Sustainable food & ag list-servs have been sputtering for the past few days over the news that the Barack Obama campaign was apparently considering asking a Republican, Ann Veneman — executive director of the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF — to be his vice-presidential running mate. Not because of her GOP affiliation, but because she was the secretary of agriculture in Bush’s first term. (That’s her at right, at a 2003 press conference for Bush’s “Healthy Forests” — cough cough - initiative.)
Politico.com was the happy recipient of the leak trial balloon. The site’s characterization of Veneman as unpopular with “some Democrats and environmentalists” but “praised by agriculture and food interests for lightly regulating the industries and for encouraging trade and biotechnology” should give you some idea of what her tenure was like. The fact that the American Meat Institute praised her “vision and commitment” when she retired tells you a bit more.
Fortunately, the Fresno Bee reports that we can all relax. Veneman’s office is denying the rumor.
Which is a really good thing, because as John Nichols writes on the Nations blog in a post titled “Obama’s Uniquely Awful Veep Prospect,” that woman was like Round-Up for small, sustainable farmers. She “was booed on visits to farm country,” and as Nichols quotes the assessment of Veneman he wrote in 2001, when she was nominated for Ag Sec:
Veneman’s track record leaves little doubt that if confirmed she will use her position as head of a powerful agency with 100,000 employees, an $82 billion budget and responsibility for implementing federal farm policy, protecting food safety and defending public lands, to advance what farm activist Mark Ritchie describes as “strictly pro-agribusiness, pro-pesticide company, pro-pharmaceutical company positions.”
As a key member of the Reagan and Bush farm teams, as former California Governor Pete Wilson’s Food and Agriculture Department director, as an agribusiness lawyer and as a member of the national steering committee of Farmers and Ranchers for Bush, Veneman has rarely missed an opportunity to advance the interests of food-production and -processing conglomerates, to encourage policies that lead to the displacement of family farms by huge factory farms, to open public lands for mineral extraction and timbering, to support genetic modification of food and to defend biotech experimentation with agriculture.
There’s more. A lot more.
Obama may have read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and he may have supported the travesty of a Farm Bill for all the right reasons (here’s Nichols again), but even the idea that his campaign would have been considering this shameless shill for Big Ag is a huge black mark in my opinion, just as Hillary Clinton’s choice of the former chair of the National Pork Producers Coalition to co-chair her rural campaign really put us off our feed back in December. The senator from Illinois is already on the wrong side of the biofuels debate.
Let’s hope the campaign thinks a little harder in the future about who a choice might offend, rather than just whose campaign donations it might attract.
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July 31st, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Forget this shill.
Joel Salatin for Veep!!!
July 31st, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I find it hard to believe that this suggestion is even serious. It’s actually worse than Kaine, which I didn’t think was achievable. (sigh)
August 1st, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Veneman D’Monstersanto? Creepy-Veepy.