Mister We Could Use a Man Like Mike Dukakis Again

Since Iowa's caususes began to matter, political campaigning has heated half the state's summers. Because of its pole position in the presidential nominating process, hopeful candidates canvas the state not only during the summer before an election but also the summer before that, prior to its first-in-the-nation caucuses. Next term, it looks like the Republicans will be in Iowa a year or two earlier. Let's hope they've learned something.

While the overwhelming majority of Iowa’s population now lives in cities and suburbs, most candidates still play to the old rural clichés about Iowans. So, they import bales of hay and bandanas to stage media events outside hip Des Moines corporations like Meredith.

While pandering to our inner rube is harmless to Iowans, it’s risky of the candidates. They walk a thin line between identifying with Iowa voters and coming off as either phony or priggish. But that’s changing. My father used to tell how his father lost an election in Iowa because he didn’t know how to milk a cow. Today, the only people who still hand milk cows live in Old Order Amish communities, so candidates are no longer judged on their barnyard skills. But elections are still won and lost because of what they eat.

Democrats failed to carry Iowa twice in the last six Presidential elections, coincidentally the only two times they lost the popular vote. And both Mike Dukakis and John Kerry choked on food matters. In 1988 Dukakis suggested that Iowa farmers diversify into crops like Belgian endive, flowers, blueberries, apples and grapes. He even suggested changing the structure of federal farm subsidies to encourage farmers to plant crops other than corn and beans. For a lot of small individual farmers, Dukakis was dispensing wisdom and foresight. A walk through just about any authentic farmers market today shows that there’s good money in growing diverse crops that humans can eat. You don’t need a minimum of 40,000 acres to make the numbers work either.

But Dukakis threatened a status quo which continues to guarantee lavish price supports for the Big Two crops, farmed increasingly by fewer and richer investors, mostly financed with out of state money. As a result, Iowa agriculture now resembles Third World mining more than early 20th century farming. Since 1988, the number of heavily capitalized outsiders exploiting our natural resources has grown exponentially, while the number of proud farmers who grow good foods to eat, and who can live off their land, has dwindled to a precious few. Big Ag helped take Mike Dukakis out, somehow making him look like he didn’t understand farming. In retrospect, he understood too well.

In 2004, John Kerry’s wife didn’t help his elitist Francophile image at all by advocating more rabbit on the American dinner table. That too actually pointed out a stupid problem with government intervention in our food system. Since rabbits multiply like rabbits, why do they cost so darn much at the store? Because Congress has refused to mandate the federal inspection of rabbits, unlike chicken or red meat. This forces processors to pay extra for inspections. Since no grocery store with lawyers on retainer would dare carry a meat product that is not USDA inspected, rabbit remains either very expensive or very hard to find. Both Kerry and Dukakis were talking about something we didn‘t want to hear and something that Big Ag and Big Chicken didn‘t want them to fix.

Food politics has changed less than you might think. In a prelude to today’s mad rush to convert corn into car fuel, Thomas Jefferson worked obsessively to develop sesame seed oil. His motive was remarkably similar to the justifications of ethanol subsidies that one hears today, from politicians as different at George Bush and Chet Culver. Jefferson talked about freeing America from dependence on foreign oil. In his time, salad dressings were being made exclusively with imported olive oil.
One hundred years before freedom fries and the French frying of Kerry’s image, Grover Cleveland rebelled against French food. Cleveland so disdained his own French White House chef that he often preferred eating with his servants, where’ corned beef and cabbage was the standard fare. The President joked sarcastically to the press that he dined on “boeuf corné au cabbeau.”

In food as in politics, there are no new ideas, only recycled ones. During the presidential campaign of 1928, a famous circular published by the Republican Party claimed that if Herbert Hoover won there would be "a chicken in every pot." Hoover’s image makers stole the phrase from 16th century France where King Henry IV used it. Then three other Presidents stole it from Hoover.

In hindsight, Dukakis was merely suggesting that farmers return to a practice that the average person still doesn’t realize has been abandoned - raising foods that humans can eat. Since Dukakis was pilloried, grapes have returned to Iowa in a big way. Iowa farmers in the 1990’s discovered they were a hedge against the tyranny of corn and bean prices: Grapes actually return more money per acre than most any other Iowa crop. They also have environmental advantages: Grapes prevent erosion and encourage small family farms that sustains rural communities. For the most part though, Iowans are still content to let places like California and southwest Wisconsin grow good things to eat, while industrialists convert the most fertile farm land into ethanol mines and livestock feeding troughs.

Mister, we could use a man like Mike Dukakis again.