Leading the Hawkeye State effort as state director will be Matt Gronewald, a former deputy executive director of the Republican Party of Iowa and a long-time strategist for the GOP.

Robert Haus will serve as Iowa chairman, and his wife, Ruth Haus, will be a senior consultant.

Robert is also a long-time fixture of GOP politics in Iowa, serving in leadership roles for the presidential campaigns of Sen. Phil Gramm and Steve Forbes. He works as a vice president for Des Moines-based PolicyWorks LLC, and previously co-owned (with his wife) Eagle Media Group.

Ruth moved to Iowa in 2002, after spending 18 years in Washington, D.C., where she served as vice president of corporate communications for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She was involved with Forbes’ 2000 presidential bid as deputy campaign manager and chief operations officer, has been a deputy executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee and deputy political director of the Republican National Committee. After serving as a campaign staffer for George W. Bush in 1998, she was given a position in the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.

Gramm’s wife, Wendy, the board chair of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which hosted the event, also ran afoul of historians. While discussing Friedman’s dialogue with General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, about free-market policies, she said that former Chilean Pres. Salvador Allende was clinging to power against voters’ wishes before Pinochet’s 1973 coup. Historians told The Texas Independent that Gramm was flat-out wrong — Allende’s party had triumphed in an election just months prior to Pinochet’s take-over.

Revered by conservative free-market thinkers, Friedman is a polarizing figure due at least in part to how his economic theories were put into practice in the wake of major upheavals in South America and elsewhere.

At the luncheon Friday, Phil Gramm praised Friedman for his unwavering defense of the free market, even in the case of sweatshops — which Friedman said were a product of poverty, not capitalism.

Phil Gramm reprised a Friedman anecdote about how his own mother had worked in a sweatshop in New York City for three years after immigrating from Poland. Gramm said Friedman’s parents were part of the Jewish migration from Poland.

However, Friedman’s parents were not from Poland; they were from Austria-Hungary, according to Friedman’s autobiography on the Nobel Prize website.

Phil Gramm related how Friedman said that sweatshop workers make more money than average workers due to the lengthy hours involved, and that this was what had enabled his family to accumulate enough money to move to Chicago and pursue “the opportunity of the American Dream.”

However, Friedman’s parents met in New York City, where Friedman was born. They soon moved to Rahway, N.J., where his mother ran a dry goods store. Friedman earned an undergraduate degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey and did not move to Chicago until he was 20 years old, according to the autobiography.

Phil Gramm also praised Friedman for originating the ideas behind an all-volunteer army, flat taxes, the earned income tax credit and school choice.

“We are in a counter-revolutionary cycle in our own country,” Phil Gramm said.

This story originally appeared at The Texas Independent.

If that weren’t bad enough on its own, the Federal Reserve came out today with a report showing that, by almost all measures, the economy is slowing.

Conservatives are criticizing the Democrats for painting what they consider to be a too depressing picture of the economy. Tonight, and for the next few days, Republicans will take their turn at touching on economic issues. With the auto sector in free fall, bankruptcies on the rise and a credit squeeze claiming more companies and jobs, it will be interesting to see how they spin all this.

The August figures show bankruptcy filings have reached a post-2005 high of 4,476 filings per day, notes credit expert Robert Lawless, a University of Illinois law professor. That milestone is significant because, in 2005, lawmakers approved a new bankruptcy law aimed at making it harder and more time-consuming to file bankruptcy, and more difficult to discharge debts.

But instead of slowing filings, bankruptcies are “staggeringly high,” Lawless said. If filings keep growing at this pace, Lawless expects a return to the era of more than 1 million bankruptcy filings annually. High numbers of bankruptcies prompted the 2005 law in the first place.

From Lawless:

People often ask me why I think bankruptcy filings are rising. My answer is that it is both simple and complex. The simple answer is that hard economic times obviously contribute to rising filing rates. Tightening consumer credit markets also lead to short-term increases in bankruptcy filings as consumers find it difficult to borrow more to stave off the day of reckoning. That is the simple part. The more complex part of the answer is that we know people do not file bankruptcy immediately upon the onset of financial distress. Typically, consumers struggle for a long time–often two or more years–before filing bankruptcy. The job loss today or the harassing calls from creditors may precipitate a bankruptcy filing, but the seeds of that bankruptcy filing were sown long before it shows up as a statistic in the bankruptcy filings.

During the bankruptcy reform fight, consumer advocates warned that the reforms – supported largely by the lending industry – would do little to curb bankruptcies, and would mainly benefit creditors. As filings continue to increase, it’s evidence that they had it right.

Senators Gramm and McCain. (Photo credit: David Silver)

Phil Gramm is back — and Sen. Barack Obama’s aides are happy to have his gruff voice back in the debate. Breaking from Bloomberg news:

Gramm Says Supporters of McCain Aren’t ‘Whiners,’ Defends Palin

Sept. 2 — Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, who stepped aside as John McCain’s campaign co-chairman in July after an uproar over comments that those worried about the U.S. economy are “whiners,” today revisited that sentiment. “If you’re sitting here today, you’re not economically illiterate and you’re not a whiner, so I’m not worried about who you’re going to vote for,” Gramm told supporters … [near] the Republican National Convention….

Democrat Barack Obama, in his nomination acceptance speech in Denver last week, referred to Gramm’s remarks, and pointed to “proud auto workers” in Michigan and military families shouldering the burden of family members deployed to war zones overseas. “These are not whiners,” Obama said. “They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint.”

The Obama campaign is circulating the article, which, if nothing else, shows Gramm, who has a Ph.D. in economics, can’t help letting old news stay old. Obama spokesperson Tommy Vietor also sent reporters this reaction:

Today, the man who wrote John McCain’s economic plan further insulted struggling Americans by suggesting that if they are not attending the Republican Convention, they are not only whiners, but economically illiterate. From the campaign whose candidate has said that we’ve made ‘great progress’ economically under George Bush and believes that the fundamentals of our economy are ‘strong,’ that’s pretty rich.

From the article, it’s not even clear what Gramm was trying to say with the whining reference. I wasn’t there, but knowing Gramm’s style, it could have been an attempt at a joke — even a self-deprecating one. But given the week the McCain campaign is having, his surrogates might want to try avoiding bad memories entirely.