By Gene Lyons | October 21st, 2010
If the White House wanted to make a real fight of it, President Obama would spend the next two weeks reading aloud from the official correspondence of GOP congressional leaders. But has he got the necessary will?
Take Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, for example. Campaigning for re-election, the photogenic tea party heroine postures boldly against taxes and government spending. A bitter critic of the Obama administration’s efforts to improve the economy, she specifically and repeatedly derides “the failed Pelosi trillion-dollar stimulus.”
Somewhat less publicly, Bachmann has taken a different position. Researchers for the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity released a bunch of letters she wrote to various federal agencies seeking stimulus grants for her district. Perhaps the most telling is one she sent to the Transportation Department seeking money for a bridge over the St. Croix River.
Funding the project, Bachman argued “would directly produce 1,407 new jobs per year while indirectly producing 1,563 a year — a total of 2,970 jobs each year after the project’s completion.”
A more basic conflict with tea party theology is hardly possible.
Government spending creates jobs? That’s heresy.
In Washington parlance, they’re called “lettermarks” — basically identical to the dreaded “earmarks” Republicans rail against, except more devious. Bachmann’s far from the only Republican quietly seeking funding she voted against and publicly derides. Frauds and fakers every one.
The ink was barely dry on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act before Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told CNN in July 2009: “The stimulus was a big mistake. I think we can fairly safely declare it now a failure.” Over the next two months, the Kentucky Republican nevertheless sought federal largesse for five projects, including a railroad he said had the potential to “attract industry, create jobs and move goods through areas underserved by national highways.”
Name a tea party hero, and they’re on the Center for Public Integrity’s “lettermarks” list: Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. Also a number of “Blue Dog” Democrats like Rep. Walter Minnick, D-Idaho.
All voted against the stimulus, supposedly on grounds of principle, then sought funding for their constituents on the less abstract grounds that building bridges, tunnels, railroads and stringing broadband cable provides jobs, public and private, stimulating secondary economic activity in the bargain.
Politically speaking, this should be dynamite. Despite the attention it gets, the tea party’s basically a joke, harkening back to a mythical Golden Age in American life that never existed. ...
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