Hillary Serves out the Pork

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted April 27, 2008.

One Sunday about three months ago -- on the day before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in fact -- I got out of bed very late and lazily switched on CNN. On the TV screen, Sen. Hillary Clinton was smiling broadly and wearing a black jacket over some strange Oriental get-up. She was standing next to influential black pastor Calvin Butts, in front of the latter's famous Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Camera bulbs were flashing. An important announcement was about to be made.

Butts, it turns out, was endorsing Hillary over Barack Obama in the upcoming New York primary. I raised an eyebrow. It's not that I expected Butts -- perhaps the most prominent black minister in New York -- to automatically endorse Obama simply because he is black. But I certainly didn't expect to see Butts go on national television and make swipe after thinly veiled swipe at Obama, sounding like he was reading a script prepared for him by Hillary's campaign team.

"This is no time for waiting or hoping for solutions," quipped Butts, making an obvious reference to The Audacity of Hope author Obama and echoing the hope-ain't-shit theme that had been pounded on the campaign trail by the Clinton camp over and over again.

The predominantly black crowd barely had time to scratch its collective head and ask what the hell was going on before the endorsement party abruptly ended, leaving the stunned audience to break out in scattered boos and dueling chants of "Harlem for Obama!" and "Hillary! Hillary!" The strange scene left some in the audience wondering what exactly they'd just seen. "What's frustrating about ministers endorsing candidates," an Obama supporter named Rafael Mason wondered to a reporter, "is it makes you question if their decision is representative of the church or if there's a backroom discussion going on."

Months later, while researching pork-barrel spending by the presidential candidates, I came across three federal budgetary awards requested by Hillary Clinton in this fiscal year:

• $446,500 Abyssinian Development Corporation, New York, to support and expand youth and young-adult after-school and summer programs (Discretionary Grants -- Juvenile Justice Programs) COM 08 D Rangel Schumer Clinton
  
• $893,000 Abyssinian Development Corporation programs for at-risk youth, New York (Discretionary Grants -- Juvenile Justice Programs) COM 08 D Rangel Clinton Schumer
• $146,000 Abyssinian Development Corporation, to support and expand youth- and family-displacement prevention programs (Social Services -- Department of Health and Human Services) LABHHS 08 D Clinton Schumer

If you haven't already guessed, Calvin Butts is the chairman of the Abyssinian Development Corporation. The above-mentioned $1.5 million in federal funds that Hillary requested on behalf of Butts' organization had been approved by Congress a month before she received the minister's timely endorsement. Maybe the minister was following his conscience in endorsing Hillary -- but then, it never hurts to have a little financial incentive when it comes to difficult decisions like these, does it?

All politicians buy and sell favors, and presidential candidates are worse than most. In this race, none of the three remaining candidates are exactly squeaky clean when it comes to the doling out of federal budgetary largess. Even John McCain, who boasts that he doesn't request "earmarks," as pork-barrel spending is known on the Hill, actually has at least one to his name. And Barack Obama has not been shy about steering taxpayer dollars to people who might be able to help his presidential bid.

But of the three candidates, no one can touch Hillary Clinton for her expertise in dispensing federal pork. She is fast becoming a sort of Heavyweight Earmark Champion of the Beltway -- one think-tank analyst has even dubbed her the "Queen of Pork" -- who excels as a favor trader not only in sheer quantity but in brazenness as well. A recent examination of this year's earmark requests shows her solidifying her champion status more and more with each passing year, even under the ostensibly bright lights of a presidential campaign.

Here's how earmarks work: Each year, Congress allocates trillions of dollars, with most of it doled out to federal agencies, which in turn spend their budgets according to their own established -- and usually competitive and merit-based -- criteria. But in a small percentage of cases, members of Congress can direct the agencies in question to award their monies to specific organizations or companies, which are almost always located in that member's home state. In an unsurprisingly high number of cases, the money is given to a company whose executives just happen to have donated heavily to the member of Congress in question. That's what an earmark is. Some are legit and go to worthy causes, but on the whole they are sleazy enough to have moved the Democrats to pass earmark-reform legislation after they took control of Congress in 2006. The reform forced members of Congress to attach their names to the earmarks in question, and Democrats pledged to cut the number and cost of earmarks in half. They blew it. This past year, in fact, members of Congress jammed more than $17 billion of earmarks into the budget -- a thirty percent increase from the previous year. In March, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi abandoned plans to impose a one-year moratorium on earmarks -- a reform that was also rejected by the Democrat-controlled Senate.

See more stories tagged with: earmarks, pork, mccain, obama, clinton

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Democracy and Elections! Sign up now »