John McCain And The Politics Of Pork

Earmarks are only pork when someone else is feasting on them. On your plate, they're veggies.

They are the train that takes you to visit Aunt Betty, or the health clinic down the street, or the waste treatment plant that makes your water safer to drink. They're not all bridges to nowhere. They're also bicycle trails to somewhere.

If John McCain is true to his rhetoric in the Republican presidential campaign, he would take a broad ax to spending that voters, upon closer examination, might wish were cut in a more discerning way. The two dozen states voting in presidential primaries Tuesday are home to thousands of projects financed by earmarks, the pet pork that members of Congress carve out of the federal budget.

The Arizona senator's criticism of pork pleases crowds, for no one likes to see tax dollars thrown at silly things. "No earmarks," he says. "Not 10,000. Not one. Zero."

And he got an unintentional assist from President Bush, a convert to the anti-pork cause after he signed a spending law that legislators had stuffed with 10,000 local projects costing more than $10 billion.

A small taste of the earmarked spending sought in 2007 by lawmakers from Super Tuesday states:

In California, $438,000 to Monterey County for gang prevention and intervention.

In Illinois, $5 million for the Red Cross to buy backup generators, cots, shelter trailers, emergency vehicles and more.

In New Haven, Conn., $487,000 to help families and children exposed to violence and trauma.

In Oneonta, N.Y., $243,000 for hospital equipment and facilities.

In St. James, Mo., $412,000 to expand services to abused and neglected children.

In North Dakota, $390,000 to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe for a methamphetamine prevention program.

Earmarks are the refuge of lawmakers who for whatever reason don't like the normal method of setting government spending priorities. Either their pet projects don't make the grade on their merits or they see them as too urgent to wait their turn. And they insist they know their district's priorities better than Washington could.

In any event, earmarks are an end run around the process that is supposed to make sure money is spent based on well-considered value judgments.

Pork haters like McCain say an agency with its eye on the national interest and an objective way of looking at a region's needs should decide on such spending, not members of Congress currying local - sometimes very local - favor.

But McCain's spending plan does not make such distinctions between waste and worthy. In his accounting, if it's an earmark, it's bad and it's gone. He counts on saving all the money now spent on earmarks to help pay for his tax cuts.

McCain has been celebrated for years by watchdog groups cheering his fight against waste, and there's always plenty in the budget to raise eyebrows if not hackles. A $50-million indoor rain forest for Iowa, anyone?

In a Republican campaign debate, McCain ribbed Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who also wants to be president, for helping to secure $1 million for a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair, a seminal event in hippiedom and the counterculture.

"I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event," he said dryly. "I was tied up at the time." McCain, who was captive in a Vietnam prison when Woodstock happened, turned that line into a campaign ad. The money has been stripped from a spending bill.

Now he talks at every opportunity about the "bridge to nowhere."

He means an Alaska bridge that would have connected the town of Ketchikan to its airport, which is accessible only by ferry, at a cost of close to $400 million by state estimates.

Critics noted the now-shelved project involved building a structure higher than the Brooklyn Bridge and nearly as long as the Golden Gate to an island where 50 people live. Proponents noted the airport on the island serves 200,000 people a year and air traffic plays a vital role in Alaska, where roads are scarce and often unusable because of the weather and terrain.

Earmarks in a literal sense refer to the marks cut on the ears of livestock for centuries to claim ownership. Now, it's more specifically about pigs.

Congress has taken steps to make earmarks more accountable, so members can't secretly slip a pet project into a bill or associated documents.

Clinton has had much company in seeking earmarks. Presidential rival Barack Obama lists dozens on his Senate Web site, among them $3 million to replace 40-year-old projection equipment at a planetarium, $3 million for a Chicago underpass, $750,000 for two water towers and $5 million for the Illinois Red Cross.

Now Bush vows to veto any spending bill that does not cut the number and cost of pet projects by half.

He's having agencies disregard earmarks that members of Congress insert into documents that accompany legislation. But earmarks can continue to go into legislation itself, and surely will.

Evidence that pork can be filling at times was under McCain's nose recently, although he apparently did not know it.

Campaigning in South Carolina, he visited a factory and praised the armored, mine-resistant military vehicles made there to be used in the war.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a McCain ally, noted to an Associated Press reporter that the plant, on a shuttered U.S. naval base, had received money from an earmark.