U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, who represents the farming region of eastern Arkansas and is approximately as dedicated a Tea Party Republican as you’ll find, was explaining a while back the wisdom of putting food-stamp money and farm policy in the same large bill.
It was that rural farm-state legislators have limited understanding of urban poverty needs and that urban legislators have little understanding of rural agricultural needs.
It was that neither interest could easily galvanize a congressional majority on its own. Together, though, they can strike a functioning balance of combined interest. A governing majority, if you will.
Actually, the country’s modern cultural and demographic evolution makes the farm bill/food-stamp marriage more important to rural interests than ever before, and more vital than to urban interests.
That is to say that farmers ought to give thanks for the food-stamp conjoining.
Rural America is declining in population. Every 10 years it loses votes in the U.S. House of Representatives through congressional redistricting. Farmers cultivating massive amounts of uninhabited acreage will need the densely concentrated city voters more than ever. They’ll need food stamps both for political votes and as supermarket customers.
Crawford’s view is shared by every member of the mostly Republican delegation in Arkansas—except, that is, for that lone holdout of the famously and fervently principled reputation, or, if you prefer, the extreme zealous reputation.
I refer, of course, to Tom Cotton, who voted to separate food stamps from the farm bill, and to slash food stamps by tens of billions of dollars, and who then voted against the compromise farm bill after he and the Club for Growth and the Koch brothers lost that battle.
Now he proposes to take his fervent principle, or extreme zeal, to the U.S. Senate to replace Mark Pryor.
Thus the question before the voters of Arkansas is as follows: Do they agree with the extreme principles of Cotton that our government has gone so desperately off fiscal course that we need to chunk it wholesale and start over again; or, do they see things more in the way of Pryor that the world is always going to be imperfect but that a political representative’s job is to negotiate the imperfections as well as he can to attend to the better interests of his constituency, of which farmers are a major economic element?
Put another way, which is to say my way, which generally sees things Pryor’s way: Can pragmatism be principled, too?
I think it can.
It was exactly that—pragmatically principled—on the farm bill, as agreed to by Arkansas Republicans John Boozman, Steve Womack and Tim Griffin along with Pryor and Crawford.
The bill was imperfect. It does not improve America’s deficit situation. It advances corporate subsidies that are distasteful. It does not impose the most favorable policies for all Arkansas farmers, relying on crop insurance rather than direct payments.
But it came down to that bill or nothing. And the bill lends essential clarity to farm policy just in the nick of time for farmers to make their planting and financing decisions. It should keep food prices reasonably stable, whereas failure to pass it could have sent dairy prices skyrocketing.
That is to say that a responsible and pragmatic political representative had to make an uninspiring choice between uncomfortable choices. That’s not unlike the predicament facing Arkansas voters as they proceed to the polling place in November to confront two names: Mark Pryor, Tom Cotton.
Cotton’s vote on the farm bill was akin to an Arkansas voter writing in the name of Huey Long. It makes a statement of principled despair. But it accomplishes nothing of relevance to anyone or anything other than perhaps one’s own self-satisfying silliness.
Republicans, as ever, have produced a counterspin. It’s that Mark Pryor’s beloved daddy, David, voted in the minority against a farm bill as a senator in 1996. It’s that Mark trashes Tom for the same thing Mark’s pop did.
As ever, that’s a good try, serviceable in a superficial way, but not exactly on point when considered in a fully substantive way.
That was the famous “freedom to farm” bill that did away with FDR-era subsidies and set up payments to farmers, even for acreage unplanted.
David Pryor didn’t like it generally. Specifically, he didn’t like the way it treated Arkansas rice farmers, who tended to oppose it although the Farm Bureau was actually for it.
In the current context, the Arkansas row-crop community was unified that the bill was acceptably better than the alternative of nothing.
David Pryor was joined in his “no” vote by his fellow senator, Dale Bumpers, and by the Arkansas House member who sat on the Agriculture Committee. That was Blanche Lincoln.
Republicans are banking on three things.
One is that the “David Pryor did the same thing” rejoinder serves to cloud the issue.
The second is that modern-day Arkansas doesn’t give a hoot any more about the farm bill.
The third is that I’m just filling space because this game was over when Pryor voted for Obamacare.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.