It’s a matter of public record that I thought the last season of Glee was a travesty. So it’s almost surreal to see them get an issue right (with the standard minor factual errors that Hollywood always seems to make about the political process). Semi-contrary to what was promised in the pre-season news, Sue Sylvester is running for Congress, and channeling Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who this year destroyed his state’s arts agency, meaning Kansas can’t get National Endowment for the Arts funding, which she’s decided to make her central campaign platform:

You know what’s getting me down in Western Ohio? The arts in public schools. Why? Because America is failing. China is on our ass, people. This isn’t the 1960s anymore, when jobs were plentiful…The arts are expensive, and we can’t afford it anymore…I will suspend all public school arts programs and reject all federal and state funding for the arts until every student reads at or above grade level.

Now, obviously a member of the House can’t turn down arts funding on behalf of their state. But otherwise? Economic and competitiveness insecurity? Check. Treatment of the arts as if they’re a luxury? Check. Folks responding to these kinds of attacks by whipping out arguments about the efficacy of the arts rather than their intrinsic worth? Cue Mr. Schue, who comes back at Sue with “The arts help kids do better in school. Kids in the arts record the lowest instance of substance abuse,” before retreating further by explaining that he really just needs job security because he wants to start a family with…a woman he hasn’t slept with yet. I mean, this is Glee. It would be too much to expect full-on emotional coherence.

But still, it’s Glee actually setting up a season-long arc that makes sense — for the first time since the first season, the Glee Club actually has an imperative to perform to survive, and the stakes are larger than simply disbanding the club. If they can stick with it longer than an episode, and come up with tactics more convincing than Will glittering Sue (if nothing else, the show should get credit for showing how silly glittering someone is as a way to make a point), the show will actually be contributing to an ongoing national debate about state and federal arts budgets. Which is rare for any show, much less one as schizophrenic as this.

I would like nothing more than to stop feeling an obligation to watching Glee, which I think is the most overrated show on television. But apparently, one of the most popular scripted shows in the country is also about to become the only show on television about arts policy. Sue Sylvester is going to start her campaign for Congress as a hardcore anti-immigration reformer, but when that doesn’t garner her the support she expects, she starts campaigning on an arts education platform.

I don’t expect that this will be thoughtful, or anything: it’s not as if that’s any sort of logical, or even logically manipulative, political evolution. Ohio is actually fairly good on public support for the arts—the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies projects that the funding for the state’s arts agency will go up 15.3 percent next year.

But the show was best in its first season when there was a real struggle to keep the glee club alive because McKinley’s budget was so stressed because the efforts people made over it illustrated the extent to which the club was important to them. Will has only ever been an interesting character when he’s faced realistic struggles with money and his relationship with Terri, which is motivated more by money than the weird sexual tango he has with Emma, who he wants to get over her issues so he can sleep with her. Glee could have been a great show about the recession, an idea Ryan Murphy’s largely abandoned except for randomly having Sam’s family lose their home. I don’t expect that this development will rectify the enormous flaws the show’s developed over the last two years. But it shows some awareness of what made the show initially watchable and engaging.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Now that we’ve run through the Republicans, it’s time to look at how one last candidate approaches arts policy: the incumbent President Barack Obama. Obama didn’t take on arts issues much during his tenure in the Illinois state Senate, but as a candidate and as president, he’s pursued a fairly wide-ranging arts policy that’s met with mixed success because of the pressures of the recession. I’m not including a discussion of internal changes by the National Endowment for the Arts here, though I’m a fan of the Our Town program, because I want to focus on the things that Obama’s made significant priorities:

2008: In his presidential campaign platform, Obama supported the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which would have let artists deduct the full market value of works they donated to charity on their taxes, rather than just deducting the cost of the materials that went into the work. He also committed to expanding cultural diplomacy through public-private partnerships and to make it easier for foreign artists to get visas to come to the U.S.; to increase funding for the National Endowment for the Arts; and to add block grant funding that would support arts education through the Education Department (he cited the Mozart effect in stump speeches). At the time, this was considered one of the more comprehensive platforms a candidate had ever offered on the arts. The question is, how well did he live up to it?

2009: The stimulus bill Obama worked out with Congress included $50 million in arts funding, including $20 million in funding that went directly to state governments. The National Endowment for the Arts was supposed to use the funding specifically to bolster arts non-profits that saw their budgets shrink in the recession. In the normal budget process, the NEA got its highest budget in 16 years, $167.5 million, and the Education Department got $38.166 million for its Arts in Education program.

When Obama adjusted restrictions on travel to and from Cuba, he made it easier for cultural programs to take Americans to Cuba and for Cuban artists to make it to the United States.

But the administration’s cultural efforts became a minor political kerfuffle when the NEA’s Yosi Sergant encouraged artists to work with the Corporation for Public Service on projects that would highlight the administration’s public service efforts. Sergant eventually left the NEA.

2010: Obama made good on his cultural diplomacy promises in a number of ways, allocating $1 million to help visual artists create public art works in 15 countries as pat of a new smART Power program; increasing the State Department’s cultural diplomacy budget 40 percent in 2010 to $11.75 million; sending Stanford professor Clayborne Carson to Israel to put on a production based on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s writing.

At the same time, he proposed consolidating grants programs for education, leaving some advocates worried that arts programs would have to compete against science and literacy programs for funds. And the administration proposed cutting NEA funding by $6 million in is fiscal 2011 budget, both moves that drew criticism from arts advocates.

This year, U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel presented Obama and Congress with the first national strategy on intellectual property law and copyright violation, which includes improved interagency cooperation, targeting of websites that distribute pirated material, and better economic analysis of the impact of intellectual property law and violations on American firms. That same year, at the Export-Import Bank, Obama gave a speech in which he promised vigorous IP protection: “Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people…It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.”

2011: An Obama-commissioned study argued that creative classwork has an “unambiguous place in the curriculum,” though it acknowledged that there needs to be more research to quantify the impact of arts education on achievement. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s made the case for keeping arts education even in a recession throughout his tenure in the administration.

And on the copyright front, the Obama administration helped broker the deal that got Internet Service Providers to start providing warnings to users who are caught downloading content illegally.

It’s clear the president and his wife enjoy the arts, and they’ve hosted lots of cultural events at the White House — though his stance on copyright allies him more with content producers than with consumers. Obama has called for tax reform, and it would be interesting to see, if comprehensive efforts happen, if he includes artists’ tax credits, the one item in his 2008 platform that he hasn’t really addressed while in office. Whoever the Republican candidate is in 2012 is, they may be able to rally support by attacking the existence of the NEA (it’s dubious any of them would break with him on IP issues), but it remains to be seen if any of them will match Obama for a sense that arts policy isn’t just a matter of funding.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Of all the lawmakers I’ve looked at in this series, far and away the biggest surprise to me has been the record of Pennsylvania’s former Republican Senator Rick Santorum. I never would have expected that Santorum would be a fan of the arts, much less one of the Republicans who bucked attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts and went out of his way to seek federal financial support for the arts in Pennsylvania. But he is. Though Santorum’s more conservative on issues of copyright and intellectual property, and he’s supported various federal decency efforts, that perspective on the arts remains a surprise, and compared to some of his competitors in the Republican primary, frankly a welcome one:

1991: Santorum voted with House Republicans to ban the National Endowment for the Arts from supporting projects that could be considered obscene.

1995: During fights over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, arts advocates lobbied Santorum, who was generally opposed to the idea that a few pieces of controversial art were grounds for dismantling the agency. He defended public broadcasting programs, even as he insisted that government support wasn’t critical to their survival, saying, “I have my share of ‘Shining Time Station’ puzzles for my 4-year-old and my 2-year-old…I have a bunch of this stuff – Mr. Rogers, a wonderful man…who does a tremendous show.” He supported cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but not in direct funding to local broadcasters.

1997: Santorum publicly backed NEA funding, saying, ”The arts foster a strong sense of community and bring new ideas and cultures to many individuals and families all over the nation. Elimination of such programs would create a cultural vacuum that could not be easily filled.”

1998: As the fights over the NEA’s existence faded, Santorum’s spokeswoman said he was unlikely to support measures to axe the agency or make further deep cuts in its budget. That won him criticism from conservatives, though his problem in Pennsylvania was generally being regarded as too conservative rather than too moderate. At the 2000 Republican convention, Pennyslvania Republican activist and former RNC member Elsie Hillman actually cited Santorum’s stances on the arts as proof that he was a moderate, rather than a hardcore conservative, something that was hurting Santorum’s reelection prospects. That same year, though, he voted against a Clinton budget that would have provided $1.75 million for an arts and science education center in Pennsylvania.

2000: Santorum tried, and failed, to bring forward legislation that would have created a universal ratings system across the entertainment industry, rather than the varying and voluntary systems that existed at the time and that exist now (interestingly, the GAO study I cited earlier in the day suggested that most parents assume there is a universal ratings system rather than a patchwork of codes). He’d bring up the issue of ratings again in 2004, publicly supporting an industry-backed effort to designate an Entertainment Ratings and Labeling Awareness Month.

2002: Santorum weighed in on copyright issues, suggesting that it was a mistake to change patent law to let generic drugs get to the market more quickly on the grounds that it would stifle innovation. He also called for investigations into peer-to-peer networks on the grounds that they made it easier for minors to access pornography.

2003: Santorum cosigned a letter along with a number of his Republican colleagues encouraging the administration to seek stricter enforcement of World Trade Organization rules on China to curb, among other things, software and content piracy. (In more contemporary news, he doesn’t appear to have a position on the PROTECT IP act.)

2005: The arts may not have been enough of a priority for Santorum to get him to vote for an overall budget, but he wasn’t above accepting funding for projects in his state when he thought they’d support the economy as well as the arts. When the Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated $4.3 million to convert an eyeglasses factory into an arts and education center, Santorum said, “This loan guarantee will provide resources needed to make capital improvements to the building and strengthen the local economy. The projects that are benefiting from this funding will ensure that Reading remains a great place to live and do business.” The following year, he and Sen. Arlen Specter secured $300,000 in federal funding towards a $35.9 million capital campaign to fund a August Wilson Center for African American Culture.

2006: Santorum was a cosponsor of the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which jacked Federal Communications Commissions fines from $32,500 for each violation to $325,000, with a cap of $3 million in fines for a single broadcast day.

Given that Santorum’s been out of office for some time, and competitors like Michele Bachmann have staked out positions to the right of him on social issues like equal marriage rights as well as federal arts funding issues, it might be worth asking if Santorum still holds to his old support for the NEA, and to figure out where he stands on PROTECT IP. If you get the opportunity to pose those questions, feel free to steal them — just report back here.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson isn’t a typical Republican—or a viable contender for the Republican nomination, given his support for marijuana legalization and open distaste for the anti-gay policies some of his opponents endorse. Arts policy, however, is an area where Johnson isn’t particularly out of step with his conservative colleagues, though neither is he an extremely outlier. He was careful about state arts funding, though because he wasn’t faced with recessions the way some of his competitors were, he didn’t aim to cut arts budgets to balance budgets. And he hasn’t been particularly vocal about intellectual property issues either. But there are a few interesting tidbits in the record, including his taste in movies:

1996: Johnson and his wife were spotted at a screening of Female Perversions, Susan Streitfeld’s feminist sex drama, at the Taos Talking Picture Festival. This isn’t a particularly key point, but it does suggest that Johnson might have actual non-focus tested cultural preferences, which is moderately refreshing.

That year, he also appointed Louis LeRoy, the director of the ethnic arts-focused Association of American Cultures to run New Mexico Arts. Like Sarah Palin’s support for special labeling for Native Alaskan art, this is probably more a gesture to a key constituency than a real prioritization of ethnic art.

1999: Under Johnson’s administration, the New Mexico Arts Commission received an increase in the funding it was able to disperse in the form of grants. But he also vetoed $2 million in funding for a pilot program to stand up and study the efficacy of 20 performance and visual arts education.

2001: Johnson signed a bill that gave New Mexico ownership over inventions and other intellectual property that state employees invented in the course of their duties. But the bill also required New Mexico to split profits or royalties from those inventions or intellectual property evenly with the employees who were responsible for their creation.

That year, Johnson also hired a company to help New Mexico expand broadband access. Gov. Bill Richardson’s administration terminated the contract two years later over concerns about some of the financing.

2002: Johnson signed a bill that expanded state funding for museums, though this legislation probably shouldn’t be interpreted as a strong sign of support for states art funding. The legislation’s supporters got it attached to a bill that provided funding for police radios.

If Johnson was as delightfully idiosyncratic on the arts and media innovation issues as he is on other issues—at least in the context of the Republican field—he might be a more intriguing candidate on these grounds. As it stands, however, he’s merely mainstream.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s a fairly typical Republican on issues of arts funding. Like his fellow Minnesotan Michele Bachmann, he opposed a constitutional amendment that provided a steady stream of arts funding for the state. And like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), he tried to spin off a state arts school to save money. But he also tried to negotiate deadlocks over broadcasts of Twins games, proposed a drug importation plan that would have undermined intellectual property regimes, and got a little friendly with the telecommunications industry over his push to expand broadband access in Minnesota:

2002: The issue of state support for renovation of the historic Guthrie Theater became an issue in the gubernatorial campaign. Gov. Jesse Ventura vetoed $24 million for the theater, and Democrats raised the issue of whether Pawlenty and other candidates would follow suit. As House Majority Leader, Pawlenty head up a budget balancing task force that proposed $750,000 in cuts to the Perpich Center for Arts Education, a Minnesota State Agency.

2003: In his first budget proposal as governor, Pawlenty proposed cutting funding for the Minnesota State Arts Board (which alone would have seen its state funding fall 40 percent) and other arts organizations by 22 percent, a larger percentage than other organizations faced as Pawlenty sought a 14 percent overall reduction in the state budget. The legislature ended up approving a 32 percent cut to the board, and funded the Guthrie’s renovations funded through bonds.

That year, in a speech to a Chamber of Commerce group, Pawlenty emphasized intellectual property as a means of revitalizing the state’s economy, rather than yearning for the days of a manufacturing economy. But his proposal to import cheap prescription drugs, including knockoff generics into Minnesota from Canada, prompted warnings from state biotech companies that the plan would rob them of profits they needed to do research and employ local scientists.

2004: Pawlenty tried to intervene in a fight over what fees cable providers would have to pay to air Twins games. The channel the team owned wanted $2.20 per subscriber from cable companies, a fairly high fee, and the failure to negotiate contracts kept the beginning of the 2004 season off a number of networks. The network never quite developed into a channel like YES, which is owned by the Yankees, but it did garner revenue increases. Pawlenty had proposed that networks would get the games for free as long as they agreed to enter into binding mediation that would set the prices they’d eventually have to pay.

2005: In this budget cycle, Pawlenty proposed keeping arts funding flat after the 2003 cuts.

2006: As Minnesota geared up for a fight over a constitutional amendment that would have increased the sales tax by 3/8ths of 1 percent to ensure a revenue stream for parks, water preservation, and arts projects, Pawlenty, like Bachmann, then in the MInnesota legislature, opposed the amendment. “While the arts and public broadcasting are important, they do not rise to the level of being in need of dedicated constitutional support,” Pawlenty said, according to the Grand Forks Herald. Though it was a tough fight, the amendment eventually passed in 2007.

That same year, Pawlenty announced a push to expand broadband access in Minnesota, signing on to a proposal by a board made up of telecom executives, government, business, and rural leaders. He’d suggested that broadband was key to Minnesota’s economic development in a 2005 speech in Hong Kong.

2009: Pawlenty proposed turning the Perpich Center into a charter school in the name of saving the state $4.5 million annually. The proposal would have dramatically decreased the amount of research and teacher training the center was able to do, but the proposal was eventually defeated.

This same year, Pawlenty also put together a task force to get Minnesota to universal broadband access by 2015. But Pawlenty and his administration recommended a non-profit with strong ties to the telecommunications industry for a contract to map existing broadband connections, prompting ire from some stakeholders. And they also made certain documents about state broadband funding private, rather than treating them as public documents.

2010: This year, Pawlenty signed a bill meant to reach that 2015 goal, and setting standards for dowload speeds, but the bill didn’t have a funding mechanism for reaching that goal. It’s not clear the state is on pace to meet it.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture—but also about how they think about the role of government.

As U.S. Trade representative, governor of Utah, and ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman’s limited work on the arts prefigure some of the moves his colleagues in other states are making today, without some of the ideological edge — as with much of his record, it demonstrates why he’s an intriguing but almost totally improbable candidate for president in this cycle. But he’s also got a long, and interesting, record on copyright and intellectual property.

1993:As ambassador to Singapore under George H.W. Bush, Huntsman said IP rights would be an ongoing concern for the United States as it expanded trade with Asia.

1996: It was a concern that continued when he returned to the private sector. Huntsman was concerned about the risks to intellectual property of doing business with China, warning Plastics News that ”The Chinese hold technical seminars and invite anyone with new technology … pick your brain completely for what you know and implement it themselves.”

2001-2003:And when George W. Bush appointed him U.S. Trade representative, he oversaw a trade agreement with Vietnam that was meant, in part, to protect IP issues; met with Thai officials about the country’s IP enforcement, especially after American entertainment companies said they’d go after Thailand if the country didn’t step up its efforts; engaged with trade talks in Korea that involved IP issues at a time when Korea was one of the world’s largest exporters of counterfeit goods; and helped set up a trade council with West African nations that took on issues like IP protection.

2005: Much like governors ranging from Democrat Dannel Malloy in Connecticut to Republican Brian Sandoval in Nevada are trying to do or doing this year, Huntsman moved the Utah Arts Council from its status as a fully independent agency to part of the Department of Community and the Arts. While reorganizations can be a bad thing if they’re done essentially to eliminate government work on the arts, they can reduce administrative costs or improve opportunities to do joint agency projects. Huntsman justified his reorganization on the latter grounds, saying, according to U.S. States News, “Utah’s population is becoming more heterogeneous, reflecting a need for more attention to certain government services. It made sense to create a department that could focus on the unique ethnic communities in the state, as well as the services that strengthen the community.”

That year, the Scripps Howard News Service reported that Huntsman was part of a plan by Western governors to promote trade between their states — one of the concerns he cited was intellectual property enforcement in China. He also praised a company that moved to Utah to develop medical software, saying, “Without the development of the intellectual property here in our state and the nurturing that it took over those years, we wouldn’t have anything to offer.”

2006: Huntsman tapped a Democrat, former Salt Lake City Mayor Palmer DePaulis, to run the Department of Community and the Arts. DePaulis ended up working on everything from interagency oral history projects to streamlining digitization systems in the different divisions under his purview, and he’s since risen to be executive director of the Utah Department of Human Services.

2007: Utah stirred up the internet community when it passed and Huntsman signed a law preventing advertisers from placing ads based on keywords if those keywords were trademarked. The bill was meant to prevent businesses from competitors who might riff closely on their names and place advertising on those businesses websites, but companies like Google and Yahoo were seriously displeased.

2009: That attention to organization doesn’t mean Huntsman made the arts a priority, especially when faced with tough budget choices. Despite outreach efforts, Huntsman didn’t stop cuts that decimated the Utah Arts Council’s Folk Arts Program. The program is now hoping a new public-private partnership model will keep its work going.

2011: It’s still not entirely clear how Huntsman will handle questions about his service as President Obama’s ambassador to China, but in that role, Huntsman pressed China on intellectual property questions and lent vocal support to artists and writers who have been powerful advocates for reform in China, declaring that the administration “will continue to speak up in defense of social activists, like Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng and now Ai Weiwei, who challenge the Chinese government to serve the public in all cases and at all times.”

Huntsman may hope to distance himself from fellow Mormon and presidential rival Mitt Romney as much as possible. But they’ve both thought about where art fits in government’s work, and both have recognized a role for government in art. If I were to guess, I’d predict Romney might tack more towards an eliminationist position on government support for the arts, but that’s more in keeping with his general approach to campaigning than anything I know about his specific convictions.

I’m reading Bill Ivey’s Arts, Inc. in between hard sci-fi and biographies of the Founding Fathers (Ron Chernow’s Washington is, by the way, awesome great), so I was excited to see that Ian David Moss and the good people at Createquity are restarting their Arts Policy Library series with a look at the book. I’m glad to see them starting this series up again in any case — one of the best things about the current state of the blogophere is how it has elevated policy debates and research, particularly around health care, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economic crisis. And it’s good to have a basic primer on the arts policy literature out there for those of who are trying to catch up with blogging experts in the field like Gabriel Rossman.

I think it’s a sign that Ivey, who argues that government has abdicated its role in securing cultural rights, which are being eroded by expanding corporate ownership, is essentially correct on some level that most of my thinking—and the thinking of most people who care about pop culture—about how to make our culture better involves demonstrating that there are markets and other incentives for companies to make more shows and movies about Latinos, or to make movies for women that aren’t gratuitously sexist. We have conversations about copyright, remixing, and things, but we mostly skip over questions of heritage and cultural rights, and our conversations about cultural diplomacy are mostly confined to the market, the question of what makes it overseas in stores and theaters. I don’t necessarily agree with everything Ivey’s saying, but the book is an important reminder of how cramped our debate over art and cultural policy has become. It’s worth reading as a way of forcing the door open, even if we eventually decide on a narrower role for government.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Perhaps the most controversial thing Republican Mitt Romney’s ever said about the arts was his brief declaration in 2007 that his favorite book was Scientology classic Battlefield Earth — keeping in character and good sense, he soon reversed himself and declared that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn had pride of place on his bookshelf instead. But Romney’s also pivoted somewhat on arts funding and arts education issues since he left the governor’s office in Massachusetts.

2003: When Romney became governor in 2003, he inherited a difficult budget situation — particularly on the arts. The previous year, Republican Gov. Jane Swift and the state legislature cut funding for the Massachusetts Cultural Council 62 percent to $7.3 million. Rather than proposing further cuts, Romney advocated for keeping that budget steady. But that same year, he did propose privatizing the Massachusetts College of Art and Design as part of a larger plan to change the governance of the state’s public college system.

2004: An alternative to Romney’s plan for MassArt, proposed by the school’s president Katherine Sloan, is approved. Rather than returning the tuition it collects to a general fund, MassArts gets approval to keep it and begins fundraising that’s intended to make it more financially autonomous (when Romney first called for privatizing the school, MassArt didn’t have its own endowment). But despite these changes, MassArt continues to receive funding from the state of Massachusetts, and remains a public institution.

2006: Even as the economy recovers in Massachusetts, Romney proposed cutting $2.4 million from the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s budget. When the legislature approved a $12.1 million budget for the MCC, he vetoed $2.4 million of that funding only to have the legislature override his veto.

2009: During the stimulus debate, Romney goes on CNBC and as part of a larger discussion, suggests that the arts aren’t an appropriate target of the bill.

Romney has questioned levels of funding for the arts, particularly in difficult financial times, and he has questioned government involvement in the arts as parts of larger conversations about the government’s core responsibilities. But unlike some of his competitors for the Republican nomination, Romney doesn’t seem to be an absolutist on the idea of government involvement in the arts. And that’s the Romney’s biggest challenge in the Republican primary: in a game of less is more, Romney’s got a lot of more in his record as governor of Massachusetts.