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Over at Grist, Michael Pollan, patron saint of politicized foodies, has a meditation on what went wrong in the fight over the food bill.
Critics of farm-policy-as-usual -- and I count myself among them -- did a much better job of demonizing subsidies than they did proposing alternative forms of farm support that would have won over some percentage of the farmers now receiving subsidies.The whole discourse depicting subsidies as a form of welfare -- payments to celebrities, rich people in cities, mega-farms, etc. -- convinced many farmers that the ultimate goal of the farm bill's critics was to abolish subsidies, rather than to develop a new set of incentives that would encourage farmers to grow real food and take good care of their land.In other words, they created opposition to the programs without creating stakeholder support for better programs. The Farm Bill, for better or worse, is pork politics at its absolute finest. It's legislation utterly unmoored from ideology, that slimes its way through Congress by rubbing some grease wherever there's resistance. It will be very hard to beat it by making a better argument, because that's not where it gains strength. Rather, you need to beat it by replacing it with some bill that has more winners, or at least a relatively equivalent amount.
