U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut announced last night that he would turn down the chance to replace his late friend Ted Kennedy as chairman of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. Dodd decided to stay as head of the Banking Committee.

What that means in Arkansas is that U. S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln may be harder to beat for re-election that we had previously calculated.

That’s because Tom Harkin of Iowa, the current Agriculture Committee chairman, is next in line after Dodd among Democrats to head the health education and labor committee, and the word is that Harkin is inclined to make the shift, even considering the essence of agriculture in Iowa, and Harkin’s move, should it happen, would leave the likeliest new chairman of agriculture as, you’ve got it, Blanche Lincoln.

I would not want to go into East Arkansas and try to convince farmers to follow their conservative hearts and vote Republican against the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, who just happened to be a farmer’s daugher herself from over Helena way. I wouldn’t much want to try to make the case across the state to chicken growers.

Agriculture issues are famously beset by regional differences — a Midwestern wheat farmer may not always want the same things as an Arkansas rice and soybean farmer, and neither of them sees policy quite the same as a Wisconsin dairy farmer. That is to say that an Ag chairman for an Arkie would be big.

And even if the Republicans were to take back the Senate, it would still be advantageous to have the ranking minority member on Agriculture.