Brownfield reports Farm Bill deal near; questions remain about Bush veto and House override

"All of a sudden, a Farm Bill deal looks close at hand," reports Peter Shinn of Brownfield Network, citing unnamed "lawmakers from both sides of the aisle" who he writes told him that "the broad outlines of a farm bill agreement are coming together," but it remains to be seen whether President Bush will agree to the price tag.

"The deal would reportedly spend just under $10 billion over the congressional budget baseline for farm programs and would fund it without increasing taxes," Shinn writes. The White House had threatened to veto any version adding more than $8 billion, but Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., told Shinn, "Once you have at least the House and Senate agreeing on a number, hopefully there would be room then for agreement between conferees and the White House." And Shinn adds that Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., "told Brownfield Wednesday if there’s a deal in place that most in Congress can live with, a presidential farm bill veto could become irrelevant" because two-thirds of each chamber would vote to override the veto. "The question would be if whether or not the House could get the votes to do that," Thune said.

But even if House and Senate negotiators agree on the price tag, "Thune added that the issue then becomes how quickly farm policy can be made to fit the available money, which he called 'the hard part.' That’s why Thune said he believes another one-month extension of the 2002 farm bill is likely, which would put a new farm bill in place by mid-April," Shinn writes. (Read more)

Rural activists in Ky. stirring opposition to McConnell, U.S. Senate's Republican leader

Rural votes have been key to many Republican victories, but three activists from rural Kentucky are helping lead growing grass-roots opposition to Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell in his home state, mainly based on his support of President Bush and his Iraq policy, Bob Moser reports in The Nation. McConnell's up for re-election next year, and conservative pundit Robert Novak said yesterday that he "could be in danger."

The rural trio is Yale University graduate student Matt Gunterman, 30, who was the Democratic nominee last year for McLean County judge-executive, the top local administrative post; New York University law student Shawn Dixon, 24, a native of Columbus, Ky., a tiny town on the Mississippi River; and Jim Pence, 68, a "Salem- smoking, pickup-driving, self-proclaimed hillbilly" from Hardin County who's built a following for his HillbillyReport.com blog, Moser writes.

Gunterman, the creator of DitchMitchKy.com, wants to "fire up an Internet-based 'Ruralution,' connecting grassroots progressives from rural America to spur political action," Moser writes. Gunterman "sees Pence as a prime example of the passion and wit that generally go untapped by Democrats and urban progressives. 'There's no one like Jim in the entire United States,' says Gunterman. 'Not with his age and his ornery attitude. He is very much a hillbilly, and he's reinvigorated the term.' In his three years of crisscrossing Kentucky to publicize its antiwar and progressive insurgencies, Pence has also stirred up the state's traditionally timid left-wingers," reports Moser, a North Carolina native who is writing a book on the South and "purple America," states that are neither red nor blue.

The trio has "also pushed the state's more established media to take notice of the progressive groundswell," Moser writes. "In 2004, when Dixon was working as deputy policy and communications director for Democrat Daniel Mongiardo's uphill Senate challenge to Republican Jim Bunning, he spent much of the campaign in a state of frustration over Kentucky newspapers' assumption that the incumbent would cruise to victory." Bunning won by only 1.4 percent of the vote, after some unusual behavior that turned off urban voters. But with President Bush and a same-sex marriage question on the ballot, Bunning's rural margin made up enough of his urban deficit for a win. (Read more)

Rural vote decisive in last four presidential elections, expert says

The rural vote "has been decisive in the last four presidential elections," according to Seth McKee, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, who "has studied the rural vote in presidential elections more than any other academic," reports the Daily Yonder.

In an article titled "Rural Voters and the Polarization of American Presidential Elections," McKee uses data since 1952 to show that "the split between rural and urban voters has widened even as the older divide between Northern and Southern rural voters has narrowed," reports Bill Bishop, co-editor (with wife Julie Ardery) of the Daily Yonder, a new rural-news site with a political bent. Bishop is a former weekly newspaper reporter, editor and publisher who most recently worked for the Austin American-Statesman.

"Bill Clinton was able to win the presidency in part because he neutralized the rural vote, winning 47 percent and 43 percent, respectively, in these contests," Bishop writes. "By contrast, in the 2000 and 2004 elections, Republican George W. Bush would not have won the presidency if not for the support he received among rural voters—53 percent and 64 percent, respectively, for these contests. Despite the decline in the rural percentage of the American electorate, the rural vote has become more important because it is so decidedly Republican. Never before has the gap in the presidential vote choice of rural and urban voters been so wide."