McCain’s earmark pledge continues to dog him

April 18, 2008

Following up on an item from yesterday, John McCain seems to seriously believe he can a) eliminate congressional earmarks; and b) use the savings to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The first claim is dubious; the second relies on poor arithmetic. (Note to McCain: $18 billion is less than $400 billion.)

But McCain’s earmark problem is even more awkward when we consider exactly what kind of funding he’s trying to eliminate. A couple of days ago, we learned that “economic and military aid to Israel” comes by way of an earmark, prompting the McCain campaign to announce that it would make an exception to his no-earmark commitment.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress found another headache for the Republican presidential candidate: funding for military family housing is an earmark.

The Congressional Research Service analysis counts not only the [military] family housing units added by Congress as earmarks but also those requested by the Pentagon and the White House.

CRS identified $6.6 billion in spending in the 2005 Military Construction Appropriation bill associated with earmarks. This included 205 units at Fort Huachuca at a cost of $41 million and 250 units at Davis-Monthan Air Base at a cost $48.5 million — both in McCain’s home state of Arizona.

Oops.

Now, it seems highly unlikely to me that McCain seriously wants to cut off funding for military family housing. When he pledged to eliminate any and all earmarks, this almost certainly isn’t what he was talking about.

But therein lies an important point: there’s an embarrassing laziness in McCain’s approach to public policy. He starts with a broad, basic premise — in this case, earmarks are bad — and then ends with that same basic premise. It probably never occurred to him to actually check what gets funded with earmarks, to see whether he’d want to make exceptions or not before making the public pledge.

The comparison is inexact, but I’m reminded of a 2006 gathering in which McCain explained how he could fix the crisis in Iraq.

In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city’s wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point.

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

There’s just no depth or indication that he cares about details.

Haven’t we already been down this road with a president who prefers platitudes to policy?

there’s an embarrassing laziness in McCain’s approach to public policy.

That’s what happens when you limit your information input to Fox and Lou Dobbs.

  • …therein lies an important point: there’s an embarrassing laziness in McCain’s approach to public policy.

    Now that Stephanopoulos and Disney Corporation have established that the new standard for media coverage is “electability” and “how candidates handle controversy”, I’m sure reporters will get right on that and press McCain on the inconsistencies in his proposals.

    (snort) Yeah, right!

  • “there’s an embarrassing laziness in McCain’s approach to public policy.”

    That’s the story of his life, isn’t it? The son and grandson of four-star admirals could get no further at the US Naval Academy than fifth from the bottom of his graduating class of eight hundred and ninety-nine. His only accomplishment during his military service was getting shot down and captured. He’s never had a serious election challenge. His dalliances have never caused him any grief. He married wealth. He hugged the Shrub rather than call him out for slander. And so on and on.

    I’d say “laziness” captures him pretty well.

  • It was my impression that much earmarking simply directs where monies that are authorized for general purposes are spent. So, if Congress decides that x dollars should be spent, it gets divvied up with earmarks. I read that the problem was not the total amount of the earmarked spending (alone), but that it was going to the wrong places. There was an article in the Christian Science Monitor [I think, I can’t find a link] about how this tendency was leading to atrophied staffs with the expertise to direct funding. For example since, nearly 100% of highway funding is through earmarks, when Congress tried to eliminate them, there was no staff able to decide where the money should be sent instead.

  • Why doesn’t one of those ‘smart’ reporters call some prominent Shiite (Maliki, Al-Sadr and company) and some of the prominent Sunnis.

    Ask them what they think about McCain’s solution for Iraq’s problems. Ask, them what they would tell McCain when he insists that they ‘stop the bullshit’.

    Then that nice ‘smart’ reporter could do a segment on TeeVee News and report on how the ‘real’ Iraqis feel about the Republican solution machine.

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