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Bloom has gotten little support at the university, where he earns an annual salary of $107,000. Spokesman Tom Moore said Bloom "does not speak for nor represent the university." One professor called him a "smug, self-important jerk"
-- on Bloom's Facebook page. Critics argued Iowa voters were some of the most educated in the country. Others noted the state's unemployment rate of 6 percent is below the national average. Iowa's population is slowly increasing, not "dropping precipitously" as Bloom wrote. Bloom, currently at the University of Michigan as a visiting scholar, said critics are missing the larger point that Iowa needs to confront its problems for future generations. "You can chip away if you want at this story, but it raises some fundamental central issues that Iowans and Americans need to confront," he said. "I think America should sit down and have a collective discussion on the wisdom of how we select our president and how inordinately important Iowa is in that process." Bloom said he faced similar attacks when he wrote the 2000 book "Postville," which chronicled the clash between Iowans and Hasidic Jews who moved in to run a slaughterhouse. He said he was vindicated years later when authorities cracked down on the abuses he chronicled. But readers aren't sure this piece will hold up. Some are questioning Bloom's claim that the state's second largest newspaper had "He Has Risen" as a front-page headline to mark Easter in 1993. A microfiche of the page shows no such headline, but Bloom insists that's his recollection. And then there were Bloom's claims about his family dog. Bloom wrote that "he can't tell you how often over the years" he was walking the dog when pickup truck drivers stopped to ask whether she's a good hunter. Iowans, he said, would never get a dog for amusement but only "to track and bag animals that you want to stuff, mount, or eat." That line prompted several Iowa dog owners to insist they've never been asked that and to accuse Bloom of exaggeration.
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