It’s a pretty strange move for a man who is seeking the Republican nomination for President in 2012 to spend any part of the 10th anniversary of September 11 doing anything other than commemorating the event. It’s even less strategic to have that “something else” be going to the opera, and worse still for it to be a $1,000-a-ticket fundraiser. But then, nothing about Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign suggests that he’s aware that while Republican voters might hope that they themselves will become rich, they don’t really want the evidence of other people’s wealth thrown in their faces.

There are additional reasons Gingrich’s long-time patronage of the Washington National Opera company rings the hypocrisy bell. His co-investor in that enterprise (along with a lot of other rich people) is the National Endowment for the Arts, which Gingrich once suggested transitioning into a privatized organization. If Gingrich has had a change of heart and is fine with the National Endowment for the Arts now, as an arts-lovin’ progressive, I welcome his conversion. But that’s probably not the case. He, like David Koch, is the kind of political figure who would like to see organizations like the NEA disbanded in theory but isn’t going to go so far as to boycott anything supported by public arts funding. Purity gets in the way of so many entertaining things.

Then, there’s the matter of the opera itself. You could make an argument that Tosca, the first performance of the WNO, is actually a totally appropriate piece of art to use to reflect on the 10 years since September 11. It’s got political prisoners, information extracted under torture, and politicized executions. But then, only a hippie liberal would spend Sept. 11, 2011 thinking about what we did to ourselves over the last 10 years, in addition to what al Qaeda did to us.

It’s grimly hilarious and depressing that, just as House Republicans are using the debt ceiling fight to go after Pell Grants, the need-based college assistance program, they also decided to use this moment of national tension to try to cut $10.6 million out of the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. This is rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic, but with extreme malice. Fortunately, 55 Republicans stood up and voted with all of their Democratic colleagues to preserve the funding. I’m obviously supportive of public funding for the arts. But I’m also just depressed by these public displays of unseriousness and pettiness. $10.6 million in cuts will not save the nation, but it would halt a lot of revenue- and salary-generating projects.

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.

Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter may rock a star-spangled Telecaster and play it for American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as an elected official, he’s got a somewhat sparse record on the arts, where he mostly parrots conventional Republican positions (though he doesn’t demagogue as aggressively on arts funding as some of his rivals do):

2000: While a Michigan state senator, McCotter introduced a bill pushing for Michigan to appoint a poet laureate. At the time, the state was one of 13 that didn’t have a poet acting as ambassador for the arts. “We’re a hardworking Midwestern state, but we’re smart, too,” he said, suggesting Bob Seger be the initial laureate.

2004: McCotter got on the broadcast decency bandwagon after Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast at the Super Bowl, supporting the Broadcast Decency Act of 2004, which would have increased FCC fines to as much as $500,000 per incident. That bill didn’t pass, though similar legislation was enacted in 2009. At the time, McCotter said, “We have to have a safe haven so parents don’t get any surprises…we don’t really know what’s safe for our kids to watch.”

2005: As isn’t particularly surprising for a Michigan lawmaker, McCotter’s been skeptical about the American trade relationship with China. As he wrote to President Bush that year, “As you know, China, despite strong action taken by Congress, continues to pirate intellectual property; produce counterfeit goods; dump these and other products into our markets; and engage in currency manipulation.”

2007: While in Congress, he co-sponsored a resolution that supported music education on the grounds that it helps boost test scores and develop students socially.

2009: McCotter was one of the Republican leaders who held a joint press conference opposing President Obama’s budget, objecting to items ranging from dog park funding to the National Endowment for the Arts. Their reaction was, he said, “the result of the American people across this country finding out what is in that bill and in their infinite common sense they understand that there is no relationship between billions in this bill and their chance of keeping their job or finding a new one.”

McCotter’s challenge on the arts and intellectual property issues is the same on many others — he’s a relatively undefined candidate, and in a crowded field, he may not be able to show off much in the way of meaningful differences.

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.

Rep. Ron Paul’s a libertarian, so it’s no surprise that he’s not fond of government funding for the arts. But true to his libertarian principles, he’s shown that he’s uncomfortable with government regulation of the arts more generally:

1997: Predictably, Paul was in the midst of some of the debates over the existence of National Endowment for the Arts after he returned to Congress in 1997. “It is clear that there is no place in the federal budget for the NEA, the NEH or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” he said after President Clinton asked for an increase in NEA and CPB funding in response to Congressional cuts the previous year. Later that year, he voted to disband the agency altogether.

2001: In a profile, Paul used the National Endowment of the Arts to illustrate his vision of the Constitution’s limits on government functions in an interview with Insight on the News: “If you say, ‘What we must do is cut back on the National Endowment for the Arts,’ instead of defending the constitutionally correct position that there should be no National Endowment for Arts, you have conceded. The Congress made a feeble intellectual attempt in 1995, but it failed because, all of a sudden, the constitutional principle spelled out clearly in the 10th Amendment was ignored. The 10th Amendment says: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’”

2004: Paul was the only Republican to vote against a bill that increased the ceiling on Federal Communications Commission indecency fines from $27,500 per incident for companies and $11,000 for individuals to $500,000, complaining “I’m convinced that the Congress has been a very poor steward of the First Amendment.”

2007: Paul may not believe that the federal government should fund the arts, but that doesn’t mean he dislikes them. He cosponsored a resolution that expressed the House’s support for music education as part of a balanced curriculum.

Support for arts education shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted one way or another, unless the candidate in question is Mike Huckabee, for whom it’s a top issue. And other than that simple resolution, Paul’s views on the arts are straightforwardly libertarian.

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.

It’s been years since I visited the Watts Towers (which blew my mind, they’re incredible, and I wish I could find the t-shirt with a picture of them ironed on to it that I bought out of a guy’s house next door), so things may have changed since then, but it was definitely my sense that they could make a fantastic linchpin for further artistic development if that was something the neighborhood and city thought would be valuable. And I’m definitely in favor of things that make it easier for folks to find their way to great public art, particularly if it brings more art to people where they live, so I’m excited to hear that there’s a National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grant headed to the area that will, among other things, create an arts trail from a historic train station to the Towers site.

A trickier question is whether to support a skate park that’s supposed to go in right next door to the towers. On one hand, it would definitely be obnoxious if the only development around the Watts Towers were geared at tourists who will make at most occasional excursions into the neighborhood. On the other, there are perhaps community projects that would be less likely to impact a fragile piece of folk art that even with seismic stabilization, can be damaged by bad windstorms. I don’t think teenagers are inherently bad or responsible people, but people have been known to act like fools in groups and accidents can happen. A more stringent review of the project that asks questions about how to make sure the Towers stay safe and plans for remediation if they’re damaged seems fairly reasonable. Hopefully, a comprehensive plan for the neighborhood will be able to balance benefits to art-lovers and neighborhood residents.

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.

Herman Cain’s had an interesting career, whether serving as the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, as a director for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, or a Naval mathematician. None of it, however, has given him much background on arts issues or intellectual property rights, leaving his stances in these areas — as with many others — something of a mystery. Literally the only clue to his position on anything arts-related is a comment he made on an appearance on Eliot Spitzer’s CNN show, when the former governor of New York asked Cain what kind of spending cuts he’d make, cautioning, “I’m not talking National Endowment for the Arts, I’m not talking about everybody’s got their favorite target.” Cain refused to say he’d eliminate NEA.

That’s it. Nothing on arts education, nothing on public broadcasting, nothing on intellectual property or piracy. Zip. Cain won some early momentum, mostly due to an empty field. But unless he comes up with actual ideas — on the arts or anything else — I’m hard-pressed to see how he stays a remotely serious candidate, even in a cycle with a lot of silly options.

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.