Clinton leads the field in seeking earmarks.....

Clinton leads senators seeking presidency in use of earmarks

BY BRIAN TUMULTY
Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — Among the five members of the U.S. Senate seeking the presidency, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a considerable lead in using the federal budget to pay for special projects known as earmarks.


Democratic Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Joe Biden of Delaware also have dozens of these projects in 2008 spending bills passed by the Senate. But they don’t use them as widely and systematically as their New York counterpart, according to a Gannett News Service review of a database compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Clinton’s 147 earmarks totaling $728.3 million topped the $640.8 million obtained by Dodd, the $118.6 million by Obama and $108.3 million by Biden.

The fifth senator running for president, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, eschews the practice and has criticized Clinton’s use of earmarks on the campaign trail.

Democratic leaders in Congress and President Bush have separately promised to cut 2008 earmarks in half from their peak 13,496 projects totaling $19 billion in 2005, according to an estimate by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Those who defend earmarks often point out that local lawmakers are best suited to evaluate the needs of their communities. They deny the projects are wasteful.

Clinton’s spokesman, Philippe Reines, defended the projects, noting they “train nurses, improve our hospitals, help those suffering from 9/11-related health ailments, bolster our national and homeland security.”

Taxpayers for Common Sense and other budget watchdog groups agree that many congressional earmarks are justified.

”The problem is that they are based on political muscle and not merit, ” spokesman Steve Ellis said.

Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, said McCain would almost certainly wage war against earmarks if he’s elected president.

The use of earmarks by the other four senators “reveals very little about how they would behave as president,” according to Mann. ”As senators, they naturally act as advocates for their states, and that includes trying to earmark spending. As president, their focus would be on national priorities and fiscal policy.“

McCain and the Democratic senators seeking the presidency support reforms passed by Congress to disclose the authors of earmarks.

And Obama joined Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma on legislation signed into law earlier this year that will establish an Internet database of all federal contracts.

Dodd said in an interview he’s never received an earmark he wouldn’t want to announce in a press release, including $470 million for shipbuilding included in the Senate’s 2008 defense bill.

”The news is, are you doing something that has little or no value?” he said. “Shipbuilding has value. It’s needed in the country. It’s the reason you have Democrats and Republicans on the major committees sponsoring it.”

The allocation grew to $588 million in the House-Senate conference agreement that removed the item’s classification as an earmark and simply lumped it in with other shipbuilding. The bill is the only one of 13 spending bills for 2008 that’s been signed by Bush.

The money will go toward construction of Virginia Class submarines by shipyards that include Electric Boat in Connecticut.

McCain has drawn attention to $1 million for the Bethel Performing Arts Center that Clinton and fellow New York Sen. Chuck Schumer requested in the 2008 Labor-Health and Human Services spending bill to commemorate the 1969 Woodstock rock concert.

McCain, a former Navy pilot shot down over North Vietnam, was a prisoner of war at the time of the concert. Last month he began running a TV ad in New Hampshire observing that Woodstock was ”a cultural event that defined a generation” while questioning if it’s “worthy of a million of your tax dollars to build a museum.”

The Arizona senator also targeted a $500,000 Clinton-Schumer request for a ”virtual herbarium” at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

Both the Woodstock and the New York Botanical Garden earmarks were removed during House-Senate negotiations, while funding for other Clinton-Schumer earmarks grew. A $600,000 allocation for Rochester, N.Y., area colleges for “excellence in math and sciences” increased to $1 million, and $250,000 for music education at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center rose to $400,000.