vote, propelled by an ad in which she said that, having grown up castrating pigs, she would be able to cut Washington spending. She does, however, genuflect at the altar of Iowa’s established religion, the Church of Ethanol, a federally mandated Iowa sacrament made from corn.

The Ernst of the primary season talked about the Harley in her driveway, the pistol in her purse and the possibility of impeaching the president. Today her less exotic persona talks about the feeble economy, the perils of Obamacare and Braley’s record, including his pride in having given in the House the culminating argument for Obamacare, which he still thinks is splendid.