Earmarks, Obama and Elections
By Conor FriedersdorfThe Next Right has an interesting post up on questionable donations to the Obama campaign. On numerous occasions, it seems, people who benefited from the Illinois Senator’s earmarks contributed huge sums to his campaign coffers. This is one counterargument to the notion that earmarks are too small a percentage of the federal budget to really care about reforming. Insofar as they give individual senators wide discretion, they increase the ease with which money corrupts politics.
October 13th, 2008 at 8:08 am
This is the single best argument McCain can make, but he’s not drawing the connection. Maybe he has some skeletons of his own that he doesn’t want to raise, but in the past (i.e. during McCain/Feingold) he never ran away from pointing out the legalized bribery angle. Maybe he’ll try to make an issue of that in the next few weeks.
October 13th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Are you sure that the argument is that “earmarks are too small a percentage of the federal budget to really care about reforming” rather than “to really care about reforming as a means for fiscal responsibility”? (Or maybe I’m just giving the benefit of the doubt to too many people’s lines of reasoning.)
You do bring up what is possibly worst about them — this potential, implied tit-for-tat. But I don’t think McCain can pivot on it, except maybe for a zinger or two in the debate. (Unless he somehow ties this into how he would be a more responsible economic steward, and then goes on to reassure people that he would, in fact, be a responsible economic steward/savior/whatever we’re looking for now.)