How Republicans Lost the Farm
On a recent Monday in San Antonio, Texas, Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, got up to speak to an auditorium full of farmers. Vilsack, a doughy, wavy-haired former governor of Iowa, wore a grim expression as he gripped the lectern.
"My mom used to caution me to have patience. She'd say, 'Patience, Tommy, patience,'" Vilsack said. "My mother never met the 2013 Congress."
The group Vilsack was addressing, the American Farm Bureau Federation, is the nation's largest farmers' organization, with more than 6 million member families from all 50 states. It is perhaps the most influential player in the American agriculture lobby, which spends more than $100 million each year to influence Congress. Through its state chapters and their political-action committees, the bureau also wields influence in state capitols and elections up and down the ballot. In San Antonio, 7,000 members had gathered for their annual meeting to hear from Vilsack and discuss what they wanted out of Washington.
The members of the Farm Bureau—an overwhelmingly conservative, strongly Republican group—have traditionally gotten what they wanted, between all that lobbying and politicians' never-ending appetite for paeans to the nobility of rural life. But these days, thanks to the Tea Party civil war that has stoppered the House of Representatives, that is not the case.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/how-republicans-lost-the-farm/283349/
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what they mean for the average American taxpayer. If nothing else, skim over the paragraphs that have numbers/data in them. I also liked their encouragement for the Dems to pursue the issue in 2014.
If farm policy was a sleeper issue in some 2012 elections, it stands to be even more influential in 2014. After the farm-bill antics of 2013, farmers are far more frustrated today than they were in 2012. And Democrats in House and Senate contests across the map have picked up the issue, as the prominent agriculture writer Jerry Hagstrom recently noted. Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat seeking to unseat Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, has run a television ad accusing him of "hurting Kentucky farmers" by voting against the farm bill. Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas has attacked his opponent, Republican Representative Tom Cotton, for his farm bill vote. I recently received a fundraising email from John Lewis, a Democratic congressional candidate in Montana, that began, "The U.S. House doesn't care about renewing the farm bill, and Montana's farming and ranching communities are hurting as a result.
Some in the farming community hope the Republicans who have betrayed them will finally pay a political price this year. Representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas represents more farmers than any other congressman, according to Barry Flinchbaugh, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, who lives in Huelskamp's district. (Flinchbaugh, a longtime adviser to Congress on farm policy, speaks to hundreds of farm groups every year; his speaker biography says he is "to Ag policy what Tiger Woods is to golf."
"But he votes no [on the farm bill], because Heritage and the Club for Growth tell him to vote no," Flinchbaugh told me. "Frankly, he pays more attention to them than he does to the Kansas Farm Bureau. That would have been unheard of even as recently as the 2008 farm bill."
