Farm bill offers test for D.C.'s politics, according to Vilsack

WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON Stalled negotiations over a farm bill threaten more than trouble for farmers and consumers, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says.

They're also a broader test of whether Washington can work.

The huge bill, which is more than a year overdue, is caught in a huge dispute between the House and Senate over how much to cut the food stamp program, among other issues.

Vilsack notes that failure to pass it before the end of the year could double milk prices for Americans, spark retaliatory tariffs from Brazil and leave livestock producers who have been hit by storms and drought without standard federal assistance.

Vilsack characterized the talks as a case study of an embattled government.

"This is a bill that should reignite what little DNA is left of bipartisanship in Washington, D.C.," he says.

"This has been a bill that's always been relatively easy for Congress to get done, and if we don't get it done, I think it sends another negative message to the country about the workings of government."

He sees passage starting momentum

On the other hand, passing the farm bill could be a tonic for what ails the capital, he argues, likening it to a stumbling football team that decides to change it's strategy and get back to basics.

"We (should) get back to blocking and tackling -- pass a bill, a major bill," he says. "When that happens, basically, relationships are formed, opportunities for success are created and I think it creates a momentum" that could boost prospects in Washington for a budget agreement and even immigration legislation.

He says "folks have been stuck" in House-Senate negotiations that missed a self-imposed deadline last week to agree on a framework so a bill could be passed before the end of the year.

He says Iowa would back Clinton in 2016

Vilsack, 62, a former two-term governor of Iowa, predicts Hillary Rodham Clinton would fare better in the Hawkeye State in 2016 than she did in 2008, when Barack Obama defeated her in the opening presidential caucuses.

"Let me just say that, from my perspective, Secretary Clinton didn't lose the Iowa caucus; the president won the Iowa caucus," says Vilsack, who supported Clinton. "His team did an enormous job of attracting new people to the system."

If Clinton decides to run again, "I'm reasonably confident that she'll receive a very good reception in Iowa," he says.

He is less certain that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie would be at all welcome in the state's Republican caucuses, which were won in 2012 by Rick Santorum.

If Christie runs, he'll need to take a page from Obama's book, Vilsack says.

"He's going to have to look at ways in which he can expand the base of caucusgoers, because it is a very conservative Republican Party right now."

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Dark Money Politics

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

In the world of nonprofit “dark money” groups, nothing is as it seems: political committees, through the magic of the internal revenue code, become tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations; a partisan campaign ad becomes principled “issue advocacy”; and federal election law that requires public disclosure of donors is rendered toothless by regulatory loopholes.

The flow of cash through organizations asserting tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code has been rising exponentially, from just $5.2 million in 2006 to $310.8 million in 2012.

There is one reason for this growth: 501(c)(4) groups do not have to reveal their donors.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images James Martin, chairman of the 60 Plus Association, and Selena Owens before a Tea Party Express press conference at the National Press Club in Washington on Aug. 4.

Two pie charts — Figure 1 and Figure 2 — drawn up by the Center for Responsive Politics demonstrate the crucial role of conservative non-profits in driving this increase in spending.

Center for Responsive Politics Fig. 1Center for Responsive Politics Fig. 2

The Center, which has dug deeply into this submerged area of American politics, has gathered a lot of the relevant data about the influence of money on American politics at OpenSecrets.org. It makes for instructive reading.

The controversy over the revelation that organizations whose names include the words “Tea Party” were targeted by the I.R.S. for review has provided new cover for politically active conservative organizations, allowing them to charge that investigations of the legitimacy of their tax-exempt status are politically motivated. Many of these groups have, in fact, been explicitly involved in federal election campaigns, as reported upon by The New York Times and Politico.

Sheila Krumholz, the Center’s executive director, told me that despite the denials coming from conservative non-profits her organization has found increasing evidence of practices designed to evade I.R.S. rules governing tax-exempt status and donor disclosure.

The actual I.R.S. rule is worth examining closely:

The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. However, a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity. However, any expenditure it makes for political activities may be subject to tax under section 527(f).

The phrase “not its primary activity” has been interpreted by campaign finance lawyers to mean that a 501(c)(4) organization can spend no more that 49.9% of its money on political activity, according to Krumholz.

In a process she refers to as “money churning,” a hypothetical tax-exempt organization, let’s call it the Good Government Coalition, has $10 million in revenues. The G.G.C. fulfills its obligation to spend just over half its money on non-political activity by giving $5 million plus $1 to another tax-exempt social welfare organization with an ambiguous name, the Liberty Bell Alliance. G.G.C. can now spend what it has left, $4,999,999 on political activity. The Liberty Bell Alliance, which now has $5 million plus $1, can spend just under half, $2,499,999, on political activity. The net result is that of the original $10 million, instead of only $4,999,999 going to political activity, $7,499,998, or 75 percent of the original $10 million, can be spent on politics.

Your eyes glaze over trying to follow money trail between organizations with names like TC4 Trust, the Center for the Protection of Patients’ Rights, Americans for Job Security, American Future Fund and American Commitment – not to mention the difficulty for a layperson, or even for a political professional, of keeping track of the differences between 501(c)(4)s, 501(c)(3)s, super PACs, Political Action Committees, independent expenditure groups, and political party committees — or God forbid 501(c)(6)s.

Let’s look at just one “social welfare” 501(c)(4) organization, the 60 Plus Association. The purpose of 60 Plus is to serve as a conservative counter to the A.A.R.P., which many Republicans believe to be a subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

60 Plus claims to be “a non-partisan seniors advocacy group.” Nonpartisanship is crucial for an organization seeking to get and maintain 501(c)(4) tax exempt status as a social welfare organization, which confers the magic right to conceal the identity of donors.

Generously interpreting the 49.9 percent guideline covering political activity, 60 Plus has pushed the non-partisanship rule beyond the limit. Its web site features items like these: “Shameful Democrats Rush to Defense of Their I.R.S. Political Partners”; “House Votes to Repeal Obamacare as Democrats Stand by Corrupt I.R.S.”; “Seniors Overwhelming Support for Romney Could Spell Trouble for Democrats Nationally”; “Democrat Deceptions on Full Display with Paul Ryan Joining GOP Ticket.”

James Martin, the chairman of 60 Plus, demonstrated his “nonpartisanship” just before the 2012 election thus:

Senior citizens better than any other group understand how devastating President Obama’s policies have been to every generation. They won’t sit idly by as he continues to squander our nation’s greatness, and liquidate our future under trillions more in debt.

Martin continued in the same vein:

Never forget, America’s seniors fought in wars and bled to defend freedom and make this country everything it is today. For four long years we’ve watched as this President has trampled on everything that defines us as a nation, and now tramples on his opponent, his predecessor and the truth itself in a desperate plea for four more years. Seniors know a great leader when they see one, regardless of party, and this President falls far short of deserving our consideration or our vote.

In the past two elections, 60 Plus has invested heavily in overtly partisan independent expenditures. In 2012, the tax-exempt organization doled out $4.62 million, $3.19 million of which was spent in support of Republicans, with the remaining $1.43 million spent to defeat Democratic candidates for federal office, including $321,933 to defeat Obama.

In the 2010 elections, 60 Plus spent even more money, $6.72 million, almost all of which, $6.67 million, was allocated to defeat Democratic candidates.

60 Plus is one of the major beneficiaries of the recent surge in the investment of conservative money in 501(c)(4) organizations.

In the two years from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2009, the organization’s annual budgets were a modest $1.89 million and $1.81 million, according to 990 forms filed with the I.R.S. and available through the Guidestar web site. In 2009-10, 60 Plus receipts abruptly rose to $16.01 million, and then to $18.58 million in 2010-11. In 2011-12, the total fell to $11.8 million, which was still 650 percent larger than in 2008-09.

This burst of cash was in part the result of multi-million dollar grants to 60 Plus from two of the other “social welfare” groups I mentioned above, TC4 Trust and the Center for the Protection of Patient Rights. The Center for the Protection of Patient Rights has been the subject of investigations by the Center for Responsive Politics, by the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the web-based Republic Report and the Los Angeles Times.

The L.A. Times reported that Charles and David Koch, the conservative billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, “have several ties” to the Center for the Protection of Patient Rights:

It is run by Sean Noble, a Phoenix-based GOP consultant who is a key operative in the Kochs’ political activities, as noted by the investigative blog Republic Report. One of the center’s original directors, Heather Higgins, is chairwoman of the Independent Women’s Forum, which has received funding from a Koch-controlled foundation. And Cheryl Hillen, a Connecticut-based consultant who raised $2.6 million for the center, was director of fundraising for the Koch-backed Citizens for a Sound Economy.

The Center for Responsive Politics found that the Center to Protect Patient Rights gave 60 Plus a total of $11.39 million, TC4 Trust gave $4.06 million, and other groups gave smaller amounts, including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS ($50,000) and the American Petroleum Institute ($25,000).

This year, 60 Plus reported in lobbying disclosure forms that in addition to issues affecting seniors, it is supporting off-shore drilling legislation and a measure to permit online gambling. Past issues it has supported have included opposition to the federal telephone excise tax and to legislation allowing drug imports, as well as support for Arctic drilling and the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

60 Plus has been the subject of a number of attempts to restrain its activities, but it remains undaunted. In July 2012, for example, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging that 60 Plus, Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity “are ‘political committees’ who have failed to register and disclose with the F.E.C.” The D.S.C.C. dismissed the organizations’ claims of 501(c)(4) status as “spurious” and “risible on their face.” The complaint is still pending before the F.E.C.

In July, 2012, well before the current I.R.S. controversy, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, called on the I.R.S. to investigate the political activities of a dozen 501(c)(4)s, including 60 Plus. Levin’s list included both Republican and Democratic-leaning 501(c)(4)s: Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, Priorities U.S.A., Americans Elect, American Action Network, Americans for Prosperity, American Future Fund, Americans for Tax Reform, Patriot Majority USA, Club for Growth, Citizens for a Working America Inc. and the Susan B. Anthony List.

60 Plus was not cowed. It is pulling out the stops to capitalize on the controversy regarding the I.R.S. focus on Tea Party groups. In one of his many denunciations of Democrats and the I.R.S., James Martin declared:

The shades of Watergate continue to hover over this scandal. We recall Nixon’s defenders dismissed that as a “3rd rate burglary.” With new revelations coming out by the day and more I.R.S. employees tucking tail, this disgraceful escapade is making Watergate look like a bad hair day by comparison.

Martin appears to be acting on the premise that the best defense is a good offense. (He did not respond to email or phone requests for comment.) In fact, what the past and present activities of 60 Plus, and of a host of other independent expenditure groups, point to is the need for a thorough rewriting of section 501(c)(4) of the tax code to limit the benefits of tax-exempt status – and of the right to conceal the identity of donors — to legitimate “social welfare” organizations.

The current political activities of large numbers of 501(c) organizations in no way constitute the kind of charitable work for which the public would grant favorable tax status as a reward. One of the reasons the people involved with political nonprofits — operatives and donors alike — love secrecy is that they fear public repercussions if their activities have to be conducted in the open. It is by now abundantly clear that abuse of the 501(c)(4) loophole corrupts and corrodes a campaign-finance system that was hardly a model of rectitude to begin with.

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Politics of Paranoia

The politics of the political right have become the politics of paranoia.

According to too many of them, the country is collapsing, and the government is not to be trusted. The circle of safety is contracting. You must arm yourselves to defend your own.

It is no wonder, then, that in this environment, a Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday found that while 47 percent of Americans were angry or disappointed that new gun control legislation in the Senate (including the enormously popular background-checks provision) had failed to pass, 39 percent were very happy or relieved. Fifty-one percent of Republicans had those sentiments, compared with 22 percent of Democrats.

This underscores just how frightened of the government far-right Republicans are.

A Quinnipiac University poll this month found that 91 percent of Americans (including 88 percent of Republicans) said that they supported background checks for all gun buyers. But that same poll found that 61 percent of Republicans worried that if there were background checks for all gun purchases, the government would use that information in the future to confiscate legally owned guns.

Furthermore, a January Pew Research Center report found that for the first time since the question was asked in 1995, most Americans now believe that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms.

According to the report:

“The growing view that the federal government threatens personal rights and freedoms has been led by conservative Republicans. Currently 76 percent of conservative Republicans say that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms and 54 percent describe the government as a ‘major’ threat.”

The report continued:

“By comparison, there has been little change in opinions among Democrats; 38 percent say the government poses a threat to personal rights and freedoms and just 16 percent view it as a major threat.”

Incidentally, 62 percent of those who had a gun in their home thought the government posed a threat, as opposed to 45 percent of those without a gun in the home.

In January, the right-wing Web site World Net Daily, writing about a poll the site conducted with the consulting firm Wenzel Strategies, bemoaned:

“The seeds of a tyrannical government are present in the United States, with a citizenry happy with a heavily armed law enforcement presence and a disbelief that their government could do anything that would make them want to revolt, according to a new poll.” The poll revealed “widespread belief” that the Second Amendment “really is for self-protection and hunting, not for ‘fighting back against a tyrannical government.’”

Fritz Wenzel of the consulting firm is quoted as saying that the poll’s finding “demonstrates the downside of more than 230 years of government stability. This survey shows it is hard for many Americans to think of a situation in which their government would need to be overthrown. Of course, the last time there was a serious fight for the future of the federal government, in the Civil War, Washington won.”

And that’s just the tip of it. Last month, Glenn Beck described the makeup of what he believed was the coming “New World Order.” It did not bode well for America.

“I think you might even have some Nazi influence in the United States, unfortunately, because we’ve had it before. And it will happen there and there, I think,” Beck said, placing dots over the Northwest and the Northeast on a map.

Discussing the Muslim Brotherhood’s “influence,” Beck said:

“I think there’s going to be a slight influence in South America and Mexico and in the United States. I think it is going to be more significant than anyone imagines, and I believe that you are also then going to be co-ruled by a thug-ocracy of this part of the world. And I think it’s going to be, at least in our case, I think it’s going to be China. China will be the balance of our power. They will use Muslim, um, Islam as the real enforcers that they will then help us and whoever is in power in our country. We will be ruled by an American, but it will be a technocrat that will answer to China. And, they will stomp things out and use Islam as much as they have to, to get rid of anyone who’s standing up, I think.”

O-kay.

And Beck delivered this prattle in a suit jacket, not a straitjacket.

This is the constant stream of desperate drivel that has fostered a climate of fear on the far right that makes common-sense consensus nearly impossible.

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The Politics of Going to College

An unexpected issue in the 2012 election is whether or not rank-and-file Americans should aspire to a college degree. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have both made comments about higher education that could come back to haunt them in a general election.

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” Santorum told a Tea Party meeting in Troy, Mich., on Feb. 25. “I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.”

Romney, the all-but-certain nominee, was blunt when speaking in March at a metal assembly plant in Youngstown, Ohio: “It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that.”

There is a partisan logic to the Republican hostility to higher education: the well-educated — a reliable source of conservative support as recently as the 1980s — have been moving steadily toward the Democratic Party. In a head-to-head contest, a March 26 McClatchy-Marist Poll shows Romney ahead of Obama 47-42 among those without college degrees, while Obama leads Romney 51-42 among those with them. Similarly, those without college degrees lean toward voting for Republican congressional candidates 49-40, while those with them lean toward Democrats 46-44.

Not only are Democrats making gains among the better-educated, but these voters are becoming a larger share of the electorate. Exit polls show the growth of the college-educated voting bloc.

In 1984, those with college and advanced degrees made up 35.3 percent of the electorate. Reagan’s strongest margins were among the college educated, who backed him over Walter F. Mondale by a crushing 62.7-36.9 margin. Among all those with both college and advanced degrees, Reagan won 58.7 percent, a landslide margin.

Jump to 2008. Even though those with college degrees made up 27.9 percent of the population that year, they cast 45 percent of the presidential vote. These voters register and go to the polls in substantially higher numbers than the less well educated.

By 2008, the Republican advantage of the early 1980s among voters with a college degree or higher had disappeared. Barack Obama carried this demographic with 54.1 percent. He beat McCain 50-48 among those with bachelor’s degrees, and by a decisive 58-40 among the 17 percent of the 2008 electorate with post-graduate degrees.

The shifting allegiance of the better-educated – together with the growth of such pro-Democratic constituencies as single women, Hispanics and African-Americans — has been a crucial factor in the revival of the Democratic Party as a fully competitive force in presidential elections. The party’s gains have, in many respects, made up for losses among white working class voters.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the defection of Reagan Democrats gave the Republican Party a clear edge in national contests; by the 1990s and 2000s, the once reliably Republican affluent suburbs surrounding cities like New York and Philadelphia had moved in the opposite direction, empowering the Democratic Party to win the White House in 1992, 1996, and 2008, and the popular vote, if not the presidency, in 2000. By contrast, in the 1970s and 1980s, Republican presidential candidates won, on average, 59 percent of the upscale suburban vote.

The gains the Democrats made were concentrated in one major segment of the well-educated: professionals — salaried employees in schools and colleges, social workers, the arts, the natural and social sciences, knowledge/information workers, “symbol analysts,” “creatives” and so forth.

Andrew Gelman, director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University, has illustrated the voting trends among different job classifications in his book “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.”

The graph below shows how professionals voted compared to the entire electorate.

courtesy of Andrew Gelman

At the same time, the percentage of the population employed in professional jobs has been growing steadily, from 16.4 percent of the workforce in 1970 to 22.2 percent in 2010.

While Democratic gains among those with undergraduate and advanced degrees have clearly benefitted the party, there are costs.

The replacement of working-class whites with upscale professionals has turned the Democratic coalition into an alliance with a built-in class division. Instead of representing the bottom half of the income distribution as it did from the 1930s to the 1960s, the party has become bifurcated, with roughly 60 percent of the base vote cast by relatively poor and heavily minority voters, and much of the remainder provided by relatively affluent social and cultural liberals.

While constituting a minority, the relatively upscale wing clearly dominates party policy and provides the majority of the activists who run campaigns, serve as delegates to the convention and have become the core of the party’s donor base.

The leverage of the highly-educated wing is reflected in the priority placed on the culture war issues that are of key importance to this wing. Support for abortion rights and gay rights, for example, is an essential litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates. There is no parallel demand that candidates protect and expand food stamps, Medicaid, or other means-tested programs for the poor.

On the Republican side of the aisle, the aversion to federally funded scholarship aid – as demonstrated, for example, in the budget passed last week by the Republican House — has significant consequences for the party’s core supporters.

The children of the white working class are in need of financial support to pay for tuition at a two or four-year colleges as a path to upward mobility. The overwhelming majority of Pell Grants, 63.3 percent, go to low income whites, while 11.8 percent goes to African-American students, 13.2 percent to Hispanics, 6.8 percent to Asian-Americans, and the rest to other groups.

This year, Romney will need to win by a wide margin among those for whom access to post-secondary education is a key issue — particularly white men whose wages have stagnated or eroded more than those of women.

The following chart, put together by the M.I.T. economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, shows what has happened to the wages of men with various levels of education working full time (high school dropout, high school graduate, some college, college graduate, greater than college).

courtesy of David Autor

For men without college degrees, 1972-3 marked — in economic terms — the best year of their lives, and earnings adjusted for inflation have gone downhill over the forty years since then. Only men with college degrees, and especially those with post-graduate degrees, did better in 2008 than they had in 1973.

A central theme of the Romney campaign is that he intends to replace the Democratic “entitlement state” with the restoration of America as “a land of opportunity and a beacon of freedom.”

In the fight for Republican primary votes, it may make political sense for Santorum to mock higher education as the province of liberal elitists and for Romney to display deficit-consciousness by declaring his opposition to government assistance for college tuition.

In the general election, Romney faces a far tougher sell. Federal aid to education has strong, bipartisan support among voters, with more than 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats opposed to making any cuts, according to a Gallup poll from Jan. 26, 2011.

Romney’s refusal to promise that he will “give you government money to pay for your college” is a risky approach to courting ambitious lower income voters. Democrats see Romney setting a trap for himself and have already begun to lay the general election groundwork.

The increasing salience of education provides Democrats with an effective means of countering the problem of an underperforming economy, as President Obama demonstrated in a speech on Feb. 27: “We can’t allow higher education to be a luxury in this country. It’s an economic imperative that every family in America has to be able to afford.”

Romney, in turn, appears to recognize that he has stepped onto treacherous terrain. His Web site now declares: “Post-secondary education cannot become a luxury for the few; instead, all students should have the opportunity to attend a college that best suits their needs. Whether it is public or private, traditional or online, college must be available and affordable.”

Still, Romney does not specify which actions he would have the federal government take to prevent post-secondary education from becoming a luxury for the few. Instead, his Web site trumpets the potential for initiatives at the state level, where Romney, speaking as a former governor himself, “knows what can be accomplished when governors are empowered to reform their education systems.”

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published in January.

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Top GOP fundraiser: 'There's not too much money in politics' (The Christian Science Monitor)

Washington – Is politics awash with too much money?

Mike Duncan, chairman of American Crossroads, doesn't think so. His group, which solicits money to spend on behalf of conservative politicians, aims to raise $120 million to support GOP candidates in the 2012 election.

“There is not too much money in politics,” Mr. Duncan said Friday, in defense of his group's goal.

IN PICTURES: Will these Republicans run in 2012?

It is a matter of context, Duncan said at a Monitor-sponsored breakfast with reporters. "Our $120 million is in relation to a couple billion [dollars] on the other side.... We will probably be outspent as a party in this election.â€

In 2008, the Obama campaign raised $750 million. The Obama team is expected to spend more than that trying to get the president reelected in 2012.

American Crossroads, a Republican-backed independent group, was launched by Karl Rove, President Bush's former political adviser, among others. Mr. Rove acted after a 2010 Supreme Court decision, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, made it permissible for "super PACs" to raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, and unions, as long as the donors are disclosed and the groups do not coordinate their spending with federal candidates.

The $120 million goal includes funds that would be raised by American Crossroads, a tax-exempt 527 organization under Internal Revenue Service rules, and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)4 group. Under the law, Crossroads GPS is not required to disclose donors' names to the public.

Crossroads President and CEO Steven Law said labor unions reported spending $400 million in support of Democratic candidates in the 2008 election. He expects similar spending by labor groups in 2012. Of his organization’s $120 million goal, Mr. Law said: “We are going to need every penny of it to have a chance of keeping up with the much larger dollars that we expect to be poured in by the left.”

IN PICTURES: Will these Republicans run in 2012?

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Ethanol No Longer Third Rail of Iowa Republican Politics (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | Recent pronouncements by declared Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty favoring an end to ethanol subsidies and undeclared possible candidate Sarah Palin to end all energy subsides have been seen as evidence of political courage.

It has been a truism for a long time that ethanol subsidies are the third rail of politics in corn state Iowa, where the first national caucus is to be held. That is certainly the calculation of Mitt Romney, another declared candidate, who has recently announced his support for continuing the subsidies.

However, an article in Slate suggests that failure to support ethanol is no longer the kiss of death in Iowa, at least in Republican politics. It seems that a broad consensus is building up that the $6 billion-a-year ethanol subsidy needs to be phased out:

"It is the mainstream Republican position in Iowa that ethanol subsidies must be phased out. Chuck Grassley, the state's senior senator, has authored legislation that calls for a gradual decrease in the subsidy. The state's Republican governor and the state's agriculture commissioner support the reduction. Even the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association -- also known as the ethanol lobby -- supports this position."

That places the stands of Pawlenty and Palin, as well as the opposite track taken by Romney, in a new light. What seemed to be courage on the part of Pawlenty and Palin now seems to be a shrewd political move, positioning themselves right in the mainstream of Iowa Republican politics. Romney, on the other hand, appears to be more of a panderer than he already is.

The reason for this development is that the budget deficit has caused a lot of rethinking of government spending. An entitlement mentality in which one demands government largess as a matter of right has become a more difficult position to take. Also, since the ethanol industry is decades old and thus mature, the case for phasing out the subsidy becomes stronger.

This means that blind support for ethanol subsidies is no longer a sure ticket for winning the Iowa caucus, at least on the Republican side. But one can be sure that President Obama will be firmly on the side of keeping the subsidy money flowing and will attack whomever the Republicans nominate of wanting to hurt farmers. How effective this tactic will be remains to be seen.

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