RALEIGH – At the conclusion of a speech I made last week in Western North Carolina – during which I criticized President George W. Bush’s record on several issues, including federal spending – a Republican activist stood up to ask me a pointed question. Referring to the polling data I had cited showing a precipitous decline in public support for Bush and the Republican Congress, he argued that a major reason for the decline was the sort of criticism I had just offered.
He was pleasant enough, mind you, but quite serious. And quite wrong.
First, and less egregiously, he seemed to equate me with Republican politicians and activists who have also criticized Bush, either on the economy, privacy issues, or the war. I am not a Republican. I am not a politician. It is not my job to elect Republicans to office, or defeat Democrats, or attempt to convince the public to side with the GOP. It is my job to research issues, craft arguments, and express my opinions. So even if criticizing Bush on, say, federal spending were bad for the Republican Party, that would not be my concern.
Second, and more importantly, criticizing a public official for adopting a poor policy is not necessarily to harm that official’s long-term political prospects. If the policy is to have a bad outcome in reality, it will probably have a bad political outcome, too. In the specific case of the federal budget, where Bush has exercised scant restraint and participated in a massive increase in non-defense discretionary spending, the president and his party would be far better off today if they had listened to think tankers and outspoken GOP conservatives years ago.
Incumbent lawmakers – be they in Raleigh or Washington – often get political pressure to vote in ways that, it may be argued, benefit their individual districts at the expense of the country as a whole. A version of this argument often used by professed fiscal conservatives goes something like this: “I don’t approve of earmarks or pork-barrel spending, but as long as the system remains as it is, I feel a responsibility to bring back as much money as possible to my district.” It sounds reasonable, if a little defensive. But I would submit that it is flat-out wrong.
Anyone who favors abolishing the pork-barrel system should say no to earmarks in their own districts. There is some political value among swing voters, admittedly, in being able to claim to have used other people’s money to finance a project. But most state legislators and members of Congress have no general-election contest to speak of. If they face political competition at all, it is in the primary. For Republicans, at least, the ability to maximize pork is not a selling point among the voters most likely to participate in primaries. In North Carolina’s 2006 cycle, when the absence of a high-profile race at the state level will likely confine turnout to the activist core, this will be especially true.
Even for the handful of Republican incumbents in competitive races, I doubt that pork buys enough votes to offset the damage their big-spending ways may do to base turnout in the fall. If Bush and congressional Republicans had reduced rather than increased the earmarking problem since 2001, they’d be better positioned for the elections today. And if they had truly restrained federal spending overall, and abandoned the Medicare prescription-drug benefit when it became obvious it would be prohibitively expensive and complicated, they’d be even better off.
Even non-Republican think-tankers can see that.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.