Political Cornball

The sooner we remove Iowa’s frontrunning status, the better off American politics and policy will be.

It seems likely that many people in the political-industrial complex would agree with that sentiment.  Who wants to be in Iowa in January?  How much nicer it would be if Florida were the first state to make its presidential preferences known.

But the people of Iowa desperately need to be first in the nation and Walker was evidently unwilling to risk defying their sense of entitlement which didn’t exactly polish up his profile in courage. So Mair was out.

The caucuses are good, no doubt, for the self-esteem of Iowans who get to see themselves on television a lot in the weeks leading up to the January caucuses and also get some face time with the candidates. And, as Hunter Schwarz of the Washington Post wrote in his account of the Mair episode:

Iowans also like the thousands of people who descend on the state to cover and participate in the caucus process, spending oodles of cash in the process.

Which is, no doubt true.  But that is petty cash.  Chicken feed, to use an agrarian metaphor appropriate to Iowa. The big political interest of the state is in corn.  More specifically, in a corn product that Americans are compelled to buy if they want to drive a car, run a boat, use a chain saw or leaf blower … to do virtually anything that requires the use of a gasoline burning, internal combustion engine. Iowa is about ethanol.

The ethanol mandate goes back to the days when President George W. Bush was talking about an American “addiction to oil.”  A clever figure of speech that some White House speech writer thought up all by himself and, no doubt, dined out on for days after.  Actually, oil has been liberating for humanity. If you want to see real dependency, go someplace where they still use muscle power – human and animal – to get the farm work done.  That place, by the way, certainly won’t be Iowa where John Deere is king.

Still, there was a slim, but persuasive, case to be made for ethanol back in 2007. Oil was expensive and most of it came from overseas, making the supply uncertain for the usual geo-political reasons. Stretching the oil by adding some ethanol could be sold as a win-win. We would need less oil and since we had lots of farmland and could raise plenty of corn, there would be home grown economic benefits.

So, we got an ethanol mandate and the equivalent of a Manhattan Project for corn. Production of ethanol in the U.S went from just under 4 billion gallons in 2005 to almost 14 billion gallons in 2011.  Iowa accounts for about a quarter of that.

Throw in the distilleries and the storage and transportation infrastructure and you are talking a big piece of Iowa’s economy. And it all must seem like found money. Leading to a fear that, if it could happen that quickly, almost like magic, then it could disappear just as suddenly.

If Washington repealed the mandate …

Consumers never “voted” to put ethanol in their cars. In fact, there were warnings that it would damage the engines of older models. Ethanol is roundly hated by users of smaller engines. Mechanics who work on two-stroke engines are kept busy cleaning up the fouled carburetors of snow blowers, lawnmowers, string trimmers and the like. Furthermore, gasoline with ethanol blended in delivers less energy than pure gasoline.

But that, we were told, is just the price you pay if you want “energy independence” and assorted environmental benefits that were said to be the result of ethanol use. And there was the national security pitch for ethanol, as made by former CIA director James Woolsey who once said that American corn famers were “at the tip of the spear on the war against terrorism.”

In war, some people profit. Even excessively. So Iowa and other corn states prospered at the expense and inconvenience of the rest of the country.  But that’s the way it goes in the political spoils game.

Which Iowa learned to play exceedingly well. When potential presidents came to the state to campaign, they could be counted on to say all the right things about ethanol. Even if it meant they had to double back on things they had said earlier. Hillary Clinton had come down hard on corn in 2002 affirming that there was “no sound public policy reason for mandating the use of ethanol.”

Six years later, running for president, she traveled to Iowa which she said was showing the way “with all of the ethanol that’s being produced here.”

Mitt Romney was unequivocal in 2011 when he was warming up for the Iowa caucuses, saying, ”I support the subsidy of ethanol. I believe ethanol is an important part of our energy solution in this country.”

And, now, Scott Walker has gotten into a spot with the Mair tweet and dismissal and his own confusing statements about the ethanol mandate.  Politico reports that Walker has said he is “okay with continuing the federal mandates, which require a certain amount of corn-based ethanol to be mixed into gasoline, to guarantee that there is “market access,” so that “individual consumers can have the choice about whether they want to consume gasoline with or without ethanol.”

And if that is the best he can do, then maybe he should have kept Ms. Mair on staff and declined to campaign in Iowa, saying that he is not going to be made hostage to a cartel of farmers any more than he was willing to be steamrolled by public sector unions.

The country is awash in cheap oil.  To the point that it is running out of storage capacity.  The arguments for an ethanol mandate have been demolished by the technology of fracking. Iowa needs that first-in-the-nation caucus to keep the candidates in line and, hence, the famers planting corn fence-row to fence-row and the distilleries on line. 

The money from the political reporters and campaign organizations is nice.  As is the media attention.  But it is that ethanol mandate that is vital and if you are working on someone’s presidential campaign, you’d best not say otherwise. If you do, big corn will crush you.