Heavyweight Republicans lined up in Iowa on Saturday claiming to be the leader who could retake the White House for conservatives, as the long race to become the party’s nominee for US president in 2016 began in earnest.

Appearing at an all-day political beauty contest in front of voters whose caucuses will be the election’s first nominating process next January, big-name Republicans from statehouses and congress explained why they had the vision and public appeal required for nationwide victory.



Ted Cruz, the precocious first-term senator from Texas, received the afternoon’s most enthusiastic reception from the 1,200-strong crowd in Des Moines, out of a schedule packed with party stars such as Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, and former governors Rick Perry of Texas and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas.



Cruz won loud cheers as he challenged would-be rivals to “show me where you stood up and fought” for conservative priorities such as opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, endorsing religious rights and battling President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms.



“We need to bring together a coalition of Americans who want to believe again in the miracle of America,” said Cruz, in a sermon-style address that attacked the Internal Revenue Service and condemned the employees of the Environmental Protection Agency as “locusts”.



Only Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, hailed for pushing through anti-union legislation and slashing public spending in his Democratic-leaning state, appeared to match Cruz for enthusiasm among voters. In a morning headline speech, Walker claimed his reforms “can work anywhere in the country” and urged Republicans “to go big and go bold”.



The speakers were gathered for the Freedom Summit, a nine-hour event convened by Steve King, a rightwing Iowa congressman and radio host. The summit was backed by Citizens United, the conservative activist group that won a liberalisation of campaign finance limits at the US supreme court in 2010.

Perry and Huckabee offered the clearest indications of any speakers that they would soon jump into a contest poised to be more crowded than any in recent memory. “I’ve been thinking a little of 2016,” said Perry. On why he recently left his show on Fox News, Huckabee said: “I’ll leave it to your imagination, but it wasn’t just so I could go deer hunting every Saturday”.



But their comments were only the most blatant overtures among a series of thinly-veiled pitches for the party’s nomination to take on a Democrat for the job of commander-in-chief in November. Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, is considered the likely Democratic frontrunner.



“There’s nothing wrong in America today that can’t be fixed with new leadership,” said Perry.



“The next two years are about hope and revival, and a vision to restore America’s place in the world.” To whoops and applause, Perry added: “America is looking for a new path forward and starting today, right here in Iowa, lets give it to ‘em”.

Christie, viewed by many as the most moderate would-be candidate in attendance, reeled off impressive statistics from his re-election victory in New Jersey last year as he received a predictably lukewarm response from the conservative-leaning audience.



“The next century does not have to be a Chinese century,” said Christie. “It can be an American century”. Making the case for himself as a conservative in another Democrat-heavy state, Christie told the crowd: “If our conservatism is really going to succeed, it is going to have to defend itself in every part of our country”. The response was silence.



Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, former governors of Massachusetts and Florida, were the only major candidates viewed as likely to compete for the nomination who did not appear at Saturday’s rally. Romney was dismissed by Donald Trump, the television personality and real estate magnate, as a “choker” who had had his turn while Bush’s support for the controversial Common Core educational standards was attacked by others.

All speakers were keen to attack Obama’s foreign policy as a stance of weakness that had diminished America’s role in international affairs. Criticising Obama for identifying climate change rather than Islamic State terrorists as the country’s most serious threat in his State of the Union address last week, Huckabee said: “Mr President, I would think that a beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn”.



Cruz sought to tie Obama’s record overseas to the likely Democratic nominee, who was seldom mentioned in the day’s speeches. “We have seen the fruits of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of receding from the world,” said the Texas senator. “Leading from behind doesn’t work.”



Amid a steadily improving economy that has seen the highest pace of job creation in years, Republican attacks on Obama’s handling of the country’s finances were rarer than during the 2012 election campaign, when the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, styled himself as the candidate to turn around America’s economic fate.



However several continued to lament the country’s $18 trillion national debt, with Perry arguing that the US needed “major economic and fiscal reforms”. Boasting of the large proportion of new jobs that Texas had contributed to the national total under his governorship, he said: “I happen to know something about this.”

