Long before he donned an oversize helmet and climbed aboard an M1 Abrams tank, Michael Dukakis had made a name for himself in rural America.

While on the campaign trail in 1988, Dukakis told a roomful of Iowa corn and soybean farmers they'd be better off growing Belgian endive.

After all, he contended, the price of Belgian endive was way up and corn prices were in the tank. Never mind the fact a single Iowa corn farm could probably grow more endive than the entire country could eat.

The press and political opponents were quick to pounce and humiliated Dukakis over the gaffe.

"His farm policy is the Belgium [sic] endive and his defense policy is the Belgium waffle," Republican vice presidential nominee Dan Quayle quipped at campaign stop after campaign stop.

The New York Times took it a step further, shadowing Quayle campaign staffers as they scoured Kansas City grocery stores for a single Belgian endive that Quayle could use as a prop while stumping.

Fast-forward two decades and leafy greens have made a triumphant return to American politics.

In a move of striking similarity to the endive debacle, White House hopeful Barack Obama asked a crowd of Iowa farmers in 2007: "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they're charging a lot of money for this stuff."

The snickers weren't as swift this time, and the backlash not nearly as severe.

So why the shift? Why is Obama now sitting in the Oval Office with a great view of the White House vegetable garden that, yes, includes arugula?

The answer has nothing to do with politics, explains Larry Combest, the former chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. Instead, he believes it is a larger societal factor.

"America is nearly three generations removed from the farm," he said. "Every decade that passes, the population loses touch just a little more with their rural roots."

Makes sense. If you've never been around a farm, you probably see no problem with asking corn and soybean growers to scrap their specialized, expensive equipment in favor of growing a far more labor-intensive crop such arugula or endive on just a fraction of their land.

Truth is, there are logistical hurdles that make these kinds of suggestions absurd. Only now, the farmer is alone in grasping that absurdity.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain could have also told jokes about Iowa's famed corn stalks giving way to arugula leaves, but no one but a handful of corn producers would've laughed.

And that, Combest says, is what frightens him the most about the situation today.

"There is a growing movement coming from urban areas that believes American agriculture should undergo a major facelift and switch to 100 percent organic, specialized production," he said. "There's nothing wrong with organics, or with farmers realizing the value and opportunities of local markets, but to think we can feed a growing world population with just organic production is reckless."

Even a few mainstream news publications that have evangelized the organic movement while criticizing traditional agriculture have admitted the insurmountable roadblocks.

TIME magazine noted in a controversial August article that if the country were going to switch agrarian practices farms would have to get smaller, less efficient and, oh yeah, the country would need a lot more farm hands to pick those vegetables, which would cost much more in the grocery store.

Combest is hopeful folks will start appreciating the fact that America is the agricultural envy of the world and stop trying to undermine the conventional family farms, technologies, and efficiencies that helped the country ascend to this position.

If not, it's pretty clear how story will end—a flood of farmers will start growing nontraditional products, the country will be overrun in vegetables, prices will tank, and rural America will be in an even worse predicament.

The Wall Street Journal first reported about this very phenomenon in 1988, when they wrote, "Farmers Must Watch Before The Endive In."

Sounds like good advice.