Page 5 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

bringing home the federal “bacon” to her farmers. She pushed back against Obama’s proposed
budget cuts in farm programs, included in both his 2010 and 2011 budget proposals.

“Put simply, the president’s proposal picks winners and losers,” said Lincoln, of the president’s
budget proposal, released in early 2010. It was a message that would be repeated often by her
fellow Southerners during the next four years.

Lincoln was the first Senate Agriculture
Committee chair from Arkansas and the first
woman to head the committee. But that power
and significance was lost on the majority of
Arkansas farmers.
Part of her home-state political problem was
her affiliation with the president. Lincoln was
one of the deciding Democratic votes to
approve Obama’s signature piece of legislation,
the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare” as
GOP leaders called it.

“A lot of the farmers told me that they would be fine with or without Blanche Lincoln in that
seat,” a former farm organization official noted. “They just didn’t want to vote for anyone
associated with Obama and Obamacare.”

In November 2010, the committee chair lost her bid for re-election to John Boozman by a
whopping 58 percent to 37 percent. She was the only member of the Senate Agriculture
Committee to suffer a defeat.

It was perhaps the first political signal that writing the next bill was not going to be an easy lift.
But no one predicted that it would take so long – until February 2014 – and be so difficult to
become law.
What was the holdup? Most of our sources interviewed for this series said there was not
one single factor that made the process drag on and on and on. Instead, there was a
combination of economic, fiscal, political and regional factors at play – the equivalent of a
perfect storm in agricultural policy.

At the same time, they pointed to themes that can help guide those writing the next farm
bill. In order to respect their requests to speak freely without retribution, we’ve not revealed
some of their names.

Former staffers who worked tirelessly throughout the long hours and often sleepless nights
explained the multiyear farm bill process with a simple Venn diagram that was later inscribed on
their personal coffee mugs.

They “affectionately” embraced each year of the rocky process, describing the 2011 Super
Committee process as “cluster,” the 2012 farm bill as “pencil,” the 2013 farm bill as “mind” –
with each adjective hyphenated and ending with a four-letter word, starting with the letter “F.

No shortage of drama
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