The Weird War on Earmarks

I didn’t see it at the time, but it turns out that on Wednesday John Dickerson wrote a very good Slate column on the bizarre and dishonest earmark rhetoric coming from John McCain:

McCain also vowed, as he always does, to make the authors of earmark legislation famous by embarrassing them as a way to cut down on the practice. I wonder. Most earmarks are not ridiculous boondoggle programs. They fund things like schools and hospitals, which are not the kinds of things that their supporters feel embarrassed about. They also fund things like abstinence-education programs (in swing states like Pennsylvania), which many of McCain’s voters favor.

Is Sarah Palin, who promised to be an advocate for special-needs families when she’s in the White House, really going to slash earmarks for special-needs schools? Will McCain really “make the authors famous” when they’re Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Republican allies who support an earmark for services aimed at families with autistic children? If they’re so evil, why not do it in this election year, when Collins is a vulnerable incumbent? Earmarks get really tricky really fast.

And of course, to repeat something we’ve observed before, McCain’s proposal to eliminate earmarks is, among other things, a proposal to end American aid to Israel. I doubt a President McCain really would eliminate aid to Israel, or eliminate services to support families with autistic children, or do any of the other politically unthinkable things that following through on his pledges would entail. But that just goes to show what a fundamentally daffy proposal this as. Being the lonely Senator who votes against uncontroversial earmarks, sitting alone in the corner railing against “pork” as things fly by on 94-1 votes, is a nice way to grandstand and to get some press coverage. But a president actually needs to take responsibility for the implications of his proposals and not just say stuff to get in the headlines.