A Quick Note on What Hypocrisy Is and Isn’t February 10, 2012
Posted by geoff in News.trackback
Rick Santorum is under attack for talking a good fight with regard to government spending, but being one of the biggest earmarkers in Congress:
While he carved out a conservative record in his Senate years, he was one of the big spenders there when it came to stuffing appropriation bills with hundreds of “ear mark,” special interest spending provisions for his state. All told, according to most published reports, he steered hundreds of millions of tax dollars into his state for a wide variety of questionable public works projects.Taxpayers for Common Sense, a deficit-cutting public advocacy group, “estimated Mr. Santorum helped secure more than $1 billion in earmarks during his Senate career,” the New York Times reported last month.
The influential Club for Growth, a tax cutting advocacy organization, said, “Santorum was a prolific supporter of earmarks, having requested billions of dollars for pork projects in Pennsylvania while he was in Congress.”
This has already become a major line of attack by the Romney campaign. It sent out a blistering e-mail Thursday attacking Santorum as a longtime Washington insider and big spender who contributed to the growth in government over his years in the Senate when spending skyrocketed from $1.5 trillion in 1995 to $2.7 trillion by 2007.
So does this mean that Santorum is so tainted by spending fever that he can’t cut budgets and exercise fiscal responsibility?
Not at all. When he was in Congress, the name of the game was delivering bacon to the home crowd. It’s a miserable, self-defeating game, but that’s the game. And he was apparently quite good at it. I’d rather take someone who is competent at playing the system than someone who couldn’t.
It doesn’t mean that he liked the system, or that the system reflected his inner values. It just means that when all the chicks in Congress were chirping to get fed, he chirped louder and got more worms. Who wants a sucky chirper representing them in Congress?
I liken this attack to those who say, “If you oppose illegal immigration, why do you use illegal immigrants as yard workers and day laborers?” The answer, of course, is that I play the game to the best of my ability given the situation dealt me. If cheap labor is available, then I use it. I’d rather the cheap labor source was high school kids, but since that’s not the case, I’ll do what makes sense.
It’s not at all inconsistent to want to change the rules but to abide by the rules as they exist.
Or, in slightly dated parlance: Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.
Your defense makes sense, but when you’re a social conservative like Santorum you can’t fall back on the “everyone else does it” defense. You’re supposed to be bigger than the game, not just another “playa”. The whole “everyone else does it” frame of mind is what got our tails in a crack in the first place.
If it seems like I’m placing an undue burden on so-cons, that is not my intention. I’m actually asking them to stand up for their own professed values. When social conservatives stop playing the game like the manipulators do, their influence in this country will skyrocket (IMHO). People who believe in personal responsibility don’t like to follow leaders who tell them “YOU need to be responsible, but MY needs were much different at the time”.
If Rick Santorum held himself out as a moderate pragmatist, I wouldn’t judge him this way. I’ve always believed that one of the best indicators of a person’s character is to use that person’s professed standards to judge his/her performance. For example, Shawn Kemp is a loser with illegitimate kids in damn near every NBA home city; however, if he were also a man who stressed abstinence and responsible sexual behavior while frequently “thinking with his dick”, he would be a much bigger failure because he is a massive failure BY HIS OWN STANDARDS.
Rick Santorum seems to be a nice guy and a good Christian. He’s just got a little too much Huckabee in him to make a good Conservative president. I’m not saying that Romney is any better, but at least Romney isn’t trying to sell me beachfront property on Mars with regard to his earmark history.
Shorter response:
This defense of Santorum is pretty much equivalent to the defenses of Romney’s record as Governor of Massachusetts that Santorum and his supporters like to shred. So tell me again why Santorum is different from Romney?
Santorum’s job, in our current very flawed version of a Constitutional Republic, was to bring home some bacon. Until the system doesn’t operate under that sort of quid pro quo, Congressmen are obligated to do their best for their constituents.
Conservative Congressmen should be doing their best to reform that system, while concurrently acing out their liberal counterparts on all the juiciest line items.
This post was not meant to be a plug for Santorum, or to differentiate between Santorum and Romney. I haven’t decided which one I’m going to resign myself to supporting.
We’re all ambivalent about the Republican field, and the solution is right in front of us.
Dave in Texas for President!
A Congressman/Senator is supposed to act IN THE BEST INTERESTS of his constituents. Unless you think “screwing everyone else before they can do it to you” is in your best interests, that’s what got us into this mess.