As campaign whoppers go, it wins the most chutzpah award.
When President Obama hijacked the farm bill, turned it into a food stamp bill… I voted no.
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That’s U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton (R) talking, and he’s running for U.S. Senate against incumbent Mark Pryor (D).
When this campaign ad was released in September, fact checkers came down hard on the freshman Congressman. Cotton had the distinction of being the only member of the Arkansas delegation to vote against the bill in January.
No, you can’t yell Obama in a crowded room just because you want to introduce the specter of a boogyman.
You see, Mr. Cotton, one direct link between farmers (the folks who grow/raise our food) and vulnerable consumers (who eat it) is older than you are: the National School Lunch Act and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966. The bill directed the Secretary of Agriculture to help ensure the health of America’s school children by “encourag[ing] the domestic consumption” of the bounty of America’s farms.
The school milk program had been in place since 1954 and was incorporated into the new act.
Food stamps have an even longer history, with the first program running from 1939 to 1943. President Kennedy’s first Executive Order was for a pilot food stamp program. President Johnson pushed for a permanent food stamp program in 1964. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 had dual goals: helping our farmers (the ag economy) and improving nutrition in low-income households.
The food stamp program began operating nationwide on July 1, 1974, according to USDA.
And in August 1977, the Mikwaukee Sentinel told its readers: Food stamp-farm bill agreement completed. The link was complete.
And who shepherded this foundational legislation?
In the 1960s, when he was still the state’s junior senator, [Herman] Talmadge was the prime architect of the nation’s agriculture policy, ultimately marrying farm subsidies to food stamps and building a coalition of urban and rural lawmakers to pass one of the most complex and important pieces of legislation in the nation’s history. By any objective standard, it was a titanic legislative accomplishment, and one that is unimaginable in today’s world.
(At one point during the evolution of the farm bill, the legendary columnist Drew Pearson reported in amazement that Talmadge was tag-teaming with Senator Hubert Humphrey, the liberal Minnesotan who would later become vice president, to press the issue. “The strange alliance between the trigger-tongued Humphrey from the North and the molasses-mouthed Talmadge from the South is something of a political miracle,” Pearson wrote.)
That bi-partisanship, Mr. Cotton, represented statesmanship and leadership, two qualities MIA from the halls of Congress today.
Just as integrity is missing from your campaign.
Instead of owning up to the big one in your ad, you and your campaign doubled-down:
“We’ve gotten such great feedback from farmers, taxpayers, and supporters that we’re actually going to increase the size of the ad buy,” said David Ray, a spokesman for the Cotton campaign.
Almost 1-in-5 Arkansas residents (19%) live in poverty, compared to a national rate of 15%.
Agriculture is your home state’s number one industry (pdf), and the farm bill provides crop insurance for corn, cotton, rice, soybeans — key crops for Arkansas farmers, who are #1 in rice, #3 in cotton and #10 in soybeans.
Have you no shame?
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com