By John Brummett
It might require big bucks and a big plane to pull such a long banner. But somebody might consider flying one over Razorback Stadium during the Georgia game next Saturday.
The banner would read as follows: “Y’all would be fools to fire Blanche Lincoln now.”
Something quite new and interesting has happened since somebody flew a plane over War Memorial Stadium last Saturday to wave a banner advocating the firing of Lincoln. She stands for re-election next year, precariously, we were formerly thinking.
Several things have happened, actually.
Sen. Chris Dodd decided not to move from the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee to replace his dearly departed best friend, Ted Kennedy, at the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Tom Harkin of Iowa, a key farm state, thought long and hard about leaving the chairmanship of Agriculture where he could champion the corn and wheat and hog farmers, not to mention ethanol. But then he opted to do it, to take the opportunity to succeed Kennedy, since Dodd had declined.
So there was an opening for the Democratic chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee. The three most-senior Democrats after Harkin chose not to take it.
Pat Leahy of Vermont had been agriculture chairman before and quite preferred passing on judgeship nominees as chairman of Judiciary.
Kent Conrad of North Dakota preferred to keep his Budget Committee chairmanship.
Max Baucus of Montana chose, naturally, to stay chairman of Finance, where he merely is the guy seeking to forge health care reform.
Who was next?
Well, that would be Madam Chairman to you, one Blanche Lincoln, farmer’s daughter from Phillips County, who now becomes the first woman chairman ever of the Agriculture Committee. Remarkably, she’s also the first agriculture chairman ever from her little state with its history of great reliance on farming and of great accumulations of seniority in the U.S. Senate.
Farming — of rice, soybeans, a little cotton and some winter wheat — is merely the very lifeblood of eastern Arkansas. Chicken growing and chicken processing provide a major component of the very livelihood of southwestern, due-western and northwestern Arkansas.
All of that falls under the federal Agriculture Department — a.k.a. the USDA — and all of the USDA’s legislative business gets routed through the Senate committee of which Lincoln is now chairman.
And there’s more. This committee oversees forestry and USDA’s food safety and nutrition programs.
But that’s not the big local story. This is: The federal Agriculture Department is where most of the federal money gets spent for rural development — for water and sewer projects and whatever else happens to be considered helpful for economic development and quality of life in the often-withering hinterlands.
Lincoln is now uncommonly positioned to defend East Arkansas farmers’ interests when subsidy issues arise, as they always do, and as they inevitably will as this president of Lincoln’s party tries to find ways to get the deficit down.
She is uncommonly positioned to protect and serve the interests of the Arkansas poultry industry. And she is uncommonly positioned to try to do whatever is within the federal government’s might to save and revitalize her native Arkansas Delta.
All of that is to make this political point, which is where I started: The Republican nominee against Lincoln, whoever it is, will still run strong in suburban areas and large communities and Northwest Arkansas. But people in rural Arkansas, who still can dominate a statewide election, will have a hard time coming up with a practical reason to vote against Lincoln’s re-election.
Obama can’t be so bad that they’d throw out an agriculture chairman. Could he?
This is the kind of thing that drives Arkansas Republicans bonkers. They’re philosophically in tune with rural Arkansas. They had in their sights a vulnerable Democratic Senate incumbent at a time of backlash against Democrats.
Then Ted Kennedy died and that vulnerable Democratic incumbent woke up one morning as chairman of the Agriculture Committee from an agriculture state.
Talk about not being able to win for losing.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
