What is an earmark? Palin versus Obama

Ed Morrissey today devotes a Hot Air blog entry to an issue I almost felt driven to address early this morning: the manner in which the mainstream media (including The Wall Street Journal) have failed to make important distinctions between funding requests and the corrupt earmarking system members of Congress use to do each other and key constituents favors.

The level of federal spending requests have dropped under Palin’s administration both years, but quite obviously she still puts in requests for Congressional cash. The question that the WSJ never really answers is how those requests come to Congress. If they come in earmark form, then the McCain campaign has some explaining to do about its rhetoric the past three weeks. If not, then this is a non-story, and in fact shows Palin weaning Alaska off of Washington’s largesse.

Earmarks are not equivalent to all federal spending, as McCain himself notes. If these requests did not come in earmark form, then Congress has the opportunity to vote directly on spending the money in Alaska based on the legitimacy of the projects. Earmarks, on the other hand, get slipped into bills without such Congressional scrutiny and are almost impossible to remove regardless of the uselessness of the project.

This distinction helps explain why Robyn Blumner's editorial column from the weekend was such an outrageous lie, and also why PolitiFact' handling of McCain's earmark history was ultimately an example of how not to do fact-checking.

Comparing Obama's earmarks to Palin's without making any distinction between the type of earmark conveys a very misleading impression. Obama spent his first two years in the Senate wallowing in the existing trough of secret earmarks. That is why Obama's earmarks were discovered through his own admission rather than via media exposure as in the case of Alaska's requests for federal funding.