THE CONCILIATOR.(Barack Obama)(Interview)

Begin in farm country, late last summer, no particular day. Carmi, Illinois--a town on the Little Wabash River, down in the southern tip of the state, twenty-five miles from Kentucky, population about fifty-five hundred. A group of twelve farmers--burly white men with ruddy complexions and very short hair--sitting around a rectangle of pushed-together tables in a nondescript room, talking with their junior senator, Barack Obama. It was long before Obama decided to run for President, and he wasn't in a rush. He sat at one end of the tables, leaning back in his chair, his knee propped against the table edge. He wore a tie but had removed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. A young farmer complained about the Jones Act, a 1920 law that he felt was partly responsible for a detrimental consolidation in the barge market. Another farmer had a question about ethanol.

"My question first arose in my mind during the State of the Union address," the farmer said. "President Bush said I'm all for biofuels, and then he started talking about switchgrass. And I'm, like, now wait a minute, we've got a system where we can make ethanol out of corn. I guess cellulosic ethanol"--which can be made from switchgrass--"is more efficient. But we don't know how to do it, and we don't know if farmers are ever going to grow switchgrass, and we don't know if we would even want to grow switchgrass, so why so much emphasis on cellulosic ethanol?"

"Well, I'm not a scientist," Obama said, in a leisurely way, "so I gotta be careful when I start getting into this stuff that I don't wade too deep and then can't get back to shore. Right now cellulosic ethanol is potentially eight times more energy-efficient than corn-based ethanol, because you eliminate the middle step of converting it into sugar before you convert it into ethanol. That's my understanding. I know you're attached to corn, but if somebody came to you and said, you know what, if you take half your fields and grow switchgrass you'll make the same amount of money or more, then--"

"Not really," the farmer interjected. "Because I had a guy come to me before wheat harvest and said do you wanna sell your straw and I said no. I said, 'Don't even talk to me, I don't wanna sell my straw.' "

"Now that's interesting," Obama said. "Why wouldn't you want to sell your straw?"

"Organic matter!" the farmer said, triumphantly.

"Well, but if it's economical to you, if it's a good business decision, you'll be interested."