GOP supporters certainly have the lead when it comes to talk radio.

And conservatives and liberals are neck and neck in the blogosphere.

However, if the Minnesota State Fair is any indication, DFLers obliterate the competition in the medium of crop art. 

Year after year, the crop art on display in the Minnesota State Fair’s Agriculture/Horticulture Building leans to the left.

For those who were schooled in more traditional arts, crop art is a field where artists use soybeans, wheat, sunflowers and a multitude of other Minnesota plants to render a portrait.

At this year’s State Fair, the Agriculture/Horticulture building had a whopping four pieces of crop art and one scarecrow all ripping the GOP to shreds.

In order to make their case, three of the five pieces referenced elephants’ scatological proficiencies (in one piece, lovingly rendered using beans).

Sen. Norm Coleman is the target in another asking the public to: “‘Spare us’ from ‘the Norm’” and illustrating Coleman as a bowling pin.

The scarecrow portrays President George W. Bush in a flight suit, wearing a sort of “Jughead” hat, holding a marionette of Norm Coleman in one hand and a missile labeled “fear” in the other.

In case that wasn’t irreverent enough, he’s also sporting a Pinocchio nose.

Ideology is never on display among the 4-H booths. It’s rarely on display at the Creative Activities building (although I would love to see a quilt taking on an issue like sexism or racism). Doctrine sometimes works its way into the pieces on display at the State Fair Fine Arts building.

With crop art, politics is a common theme, which is all fine and good. What better way to demonstrate free speech than through one of Minnesota’s preeminent forms of folk art?

However, it does beg the question “Where are the GOP crop artists?”

The pieces of crop art can take hundreds of hours of arduous labor, placing the right seed in the right place. When delivering a message, it’s definitely not as time-efficient as hammering out an online treatise, or voicing thoughts over the airwaves.

However, there are thousands of people who line up to take a walk through the building to look at crop art. This year, there may be hundreds of National Republican Convention delegates checking out the fair.

Perhaps they’ll begin wondering, “Are we losing the crop art race?