Speculation is rife in ag circles about who President-elect Obama will name as Agriculture Secretary.
It's not rife anywhere else, because in the Obama scheme of things, this is a very low priority appointment. The Secretaries of State and Treasury speak to the rest of the world, both our enemies and friends, so are early must-do's. Ag Secretary will be pretty far down the line.
The best we can hope for is some politician, like former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who briefly ran for president in 2004. Some one from a farm state, in touch with the production realities, will do the least damage. On the other hand, some special interest group zealot, like Carol Tucker Foreman was in the Carter administration, can be very harmful.
Obama would naturally lean to someone like Foreman. But politics, and the need to use up his best diehard soul mates in what he sees as higher priorities, could well let USDA slide to a career pol.
Farm policy needs a good shaking, restoring private enterprise with a lot fewer federal subsidies--particularly of things like ethanol production and food stamps. But this is philosophically opposite of Obama's bent, so it's a lot better to hope for the status quo than some radical, off-the-wall vegetarian, health food nut, New York City-style fast food fat zealot, or anti-bio crop bigot.
Things could be a lot better, if we had some free enterprise, free market conservative reforming agriculture. That's not going to happen in an Obama administration, so the best we can hope for is the doctor's Hippocratic Oath "First, do no harm . . ."
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