President-elect Barack Obama will nominate former Iowa Governor and Institute of Politics fellow Tom Vilsack to be secretary of agriculture, Obama announced last week.

Like Obama, Vilsack promotes support for biofuels such as ethanol as critical to reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil and combating climate change, through others criticize such subsidies as sops to states like Vilsack's Iowa, where ethanol is a key source of revenue.

At the announcement last week, Vilsack said he would also prioritize rural growth, a particularly salient issue in the current economic climate.

“It must be about the work of improving profitability for farmers and ranchers and expanding opportunities in the rural communities in which they live,” Vilsack said of the pair’s shared vision during the announcement. “It must aggressively promote policies and programs that support sustainable practices to conserve and preserve our precious natural resources.”

Vilsack mounted his own campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination before exiting the race in early 2007.

After dropping out of the primary, Vilsack endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton for president and served as one of her campaign's national co-chairs, but he campaigned heavily for Obama after the Illinois senator secured the nomination. Clinton is also set to serve in Obama's cabinet as secretary of state, pending confirmation by the Senate early next year.

Vilsack's agricultural policies are not his only connections to the president-elect. Obama’s Chief Strategist David Axelrod also advised Vilsack during his Iowa gubernatorial campaign, and Vilsack’s wife, then-Iowa First Lady Christie Vilsack, spoke during the 2004 Democratic National Convention on the same night as Obama.

Vilsack spent the fall serving as a fellow at the IOP, where he organized a study group entitled “Do the Gods or Odds Control Us?: A Study of Risk and Responsibility in the Big Issues Facing America Today.”

Punit N. Shah ’12, who served as one of Vilsack’s student liaisons at the IOP, said the study group focused on analyzing the risks implicit in adopting certain political actions or policies.

In a role reversal from his future position, Vilsack’s study group meetings included simulations in which he would play the role of the president and pose questions to his cabinet, which was made up of students, Shah said.

A Pennsylvania native, Vilsack graduated from Hamilton College and Albany Law School. He moved to his wife’s hometown of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, where he was elected mayor in 1987 after the city’s then-mayor was killed.

Vilsack set a self-imposed term-limit and planned to step down after four years in the post.

“I served two terms as mayor and I felt, and still feel very strongly, that the founders of our nation felt that public service was not something that you would aspire to as a sole thing to do in life, but you would have a life outside of politics,” Vilsack said in an interview earlier this semester.

But the people of Mount Pleasant appear to have differently. Vilsack was reelected to another term by write-in votes.

In 1992, Vilsack won a seat in the Iowa State Senate, where he served two terms.

Vilsack was narrowly elected as governor of Iowa in 1998, making him the state’s first Democratic governor in 32 years. He won reelection by a wider margin in 2002, but chose not to run again in 2006.

Vilsack will be the fifth Secretary of Agriculture from the state of Iowa.

—Staff Writer Lauren D. Kiel can be reached at lkiel@fas.harvard.edu.