Look Ma, No Earmarks: Even in Passage Democrats Fail at Framing Stimulus

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

In the stimulus fight, an old friend of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's came back to terrorize Democrats once again.

Ah, earmark. How we missed your rhetoric so.

Granted, I myself was concerned about the idea of a hands-off approach from the Obama Administration, allowing a bunch of lawyers (only slightly worse than a bunch of economists, but oh well) determine how hundreds of billions in taxpayer money would be spent.

When I talked to a bunch of economists about the stimulus plan a few weeks ago, I found that the fear of earmarks was virtually the only thing that united them.

Republicans have been railing against a supposedly porky stimulus package since the beginning of negotiations. Gail Collins had a funny, insightful op-ed piece in The New York Times on February 4 on that very subject. I recommend you read it in full, but here's how it started:

The economy is in crisis, and we are so relieved that the Senate has finally gone to work debating the critical stimulus plan and ...

Oh, dear Lord. John McCain is making a speech about earmarks.

"... $188,000 for the Lobster Institute, which includes a lobster cam at the bottom of the ocean that so far we haven't been able to work!"

Earmarks, you will remember, are those frequently porky little bits of appropriations for specific projects that legislators like to stick into budgets. During the presidential race, McCain gave the definite impression that earmarks were a threat to the nation's well-being - second only to radical Islamic fundamentalism.

And although McCain lost the election (by a lot, really), Barack Obama still made a point of saying that there would be no earmarks in the stimulus bill.

Which there are not. Nor is there anything for the Lobster Institute. But the old stories are always the best stories. Anyway, we're talking government spending, so there must be something nefarious somewhere.

"You don't have to call it an earmark and it doesn't have to be technically an earmark, but ... that's certainly their effect," McCain said darkly.

The Republicans have been doing an extremely thorough job of making this American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (stimulus bill to its friends) sound like a wasteful ball of lobster cameras. Even its authors now seem a little embarrassed.

That situation has pretty much held strong to today, as Congress hammers out the final details of the amazing shrinking stimulus bill (in case you haven't been watching, it's now down to $787 billion, $2 billion less than yesterday). Republicans are still blustering about overspending on pet projects and Democrats are still being overly apologetic, which makes them sound guilty.

A prime example of that last point comes at the very end of a press summary of the bill coming out of the House Appropriations Committee, a screenshot of which appears at the top of this story. A whole bullet point is devoted to telling reporters once and for all, "There are no earmarks in this bill."

Will it work? Probably not. All the way down to naming the darn thing, Democrats have failed at every framing opportunity on this one. They've lost the information war so completely that it hardly makes a political difference whether the stimulus will fail or not; Democrats will get blamed either way.

The earmark conversation is a good example of this problem. In fact, one Wiki site getting a lot of attention is StimulusWatch.org. Conservative bloggers are seizing on the site as evidence of ridiculous pork barrel projects that are supposedly included in the bill.

One blog entry titled "Obama Broke His Promise on Earmarks in the Stimulus" lists some pretty flagrant pet projects: dog parks, a disc golf course, a little league parking lot, each dutifully linking to StimulusWatch.

The problem is that StimulusWatch lists state projects that were submitted in the U.S. Conference of Mayors' report for federal consideration. The projects are not in the stimulus bill; they're more of a wish list from local governments all around the country. The individual pages describing the projects on StimulusWatch -- which are what these confused conservatives are linking to in their uninformed blog entries -- don‘t make that very clear (check out the comments section on this page alone to get an idea of the mass confusion).

To be fair, the group writes this in their FAQ:

U.S. Conference of Mayors has responded by releasing a list of "shovel-ready" projects in cities around the country that the mayors would like to see funded. President Obama, however, has promised to spend stimulus dollars only on critical projects.

"What we need to do is examine what are the projects where we're going to get the most bang for the buck [and] how are we going to make sure taxpayers are protected," he has said. "You know, the days of just pork coming out of Congress as a strategy, those days are over."

StimulusWatch.org was built to to [sic] help the new administration keep its pledge and to hold public officials to account. We do this by allowing you, citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed projects in your city, to find, discuss and rate those projects.

Now, part of the blame goes to Congress for not posting the actual stimulus plan online soon enough (they finally got it online this afternoon, you can access the 647-page PDF from this page). They say sunshine is the best antiseptic for a reason; it scrubs out ignorance and misinformation as well as corruption.

So why are Republicans still hammering away at this one talking point? Well, that's what they're good at. But more importantly, it's because pork resonates. Earmarks are like the polar opposite of "not in my backyard" issues: everyone hates wasteful spending, unless it's being spent in their neighborhood. As BuzzFlash editor Mark Karlin likes to remind us, "One man's pork is another man's bacon."

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

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