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Pork Could Put McCain Over Barrel

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The New York Times

Published: May 4, 2008

The campaign trail has recently taken Sen. John McCain - the scourge of earmarked, pork-barrel spending in Congress - across the Alabama River on the Gee's Bend ferry, to one of his old Navy posts at Cecil Field in Jacksonville and to the Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, Pa., where he marveled at the new technology.

Each one of these campaign stops visited a place that received some money from - you guessed it - congressional earmarks, as Democrats have gleefully pointed out.

McCain, who has vowed to veto all earmarks as president and to "make the authors famous," said this week that he understood that some earmarked projects were worthwhile and deserved money. It is the unaccountable, opaque way in which such spending is quietly slipped into legislation that he objects to, a system that he said breeds corruption.

Good programs, he said, can still be paid for the traditional way.

"If they're worthy programs, then they can be authorized and appropriated in a New York minute," McCain said last week aboard his campaign bus as he rolled away from the hospital in Allentown, which Democrats pointed out received earmarks for construction and a program to treat ovarian cancer.

"If they are worthy projects, I know that they will be funded," he said. "I know that this program here would be funded."

The difficulty for McCain is that last month he called for cutting $95 billion worth of earmarks, and federal spending that began life as earmarks, to make up for the revenue that would be lost if he won passage of some of the large tax cuts that he has proposed. So for every worthy earmark that he agrees to save, McCain will have to find a spending cut elsewhere.

But Democrats, who have questioned whether McCain could save enough by dropping earmarks to make up for some of the tax cuts he wants to make, said that it appeared less likely that McCain could do so now, when he is talking about saving some of those programs.

"John McCain is playing a disturbing game of three-card monte with his own credibility and our country's economic security," said Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.

By some measures, large spending programs that McCain supports, including aid to Israel and money for military housing, count as earmarks.

When he was asked recently on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on ABC whether he favored cutting those two programs, McCain replied, "Of course not."

On his campaign bus, McCain said that he was confident that there was enough wasteful spending in Washington that he would be able to find cuts to offset the programs he would want to keep.

Earmarks have been central to McCain's critique of Washington. On the trail he often boasts that he has never taken pork-barrel spending for his home state of Arizona, and despite the contention of critics who say a couple of projects he sought could be called pork, he is nothing like lawmakers who routinely take millions, and even hundred of millions of dollars in pork barrel projects each year.

McCain rails against earmarks on the campaign trail, sometimes several times a day, and often argues that the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006 because of runaway spending, and not because of opposition to the war in Iraq.

Bruce Riedl, budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation who has studied congressional pork-barrel spending, said it would take much more than cutting earmarks to balance the budget.

"Congress can't balance the budget by cutting earmarks alone," Riedl said. "As a matter of fact, any significant spending cuts will probably have to come out of entitlements, and, in particular, in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare reform."

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