The Candidate: Barack Obama (D)
The Issue: Earmarks
The Position: Supports added transparency to earmark process.
The Cost: $13 billion to $29 billion in earmarked spending per year
The Media Position: Earmarks aren’t important.

The Issue

     Earmarks, more colloquially referred to as pork barrel spending, have accounted for as much as $29 billion in federal spending in recent years. Most politicians have requested them, including Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, Ill., who has requested $740 million in earmarks during his three years in the Senate.

      The amount of money spent on earmarks every year may seem small in the face of a multi-trillion dollar budget, but analysts suggest the problem of earmarks runs deeper than face value.

     “Earmarks are a mostly symbolic issue,” according to Cato Institute senior fellow and Business & Media Institute adviser Dan Mitchell. Politicians got 11,510 earmarks worth $16.57 billion in 2008 appropriations bills, according to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The most expensive year for earmarks, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, was 2006, when some 9,963 projects cost $29 billion – accounting for less than half of one percent of the federal budget.

      “But symbolism is important,” Mitchell said. “We shouldn’t have politicians enriching themselves and their campaign contributors by putting these earmarks in the system. 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.”

     Obama has proposed adding “transparency” to the earmark process, although he has not outlined specific steps he would take to discourage wasteful spending.

     When the media bother to mention earmarks, they are usually derided as wasteful spending. But ABC, CBS and NBC rarely find time to mention them, especially when it comes to Democratic requests. Even more than $1 billion in requests from the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates has garnered little focus.

The Media Position

     The media double standard on earmarks became apparent after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was announced as the Republican vice presidential candidate on Aug. 29. In more than 50 mentions of earmarks after Palin was picked, only two mentioned Obama’s earmark requests totaling more than $740 million.

     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 but having requested millions of her own as a mayor and governor in Alaska.

     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.”

     ABC’s Charles Gibson accused Palin of opposing the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” only after Congress 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.”

     But the same journalists didn’t deem it necessary to investigate earmarks requested by Obama or his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. The two have requested more than $1 billion in earmarks in recent years, but only two of the 54 stories since Palin was picked mentioned their totals. Both instances – ABC’s September 26 “Nightline” and Sept. 27 “Good Morning America” – cited McCain attacking Obama on spending.

     Of the 60 stories between Jan.1 and Aug. 29 that mentioned Obama and earmarks, only six (10 percent) tied Obama to earmarks. Half of those were excerpts from McCain speeches attacking Obama on earmarks. Two – both from ABC’s Jake Tapper in April – referenced Obama’s 53 earmarks worth $100 million in 2008. The last, on CBS “Evening News” April 18, mentioned Obama was one of six Illinois politicians who received campaign contributions from an aquarium that received $1.8 million in earmarks.

     In all, 114 stories on the broadcast networks have mentioned earmarks. Eight of them – 7 percent – have mentioned Obama’s earmark spending.

      Broadcast journalists didn’t have time for earmarks even in the midst of a contentious back-and-forth between Obama and his Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, in March.

     In releasing his three-year history of earmark requests – totaling $740 million worth of requests, according to The New York Times – Obama challenged Clinton to release her own history of requests.

     Obama’s running mate Biden has since released his requests for 2009 earmarks, totaling more than $340 million. He has not released requests for his previous years in the Senate.

     The networks have also ignored the earmark connection between Obama and Biden’s lobbyist son, Hunter Biden. According to the Washington Post Aug. 27, Obama “sought more than $3.4 million in congressional earmarks for clients” of Hunter Biden.

The Bigger Cost of Earmarks

     Earmarks may be a “mostly symbolic issue,” according to Cato’s Mitchell. But they cost more than the up to $29 billion expended annually, he continued.

     “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,” he said.

     “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.”

     Mitchell said Obama’s promise to add transparency to the process would have little influence on politicians’ behavior.

     “Well the problem is that politicians aren’t ashamed of their earmarks,” he said. “They do these things because they have some campaign contributor or some interest group in the district that’s asking for them so anything that you do to publicize earmarks, the politicians think that’s probably good. Now the rest of the country won’t think it, but they’re not trying to get votes from the rest of the country.”

     “We have transparency now,” National Taxpayers Union president and Business & Media Institute adviser Duane Parde said. “All federal spending is on the Web. I think it’s a false promise. Obama has proposed earmarks what little time he’s actually spent in the U.S. Senate. He’s proposed earmarks; he favors them.”

     But Dr. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University and also a Business & Media Institute adviser, said an approach aimed at publicizing pork requests could work by introducing an incentive to avoid excessive use of earmarks.

McCain: Read how the media have attacked the McCain-Palin ticket over earmarks.

   America 2012 Home  •  BMI Website                  Health Care  •  Taxes  •  Earmarks  •  Ethanol  •  Cap-and-Trade