It’s not exactly the same situation as Armstrong Williams’ $241,000 contract, but Maggie Gallagher’s work with the administration is troubling nevertheless.
In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush’s push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families.
“The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples” and “educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage,” she wrote in National Review Online, for example, adding that this could “carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children.”
But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president’s proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.
Effectively, the Bush administration hired Gallagher to be a freelance ghost writer, which doesn’t speak well to her journalistic standards, but she’s always been a bottom-tier pundit anyway. The more salient problem was touting Bush’s marriage initiative without disclosing the fact that she was responsible for shaping the program’s sales pitch.
[Late yesterday], Gallagher filed a column in which she said that “I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers.”
She forgot her year-long federal contract to craft an administration’s message on marriage? That’s hardly a powerful argument.
To be sure, Armstrong Williams’ situation was far worse. He was paid to turn his TV program and syndicated column into an adjunct of the Department of Education. Williams accepted tax dollars to essentially become an infomercial spokesperson — while maintaining the fiction that he was a credible pundit. He’s permanently disgraced.
Gallagher’s mistake wasn’t as ridiculous, but she was nevertheless paid with public money to work on Bush’s marriage initiative while simultaneously plugging the same initiative for publications and readers that didn’t know about her “arrangement.” Gallagher’s credibility as a far-right talking head wasn’t that high before, but whatever integrity she had before now has to be considered gone.
You might be asking yourself, “Who on earth is Maggie Gallagher?” It’s a question that raises an even more important point about which conservative pundits are getting paid by the administration.
Josh Marshall, for example, noted last night that this revelation “seems less like a matter of payola than a Bush administration make-work program for third-tier GOP pundits.” That’s true. If it were a payola problem, the contract would have been far different — HHS would have simply paid Gallagher to write and say what the administration wanted to hear.
Instead, the arrangement was less nefarious and more pathetic. The Bush gang probably isn’t keeping the right’s heavy-hitters on the payroll; they don’t need the money and they’re already parroting the right-wing line. Instead, the administration seems to have created a Works Progress Administration for conservative pundits who apparently need the help.
It’s kind of sad, really.