SCENARIOS: Post-Kennedy Senate committee shuffle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Democrats on Wednesday named new leaders for several key committees as part of a reshuffle following the death last month of Senator Edward Kennedy who had chaired the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

The moves could change some priorities while keeping others in place amid President Barack Obama's bid to overhaul U.S. healthcare and tighten regulation of the financial industry.

Senator Chris Dodd, the senior Democrat on the health committee, decided to remain chairman of the Banking Committee, triggering changes in two other panels.

In the shuffle, Tom Harkin took over as chairman of Kennedy's old health committee, a key panel in the drive for healthcare reform. To take the job, Harkin stepped down as head of the Agriculture Committee, which Blanche Lincoln inherited.

A senator may hold only one committee chairmanship at a time. The posts are generally determined by seniority.

Here's a quick look at the shakeout:

HEALTH - HARKIN

Like Kennedy, Harkin is a liberal and a longtime friend of organized labor. Kennedy, as chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, had named Harkin to head a working group that helped craft the healthcare overhaul bill passed by the panel in July. That bill will be meshed with whatever the Senate Finance Committee produces.

Harkin reflected Kennedy's thinking so there is likely to be little, if any, change in policy. Yet no one in the Senate matched Kennedy's clout or ability to cut a bipartisan deal.

Harkin, from Iowa, said among his priorities is legislation backed by Kennedy to make it easier for workers to unionize, and a food safety bill similar to the one passed earlier this year by the House of Representatives.

"If Ted Kennedy were here today, he'd applaud wildly the fact that Tom Harkin is going to lead his committee," Dodd said.

BANKING - DODD

Dodd's decision to remain as Banking Committee chairman is seen as bad news for the financial industry. If Dodd, a liberal, had stepped aside he would likely have been replaced by Senator Tim Johnson, a moderate. Dodd is seen as likely to be tougher than Johnson on the financial industry in the pending regulatory overhaul.

Concept Capital Washington Research Group, a private firm that tracks Congress for institutional investors, predicted in a report on Wednesday that "Dodd is likely to become more populist in the next 12 months" as he wages what's become a highly competitive re-election campaign in Connecticut.

"This is partly because he needs to distance himself from ties to a controversial mortgage program at Countrywide and because of voter anger over the financial crisis," it said.

AGRICULTURE - LINCOLN

In becoming the first woman to head the Agriculture Committee, Lincoln, of Arkansas, gets a political boost that may help her bid to win re-election in November 2010.

Concept Capital Washington Research Group, in its report on Wednesday, said at change at the helm at the Agriculture Committee -- with a moderate Southerner replacing a liberal Northerner -- "may portend greater sensitivity to the needs of Southern agriculture, including cotton, rice and poultry production."

"For one, this means that prospects for further tightening limits on government payments to individual farms -- a reform that Obama advocated earlier this year -- would grow even dimmer," it said. More senior Democrats on the farm panel already chair other committees.

(Writing and reporting by Thomas Ferraro, with additional reporting by Andy Sullivan)