of alligators and agriculture

Once I heard a guy who worked in state politics use the expression, "I'm up to here in alligators!"
and then I ran across a similar expression in the Richard Reeves book, Old Faces of 1976, in which he writes about the 1976 Democratic primaries...

----------------------- [excerpt]------ ...Disillusionment with the Florida primary increased in proportion to the number of candidates who were placed on the ballot by a seven-member commission of state officials who faithfully discharged their responsibility to list all Presidential candidates "generally advocated or recognized in the news media."

Finally, there were eleven names -- George Wallace and the Ten Dwarfs...Secretary of State Richard Stone dismissed the whole thing as "ludicrous . . . we're right in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp and hip-deep in alligators."

The eleven alligators, in approximate order of importance, were:
Governor George Wallace of Alabama...
Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine...
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota...
Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson...
Mayor John Lindsay of New York...
Senator George McGovern of South Dakota...
Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York...[and]
the candidates who never did show up in Florida:  Eugene McCarthy, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana, Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, and Mayor Sam Yorty of Los Angeles....

Wallace is the big alligator and the big story in Florida....

Part of Wallace's strength was rooted in the caution of his most formidable opponents -- Muskie, Humphrey, and, to a lesser extent, Jackson, just didn't have the political guts to take him on.  Muskie crawfished, and Humphrey and Jackson practically let Wallace manage their Florida campaigns; the Senators from Minnesota and Washington began to sound more and more like the man from Alabama with each new day and new poll.

There was both exuberance and desperation about the $500,000 Humphrey campaign in Florida.  "It's the work I enjoy," he told a Tampa radio interviewer who asked why he is running nationally for the fourth time in twelve years. 

And he ran as hard and joyously as ever, leaping into the saddle of a wooden palomino on a merry-go-round at the state fair and trotting across an airport V.I.P. lounge to make ten minutes of phone calls to old supporters -- "Hi, would you tell your daddy that an old friend of his is calling, Hubert Humphrey." 

He is so quick of feet, hands, and mind that it is easy to believe the apocryphal story that he once saw a tomato flying out of an audience and before it landed he was saying, "Speaking of agriculture, let me say this . . . "

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