Secretary of Corn

Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture.  Is anybody who isn’t from Iowa happy with this pick?  I’m with Ezra Klein (except for the last sentence, which perfectly demonstrates why libertarians and liberals will likely never form a political alliance):

At the end of the day, though, Vilsack is arguably less the problem than his agency. In 1862, when the Department of Agriculture was founded, agriculture composed 82 percent of American exports. America had three times as many farms as it does now — and those farms were far more labor intensive, in a country that had one-third the population. Agriculture, in other words, was the main export and one of the nation’s largest employment sectors. You needed a Department of Agriculture. Today, agricultural exports make up 8 percent of the total. Agricultural industry employs a tiny fraction of Americans and is dominated by a few large producers. It is an interest group that has attained cabinet status. That it would be headed by a governor from a state whose reliance on agricultural exports makes it a throwback to the days when the agency had a more obvious claim to existence makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is why you’d have a Department of Agriculture rather than, say, a Department of Food.