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The Candidate: John McCain
(R)
The Issue: Earmarks
The Position: Vows to veto earmarks.
The Cost: $0
The Media Position: Republicans are hypocrites
The Issue
Earmarks, the special projects
lawmakers fund with amendments to other bills, have come
under fire in the 2008 presidential campaign with the
candidacy of Sen. John McCain, Ariz., the Republican
anti-earmark crusader.
McCain is one of few national
politicians with a reputation for not requesting
earmarks, also called pork, to fund special projects in
his home state. His colleagues in Congress got 11,510
earmarks worth $16.57 billion in 2008,
according to the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB). The most expensive year for earmarks, according
to Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), was 2006,
when some
9,963 projects cost $29 billion.
McCain trumpets his record of
never having requested an earmark. He has vowed on the
campaign trail to block earmark spending by vetoing
bills that contain pork.
“I believe we must end this
process, which has diverted billions in taxpayer dollars
to needless projects, once and for all,” McCain said in
a
March 2008 statement. “If voters give me the pen, I
will veto every single pork-barrel bill Congress sends
me.”
McCain has also threatened to
“out” politicians who make a habit of requesting
earmarks. “John McCain will veto every pork-laden
spending bill and make their authors famous,” his
Web site says.
The Media Position
McCain has made abolishing
earmarks a central focus of his financial platform, so
it has earned a substantial amount of media coverage –
114 stories on broadcast networks have mentioned
earmarks since the beginning of 2008. But most of those
mentions came either from McCain campaign
representatives, or from journalists attacking his
running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, on the issue.
Some of the coverage, rather
than praising McCain for opposing wasteful spending, has
sought to minimize his position on the issue.
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos
suggested McCain’s proposal to veto all earmarks was
worthless because it wouldn’t “pay for” all of his other
tax-cutting proposals.
“Yet you only claim $60
billion a year from your earmark reforms,”
Stephanopoulos said in an April 21 “This Week” interview
with McCain after the candidate asserted there were
“hundreds of billions that can be saved” from government
spending.
Others have suggested McCain
became an anti-earmark crusader to cover up past
unethical behavior. CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes
suggested on the Feb. 21 “Evening News” that McCain
began his anti-pork crusade to survive a scandal.
“In 1991, the Senate
reprimanded [McCain] and four other senators, the
infamous Keating Five,” Cordes reported. “Together they
had interfered in the regulation of a savings and loan
on behalf of a campaign contributor. It cost some of
them their careers. McCain survived by turning his
experience into a crusade against special interests and
lobbying in Washington.”
McCain was cleared of any
wrongdoing by the Ethics Committee investigating the
case. The
committee said he had “exercised poor judgment,” but
didn’t pursue charges against him.
The media have also used
earmarks to paint Palin as hypocritical.
In the eight months before
Palin was picked, the broadcast networks mentioned
“earmark” spending 60 times – an average of 7.5 times
per month. In the month after her pick, the mentions
increased nearly eight times – to 54.
During that month, reporters
and interviewers tried to paint Palin as a hypocrite
campaigning against earmarks after having requested
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of her own as a
mayor and governor in Alaska.
ABC’s Charles Gibson accused
Palin of opposing the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” only
after Congress has pulled the plug on federal funding.
He told Palin she was “for it, before you were against
it. You were solidly for it for quite some period of
time, until Congress pulled the plug.”
Gibson criticized Alaska for
receiving $155 million in earmarks in 2008. But he
didn’t point out the state requested $500 million in
2007 and less than $200 million in 2008, which Palin has
said shows she is fighting the tradition of requesting
earmarks.
CBS “Evening News” was one of
many broadcasts to offer a “reality check” on Palin’s
earmark stance Sept. 9. “Gov. Sarah Palin just won’t let
it go,” correspondent Wyatt Andrews said. “But the truth
is, the governor never rebuffed Congress. Here are the
facts: After a year of supporting the proposed bridge
near Ketchikan, Gov. Palin pulled state funds from the
project, which killed the bridge for good, but she never
said ‘no thanks’ to the federal funds promised by
Congress, $233 million.”
All three networks aired
Obama’s September campaign trail attack accusing Palin
of “taking all these earmarks when it’s convenient and
then suddenly you’re the champion anti-earmark person,
that’s not change. Come on.”
The Real Cost of Earmarks
McCain’s critics, such as
George Stephanopoulos, do have a point about earmarks
being a small part of the federal budget, according to
Cato Institute senior fellow and Business & Media
Institute adviser Dan Mitchell.
“Earmarks are a mostly
symbolic issue,” Mitchell said. “But symbolism is
important.”
“We shouldn’t have politicians
enriching themselves and their campaign contributors by
putting these earmarks in the system,” he said. “There’s
also another issue, which is that earmarks themselves
might not be that large relative to the entire budget,
but they’re oftentimes the grease the gets the process
going for a bigger expansion of government.”
“Look at the bailout that the
politicians gave for Wall Street,” Mitchell said,
referring to the $700-billion financial bailout bill
that President Bush signed into law Oct. 3. “The reason
they got that through after it initially failed was by
putting earmarks in – special provisions to try to bribe
lawmakers to vote for it.”
Don Boudreaux, an economics
professor at George Mason University and a Business &
Media Institute adviser, said there is “political umph”
in attacking earmarks, but that, as with foreign aid,
“You get rid of it, Americans wouldn’t notice the
difference.”
“Now, I’m in favor of getting
rid of earmarks and I hope that McCain is successful in
doing that, but to the larger point that you suggest,
many of the things government does today like this
proposed bailout, Social Security, Medicare,
agricultural programs, these things dwarf the size of
earmarks, and I wish attention would be focused on these
larger more destructive programs than on earmarks,”
Boudreaux said.
Duane Parde, president of the
National Taxpayers Union and a Business & Media
Institute adviser, praised McCain’s stance. “I mean
individual earmarks clutter the budget, they slow the
process,” he told the Business & Media Institute. “I
think it [getting rid of earmarks] would streamline the
process. It would certainly save taxpayer dollars.
Obama: Read how the
media have ignored the Obama-Biden ticket’s earmark
requests.
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