Earmarks aren’t bad, and pork is more than a disagreement

Jeff Rosenberg at the Twin Cities Daily Liberal has an outstanding post illustrating how meaningful discussions of earmarked funds and pork-barrel spending have been all but eliminated from current political discourse. Due to bandwagon bashing of not only truly wasteful expenditures but any spending someone simply isn’t a fan of, we’ve allowed discussion of this serious issue to be neutered.

Rosenberg writes:

Think about this for a moment: If our members of Congress aren’t inserting spending into spending bills, who’s supposed to be doing it? The reason all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives is that the representatives understand their districts and their needs. As long as spending bills stay within established budget guidelines, doesn’t it make sense to let our representatives direct the spending where it’s needed most?

That’s not to say that earmarks aren’t abused to create real pork-barrel spending. But just because a Congressman inserts an earmark into a bill for a local spending project doesn’t make it “pork.” Pork-barrel spending occurs when that earmark is used for spending that doesn’t really meet any need other than shoveling money to the Representative’s district.

Read the original: “Pork: The most meaningless word in politics.” And thanks for writing it, Jeff.

Photo courtesy of kuow on Flickr

Populism’s negative affect on politics

Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University and a former editor of the Public Interest, wrote in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend about “What the rise of Sarah Palin and populism means for the conservative intellectual tradition.”

To summarize, Lilla laments the apparent rejection of intellectualism that initially attracted him, a self-described liberal, to the world of conservative political thought.

Coming of age politically in the grim ’70s, when liberalism seemed utterly exhausted, I still remember the thrill of coming upon their writings for the first time. I discovered the Public Interest the same week that Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and its pages offered shelter from the storm — from the mobs on the street, the radical posing of my professors and fellow students, the cluelessness of limousine liberals, the whole mad circus of post-’60s politics. Conservative politics mattered less to me than the sober comportment of conservative intellectuals at that time; I admired their maturity and seriousness, their historical perspective, their sense of proportion. In a country susceptible to political hucksters and demagogues, they studied the passions of democratic life without succumbing to them. They were unapologetic elites, but elites who loved democracy and wanted to help it.

But as a response to what many conservatives saw as a uniformly hostile environment in the media and on university campuses (“campii”?), the tide began to turn:

They [then began to] mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

The issue is not that “regular folk” are bad. Lilla’s concern with populism is that, in this manifestation, it has become less about the people and more about pandering to the people. The thinkers and the politicians leading the Republican Party — or, of course, any political party or movement — are supposed to be leaders, not panderers. They’re supposed to raise the level of thought, the level of discourse, not play to the lowest common denominator.

There’s a rather fine line between being elite (which has similarly been twisted into a slur) and being exclusive. One certainly can be elite — which, I’ll remind you, simply refers to being of the cream of the crop, not favoring those who are the cream of the crop at the expense of others — without being exclusive, and that an important distinction in a functioning democracy.

A great thinker of our time, Jon Stewart, summed up well the case for elitism: “If you don’t actually think you’re better than us, what the ____ are you doing? … Not only do I want an elite president, I want someone who’s embarrassingly superior to me.”

Thanks to my partner in blogging crime Gary Hornseth, one of several contributors to The Same Rowdy Crowd, for bringing this WSJ article to my attention. Great find.

Photo courtesy of Gaetan Lee on Flickr

The truth about false equivalence

This article originally appeared at The Same Rowdy Crowd, a blog written by a bunch of Minnesotans who get worked up about politics, communication, PR, journalism and the like. I happen to be one of those writers. My Rowdy colleague, Joe Loveland, kindly allowed me to republish this here.

Of all the errors that reporters and voters make in political communications, the most prevalent and dangerous may well be the error of false equivalence.

False equivalence – also recently described in a terrific Washington Post piece as “the symmetry of sin” — works like this: Candidate A has made an error. Candidate B has made an error. With little or no exploration or thought, the errors are judged to be equally egregious, and therefore the candidates are equally damned.

The problem is the errors committed by Candidate’s A and B are almost never equally egregious. The errors are only treated as equal because reporters and voters are too lazy, uninformed, dim and/or self-righteous to form and express an opinion about which error is more significant.

What types of errors am I talking about?

• Candidate A votes with a particular interest group 5% of the time. Candidate B votes with the same interest group 90% of the time. Therefore, a judgment is made that “they both vote with that interest group, and are therefore equally bad.”
• Candidate A makes an argument that is correct at it’s core, but contains a relatively small technical error. Candidate B makes an argument that is at its core is completely, knowingly and demonstrably false. A judgment is made that “they both are liars and equally untrustworthy.”
• Candidate A has been fighting for Issue Z as part of a political institution. Candidate B has been fighting against Issue Z as part of the same political institution. Therefore, a judgment is made “that the candidates are equally blameworthy because they are part of the institution that failed to enact Issue Z.”

By the way, I’m stating these as abstruse hypotheticals in a probably futile attempt to focus on the method of reasoning, and not get bogged down on the factual basis of particular debates.

As a frequent practitioner of false equivalency, I can tell you it feels darn good. It makes us feel wise, noble, and above the fray. It makes us feel more mature and measured than the people with those messy opinions. It makes reporters feel “balanced.” It liberates us from the brain cramps and pulled Googling muscles associated with digging below the surface rhetoric.

But the error of false equivalence may be the most dangerous phenomena facing our democracy, because it frees us from the burden of thought, robbing democracy of its most essential fuel.

Joe Loveland of The Same Rowdy Crowd

Fallibility: a key to success

Being wrong is the only way to be right.

We’ve all seen the spokespeople who go on TV representing political candidates. You know the types:

I represent Sally. Steve is scum. Sally will cut taxes; Steve will raise taxes — and eat your babies. Did you know Steve wants to take away Social Security benefits and give them to Wall Street big-wigs?

Of course, Sally probably has her flaws, and Steve isn’t scum. He’s has different values, which include no desire to eat babies. And of course, no significant discussion of changes to tax law can take place in sound bites, so nobody has any idea what the truth is on that front. Social Security? Steve actually voted for a bill to give taxpayers the option to invest part of their Social Security payments in stocks or mutual funds. This, of course, does come with some amount risk, and it’s probably possible that a Wall Street big wig could make money off of your losses. Sally’s spokesman, though, felt compelled to misattribute Steve’s motivation, saying he “wants” to “give” your money to those big-wigs.

The point is, these people make for great talking heads on TV, but they’re terrible communicators. They put up a façade of infallibility, operating as if their candidates have never made a mistake or demonstrated even a hint of poor judgment or policy-making regret. Their opponents, on the other hand, hope to see the country handed over to socialists/fascists hell bent on taking all of your money/controlling your life.

But if Sally’s spokesman continually operates if Sally is always right and Steve is always wrong, people quickly start to see that Sally’s spokesman if completely full of bullshit. No one is infallible, and no one should ever feel compelled to try to be.

Thus my premise: Being wrong, occasionally demonstrating human qualities like fallibility and humility, is the only way to ever be right. If you’re never wrong, you’re full of shit. If you’re full of shit, you’re never going to be right. If you admit mistakes, sincerely explain decisions that have been smeared as “flip-flops,” and address dissenters’ concerns by answering to them without trying to convert them, you’ll be seen as a straight shooter.

People like straight shooters.

“Imperfections” courtesy of Rickydavid on Flickr

Judging Palin’s qualifications, supporters

Well, this is a doozy.

South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler, perhaps no surprise, isn’t a huge fan of Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin. What surprised me were some of the words chosen to express that lack of fanaticism.

Fowler kicks things off with a solid pot-shot. She said it seems as though Sen. McCain has chosen a running mate “whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

“Only”? Really? I’m sure the hyperbole works in front of a friendly audience, but it’s not much good for making a persuasive argument, at least not in this case. This, however, was told to a reporter in an interview setting. Couple that with the inclusion of a widely recognized hot-button issue and you have yourself one hell of a lightning-rod comment.

The subsequent apology gets even better. Her apology statement said:

I personally admire and respect the difficult choices that women make everyday, and I apologize to anyone who finds my comment offensive. I clumsily was making a point about people in South Carolina who may vote based on a single issue. Whether it’s the environment, the economy, the war or a woman’s right to choose, there are people who will cast their vote based on a single issue. That was the only point I was attempting to make.

In a way, there’s some logic to this apology as an explanation for why she said what she said. McCain is notoriously less-than-perfect in his positions over the years on certain issues of great importance to voters referred to as “social conservatives,” abortion certainly being one of them. By choosing the firmly anti-abortion Palin, according to Fowler’s thinking, McCain is shoring up those voters to whom abortion is an important issue.

But with this apology, Fowler seems to step in another cowpie by implying people who vote primarily based on a single issue — or who can at least be perceived as doing so — are of lesser intelligence or of diminished rational capacity. One-track minds. Stupid. Sheep-like.

Again, a statement that might work well in front of a friendly crowd, but one that’s not smart to make when your primary focus should be singing the praises of your preferred candidate — not putting yourself in a position to apologize and clarify and backpedal.

Photo courtesy of kromatic on Flickr