It’s Time for Swing State Projects to Get Attention

WASHINGTON —  During an Oregon campaign appearance earlier this month, President Bush mounted a podium carefully positioned so that the Columbia River formed the backdrop as he pledged to deliver $15 million worth of improvements for the majestic waterway.

There was only one problem: Bush didn’t have the money. It was not in the 2004 budget. It was not in his proposed 2005 budget. Only the fine print of a White House fact sheet revealed that the president was promising to ask Congress for an amendment to his 2005 budget.

One of the oldest rules for incumbent presidents seeking reelection is: Dole out federal money -- “pork” in the political vernacular. But Bush, caught between soaring budget deficits and his small-government convictions, is adding a corollary: If you have almost no money, don’t let that stop you.

Bush and other administration officials have followed a well-established political rule as they travel the country: Hand out money for local projects. And if you don’t have the money, promise it -- especially in battleground states.

His father’s 1992 reelection campaign had a name for such efforts: “The Funnel.”

“They had a person who would coordinate with all the executive agencies to see what largess could be funneled to critical electoral areas,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, whose book “Presidents as Candidates” documented the way presidents use the office to run for reelection. “This kind of behavior is not unusual.”

Coordinating politics and policy is traditional, but the Bush administration seems to have raised it to a fine art, said Paul Light, a presidential scholar at New York University. He noted that Karl Rove, the president’s political strategist, makes weekly phone calls to the chiefs of staff of Cabinet-level departments to make sure federal largess goes where it would do the most good on election day.

“This is not just targeted at the state level,” Light said. “It’s targeted at the district level. From the very first day, no grant or program has been too trivial to ignore in terms of the political calculus.”

It’s not always the president who delivers the goods. Cabinet secretaries and agency heads often serve as surrogates. And more often than not, administration officials choose swing states for their announcements.

In March, Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta traveled to Huntington, W.Va., to award a grant for a new firehouse there.

His department recently announced small grants to 64 airports across the country, two-thirds of which are in closely contested states.

Mike Leavitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, visited an elementary school in Pennsylvania -- the state Bush has visited more than any other -- to announce that a local school district had won a $125,000 grant to refit school buses with emissions systems to lower pollution.

Last week, he was in Wisconsin and Michigan to promote the president’s $45-million plan to clean contaminants from the Great Lakes.

Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, describes the Great Lakes initiative as a perfect example of a Bush administration program with clear electoral import. Nearly all of the Great Lakes states -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota -- are considered electoral battlegrounds.

Clapp noted that $45 million is not a lot of money in a $2-trillion federal budget. But it was enough for the administration to arrange a public event and send a Cabinet secretary to beat the drums for it.

“The Bush administration would like to say that the environment is not a voting issue [nationally]. But they recognize that it is a voting issue on a regional level,” Clapp said.

Light said that the ability to concentrate federal funding in swing states was one of the great advantages of incumbency. And it doesn’t have to be a lot of money.

“I’m not sure most Americans can tell the difference between a $200,000 grant or a $2-million grant or a $20-million grant,” he said.

If so, that’s lucky for Bush, because he has less to hand out than some of his predecessors. President Clinton was famous for tossing sizable gifts to favored regions as he ran for reelection in 1996, but he presided over a booming economy and enjoyed a budget that was swinging into surplus.

By contrast, Bush’s combination of deep tax cuts and increased spending on defense and the war in Iraq has led to a record $450-billion deficit.

“He’s not able to dangle as much of these presents as previous presidents have done,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense.

As for promises like the Columbia River dredging, there’s no guarantee that Congress will approve it, noted Trinity Tomsic, who tracks federal spending for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“It’s just his funding request. He can [make promises] based on his proposed budget, but it’s not money the state is going to get unless Congress enacts it,” Tomsic said.