INDIANOLA – The steak fry for Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, at the Indianola Balloon Field on Sunday was filled with food and thousands of Democratic supporters with high hopes – and half -a-dozen presidential candidates with hopes equally as high.

Each candidate spoke on their stances about the war in Iraq – all expressing disappointment with Bush’s recently announced troop withdrawal plan – universal health care, education and raising of the minimum wage.

“We have the worst economic disparity in America since the Great Depression,” former Senator John Edwards, D-N.C., said. “We’re becoming a country made of up a few rich people and then everybody else. That is not the America I want to live in. That is not the America that you want to live in.”

Edwards also spoke of the war in Iraq, and talked about increasing political pressure on the president for a more permanent plan for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

“My view of George Bush is he has not damaged our reputation in the world – he has destroyed it,” Edwards said. “Every single funding bill that goes to President Bush should have a time table for withdrawal. If he vetoes it, they should send another bill with a timetable for withdrawal and continue this until this president is forced to start taking troops out of Iraq.”

When Edwards said this, the crowd was cheering so loud that it was difficult to hear him through the loudspeakers.

Senator Joe Biden, D-Del., took the stage to speak about his plan for Iraq.

“Four years and $20 billion later, and the Iraqi army still cannot stand on its own,” Biden said. “This president had the audacity to look the American people in the eye on Thursday and say, ‘My strategy is working.’ He ought to say, ‘I’m going to risk the lives and limbs of 130,000 brave Americans indefinitely.”

The first part of his plan included bringing all the troops home and to recognize that Iraq is incapable of being governed from the center.

“Focus on three regions and give them control to focus on their daily lives,” Biden said. “Always provide our troops with the protection they need and veterans they have.”

Biden also spoke of bringing the focus on a regional settlement for Iraq.

“This is President Bush’s war, but it’s America’s future,” Biden said, in closing out his speech to the more than 1,000 in attendance.

Those in attendance roared in approval.

“We have to recognize until we end this war, and the device of politics in which it has spawned, we will be unable to deal with any of the consensus issues you heard every one of my colleagues speak to,” Biden said.

As the candidates left the stage, several people wearing blue T-shirts in support of Senator Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., were chanting “H-I-L-L-A-R-Y” at the top of their lungs and were beating on makeshift drums with plastic megaphones.