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 Republican candidates in the 2012 field, Newt Gingrich is the one who’s invested most of his career in crusading against so-called obscene art and public funding for the arts. But he’s also the rare politician who is also an artist, having published a spate of historical novels throughout his career:

1991: As controversy raged about the National Endowment of the Arts’ support of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work Gingrich, then a Republican whip, encouraged his colleagues to vote for a bill that would have prohibited the NEA from funding projects that in any way “promote, disseminate or produce materials that depict or describe in a patently offensive way sexual or excretory activities or organs.” The furor was to provide a major theme for Gingrich’s tenure as speaker of the House after the Republican victories in the 1994 midterm elections.

1993: Cobb County, Georgia, a major bastion of Gingrich support, cut arts funding, saying that it helped promote a “gay agenda.”

1994: When Gingrich unveiled the Contract With America, it proposed cutting National Endowment for the Arts funding by 50 percent. Gingrich said he hoped to go even further, privatizing the NEA and public broadcasting.

1995: As the battle over the NEA’s continued existence kicked off, Gingrich said on C-SPAN: “I am for the Atlanta Ballet. I’m for the Metropolitan—maybe the greatest art museum in America—in New York City. But I’m against self-selected elites using your tax money and my tax money to pay off their friends.” After a fierce battle, the NEA budget was slashed by 40 percent, but it wasn’t killed immediately.

He did find common ground with Democrats, though, when the Clinton administration slapped Chinese exports with a 100 percent tariff over persistent failure to enforce laws on piracy of software, music and movies, Gingrich supported the administration’s move. He also held some of the first major meetings between top Republicans and Hollywood studio chiefs, at which piracy was a major point of discussion, aimed at trying to recruit a traditionally Democratic industry as a Republican constituency.

This same year, Gingrich also publishes the first of many historical novels, 1945, an alternate history of World War II in which America is left isolated against Nazi Germany. He would follow with series on the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and continue his World War II novels with the same co-author.

1997: After a bruising battle, Gingrich moderated his stance on the arts somewhat, inviting Alec Baldwin and other to Washington to discuss funding mechanisms for the arts. Republicans still attempted to close NEA and replace the agency with a block grant program to the states, but that effort eventually failed and efforts to defund the agency puttered out.

1998: Consistent with his long-running interest in technology and the development of the internet Gingrich founds Congress’s High Technology Working Group.

Today’s debate over public funding for the arts is essentially a retread of Gingrich’s efforts to shutter the NEA, minus the rhetoric about support for gay art. The narrower focus on deficit reduction might make more sense politically, but it’s also failed to galvanize outsized passions, which may be one reason it’s sunk so swiftly below the political waves. Similarly, Gingrich’s support for copyright enforcement prefigures the positions of most of his colleagues in the race, who see piracy as a key trade issue.

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.

The problem with transitioning from governor to national ideological symbol is that American politics don’t line up neatly from the local to the state to the national level. A governor’s appeasement of a key constituent group with a gesture is a national ideological enforcer’s rank betrayal of principal. And so it’s interesting to watch Sarah Palin’s evolving position on the arts as her function moved from semi-pragmatic governor of a small state composed of eclectic constituencies to a symbol of small-government conservative purity. Palin may not be an official candidate for president yet—and she may not run at all in 2012. But she creates so much heat and light in the race that it’s worth looking at her positions anyway.

2007: As a Republican governor, Palin signed a highly standard proclamation designating an Arts Education Month on the grounds that “arts education contributes to increased self-esteem and the development of creative thinking, problem solving, and communication skills. Arts educators strive to improve arts education opportunities for students in the arts and to stimulate interest in the arts among students and teachers.vStudents who study the arts score higher on verbal and math SAT scores than those without arts in the classroom. The arts challenge and extend the human experience, and the cultural arts honor Alaska’s unique heritage.”

That same year, the Anchorage Daily News noted that she appointed Aryne Randall, her Wells Fargo loan officer to the Alaska State Council on the Arts.

2008: Palin signed a bill creating a special labeling program for arts and handicrafts made by Alaska Natives to help promote their sale. Her rationale for the bill? U.S. States News reported she said, “Alaska Native art is admired around the world. This bill is about fairness and respect for our Native culture. I appreciate Senator Stevens and the Native artisans who worked so hard on this bill.” Palin may never have believed that government should subsidize the production of art, but at one point, she appeared to believe that the government should promote the sale of some art if such sales coincided with other interests.

As a vice presidential candidate, Palin ran into one of the disputes between Republican candidates and musicians that happen every cycle: Heart sent a cease-and-desist letter to the campaign over Palin’s use of “Barracuda” on campaign stops. The Republican platform that McCain and Palin ran on included calls for China to obey its World Trade Organization obligations particularly as they applied to intellectual property issues.

2009: After the federal stimulus passed, Palin turned down half the money allocated for Alaska, and cited federal funding for the arts as a cause: “I don’t want to automatically increase federal funding for education program growth, such as the National Endowment for the Arts, at a time when Alaska can’t afford to sustain that increase.”

After her resignation, she took a number of speaking engagements, including one in Hong Kong where she repeated her 2008 campaign themes about China and intellectual property rights.

2010: Palin has proven not to be shy about defending her intellectual property rights. When Gawker published excerpts of her book America By Heart prior to publication, Palin successfully sued to have them removed.

2011: That decision about the stimulus was the moment when Palin found her talking points about federal arts funding. She told Sean Hannity: “NPR, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, all those kind of frivolous things that government shouldn’t be in the business of funding with tax dollars — those should all be on the chopping block as we talk about the $14-trillion debt that we’re going to hand to our kids and our grandkids. Yes, those are the type of things that for more than one reason need to be cut.”

And her concerns about her own intellectual property persisted: earlier this year, Palin and her daughter Bristol successfully trademarked their names.

These kinds of contradictions and shifts, from things particular to Alaskan politics and general to the kind of appeasements governors make to folks who get excited about things like arts education (which has next to no resonance in national politics, but plenty on the local level), to broad statements of governmental should and shouldn’t, are the reason people will always wonder if Palin could be something other than what she’s become. But even though Palin is a singular figure for reasons having to do with her use of media, her personal popularity, and her immunity to mid-level scandal, the actual substance of her shifting position feels rather typical. Unlike, say, Mitt Romney, there are fewer major commitments to limit her, or for her to disavow.

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.

Michele Bachmann’s career in politics has been fairly short, and her record on the arts is correspondingly fairly flimsy. But what record she does has indicates staunch opposition to any government role in supporting the arts.

2006: As a GOP state senator, Bachmann opposed an amendment to the Minnesota constitution that would have raised the state’s sales tax to fund development of outdoor spaces and the arts. At the time, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Bachmann said: “Republicans support the arts just as much as Democrats support the arts. The only question is who will pay for it? We don’t want government choosing which arts are subsidized and which ones aren’t.”

2009: Now in Congress, Bachmann votes against the omnibus appropriations bill. Her reasoning? “Even more incredulous is the fact that this omnibus appropriations bill contains funding for many of the same agencies and programs that already received funds in the so-called ‘stimulus’ bill—162 programs in fact,” she said, according to the States News Service. “We also have funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, which, fresh off receiving $50 million from the ‘stimulus,’ is now in line to receive $138 million in this latest proposal.”

2010: Bachmann cosponsored a bill introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn that would have eliminated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

2011: When Bachmann proposed an alternative to President Obama’s budget earlier this year, the MN Progressive Project noted that her outline would have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts. Later that year, she voted for passage of H.R. 1076, which would have stripped all funding from National Public Radio and banned the federal government from spending money on radio content.

None of these are particularly novel or surprising positions for someone of Bachmann’s stated beliefs. She may have genuine policy eccentricities, but when it comes to the arts, Bachmann’s a predictable small-government conservative.

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.

The South Carolina House and Senate voted 105 to 8 and 32 to 6 to override Gov. Nikki Haley’s veto of the $1.9 million in funding that will keep the South Carolina Arts Commission alive and running for another year—a figure that, as the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies points out, is 0.032 percent of the state’s budget.

Some folks poked me about the necessity or wisdom of state arts agencies yesterday, so I’ll reiterate that I think these agencies are important to make sure there’s some equity in arts access, particularly in rural areas, to help bolster arts education, to provide useful peer review and grants to projects that can then leverage them for private-sector fundraising, and to support public art that can improve overall quality of life. And also, if you’re thinking strategically about the long-term argument between progressive and conservative worldviews, it’s conceding a lot of ground to walk away from programs where government investment is small as long as we think it might still be useful.

Following in the footsteps of Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) yesterday vetoed the state Legislature’s appropriations for the South Carolina Arts Commission. If the Legislature can’t override her veto, South Carolina would become the second state in the country without an arts agency. As Ian David Moss points out, the South Carolina Legislature overrode a number of former Gov. Mark Sanford’s budget vetoes last year, including one gutting much of the Arts Commission’s funding, but it’s a new governor and a new political climate. If state lawmakers are going to buck the governor on anything, it strikes me as more likely that they’ll spend political capital to fund the South Carolina presidential primary elections, which also fell victim to Haley’s veto pen.

As was the case in Kansas, the funding for the South Carolina Arts Commission wasn’t the difference between a balanced budget and a deficit. Instead, Brownback and Haley had both pushed to eliminate their arts commissions, and when their legislatures disagreed with them on the wisdom of cutting small programs that support a wide range of arts endeavors across their states, they eliminated the agencies through executive action. The South Carolina Arts Commission was required to spend 70 percent of its funding on grants, so most of the funds that Haley vetoed would have gone directly to arts projects rather than to administration.

Government support isn’t necessary a litmus test for Republicans, but it’s certainly becoming a way for Republican governors to prove their small-government credentials in the run-up to a presidential election. Along the way, they may end up dismantling a lot of valuable infrastructure, review processes for grants, and funding organizations used to leverage donations from the private sector. We can hope that individual donors and foundations make up the gap. But it’s still unattractive to watch Republican candidates earn their spurs by cutting jobs and eliminating small but useful organizations.