For the benefit of readers who complain that I write too much about Tom Cotton, I choose to begin today by writing about Rick Crawford.
I do so in the eventual context of Tom Cotton’s pants being on fire.
Months ago when the farm bill was being debated, Crawford appeared on a local news show to explain the bill and argue for its passage. A conservative Republican in his second term representing the farm-heavy 1st District, Crawford sits on the House Agriculture Committee that helped prepare the bill.
Crawford explained that it was a matter of time-honored practicality to administer food stamps through the Agriculture Department and combine the food-stamp appropriation with money for farmer assistance.
If those expenditures were separated for appropriation purposes, Crawford explained, then rural farm interests, already threatened by population shifts to the urban centers, would have difficulty passing basic farm-assistance programs.
Likewise, conservatives might never vote for food assistance for the poor if the appropriation stood alone.
Give a little, get a little, keep farmers solvent and render otherwise starving poor people minimally nourished—that’s the grand political bargain of long standing.
It’s solution-oriented politics, not ideology-consumed politics.
And that, of course, gets us to the blazing britches of the aforementioned Cotton.
He is trying to win fast-track promotion to the U.S. Senate from a farm state after voting in his one term in the U.S. House against the farm bill favored by the state’s major farm interests.
Level of difficulty: high.
Cotton said he voted against the farm bill because of food stamps. He said people use food stamps to buy steak to haul in big SUVs to their mansions—a dubious scenario for which I’ve encouraged Cotton or anybody to produce photographic evidence and share it with me and/or the Agriculture Department’s fraud hot line.
Even if there is cheating, and surely there is, the best answer is to stop the cheating, not gut the program.
After all, if someone gets caught speeding on Interstate 30, the right approach is not to close a section of the highway or lower the speed limit for everyone. It’s for the trooper to give the speeder a ticket and become more active and vigilant with his radar gun.
So it appears that Cotton’s self-alienation on the farm bill—his having voted with the Club for Growth and differently not only from his Democratic opponent, Mark Pryor, but from Crawford and the other three Republican members of Congress—was posing problems for Cotton in his nationally watched challenge to Pryor.
He did a commercial trying to explain it away. He brought out his daddy this time, giving his mom a rest. He showed video of some cows.
Then he said that what happened to the farm bill to make it unpalatable to him was that “President Obama hijacked the farm bill, turned it into a food-stamp bill.”
You see what Cotton did there? He chose to cloak his vote in the uncommon popularity in Arkansas of this president.
And he … well, I don’t like the word “lied.”
Instead I’ll limit my own reference to “committed a shamefully dishonest implication.”
I will rely on PolitiFact.com, a leading referee of contemporary political advertising, to rate Cotton’s charge as worthy of its most egregious designation, that being “pants on fire.”
As in, well, you know—liar, liar, pants on fire.
Our federal government began putting food assistance in the Agriculture Department in the 1930s. It continued to do so until the 1940s. Then, in the 1960s, this merger of food aid and farm aid was restored. In 1973, when Richard Nixon was president, the current nutrition program was put into the farm bill. It has remained there ever since.
Barack Obama did not hijack diddly.
He did not put food stamps in this place where they had been for decades already.
If Obama had hijacked anything, he would have been assisted by certain conspicuous accomplices—Rick Crawford, Tim Griffin, Steve Womack, John Boozman.
Food stamps were maintained, per usual, in the farm bill in a process beginning with the agriculture committees, on which Crawford and Boozman sit.
Cotton essentially calls his congressional colleagues abettors of this unpopular president.
But those colleagues are not taking Cotton’s commercial seriously. Nor should you.
This is the second instance of Cotton’s ceding his seemingly principled status as a zealous outsider to try to wiggle out of a principled stand through tactical misstatement.
He denied voting against the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, though he, alone in the delegation, did just that.
Now he excuses his vote against the farm bill by the utterly bogus assertion that Obama hijacked the bill to install food stamps.
Apparently—as a man told me once—sometimes you have to rise above principle.
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.