For Cowboy Poets, Unwelcome Spotlight in Battle Over Spending

Charlie Seemann at the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nev., home to an annual festival that draws thousands of cowboy poets and their fans.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NYT

ELKO, Nev. — This isolated town in the northeast Nevada mountains is known for gold mines, ranches, casinos, bordellos and J. M. Capriola, a destination store with two floors of saddles, boots, spurs and chaps. It is also the birthplace of the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a celebration of range song and poetry that draws thousands of cowboys and their fans every January and receives some money from the federal government.

That once-obscure gathering became a target in the budget battle a world away in Washington last week, employed by conservatives as a symbol of fiscal waste. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat and the majority leader, invoked the event in arguing against Republican cuts in arts financing in the budget debate, setting off a conflagration of conservative scorn.

It put cowboy poetry and Elko, a heavily Republican town with a population of 17,000 about 230 miles east of Reno, very much on the ideological map, like it or not.

By every account, Mr. Reid is an admirer of what takes place here. He grew up in small-town Nevada, is a fan of cowboy culture and has boasted in news releases of getting money for the Western Folklife Center, which sponsors the event. His mention of the gathering, as an example of what he views as valuable projects financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, appears to be an innocent — if unfortunate — political misstep by a leader who is known for occasional political missteps.

(More here.)