CQ says former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack has emerged as the frontrunner for Agriculture secretary in the Obama administration. Ezra Klein speaks to dashed hopes:
Anyone who cares about food policy, or who was excited by Barack Obama’s offhand reference to Michael Pollan’s food policy manifesto [that’s me], should be extremely skeptical of this pick. [I am!] Iowa, of course, is a corn state. For the last 14 years, they’ve been the leading corn producer in the nation. In 2006, they grew almost 2.1 billion bushels. But they don’t just grow corn. They also demand subsidies. And they get them. Tens of billions of dollars of them. And corn subsidies are far and away the worst of our food policy abominations — they make processed food cheaper, meat cheaper, sweeteners cheaper, and create a market for ethanol that would not naturally exist. They endure, in part, because of a quirk in our political system. The power of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential Caucus is used to force candidates to swear fealty to ethanol and corn subsidies. This bit of civically disguised blackmail has become so routine that the West Wing did an episode on it. But it’s one thing to make promises during campaigns. Putting a former governor of Iowa in charge of the Department of Agriculture, however, seems like a solemn oath that the subsidies will continue far into the future.