It's Not The Earmark, It's The Lying

But here’s the thing. Even if Palin did initially accept the money [for the bridge], I have a hard time blaming her.  As the Governor of Alaska, her job was to spend Alaska’s taxpayer dollars responsibly, not federal tax dollars.  I have no problem with a state governor taking any money Congress wants to throw their way.  I do have a problem with Congress giving money away stupidly. ~Amber Bryer-Wotte

That’s almost beside the point in this case.  The two people most preoccupied with casting blame in connection with earmarks are McCain and Palin (they were just using this to needle Obama the other day), and they have opted for some reason to make her into an anti-earmark crusader as proof of her “reform” credentials.  The GOP candidates are the ones who want to make the earmark “game” a central issue of the campaign, while simultaneously pretending that the fresh outsider member of the ticket had nothing to do with said “game.”  To that end, they have repeatedly made false and misleading statements about her actual record on the bridge and her willingness to accept earmarked funds.  If Palin was simply taking advantage of a broken system, there’s not much reason to be outraged by that, but there is good reason to take issue with her decision to engage in a pattern of deceiving the public about her record, which she has clearly done in the hopes that her past obscurity will shield her from being held to account for making false claims.  More to the point, once you strip away the hostility to earmarks Palin’s “reform” credentials become pretty thin, and the more it becomes apparent that adding Palin to the ticket really was as much of a P.R. stunt as the critics said it was. 

For my part, I think the Republican preoccupation with earmark reform reveals a truly bizarre view of what is wrong with the federal government and how its dysfunction might best be fixed, as if pork-barrel spending were the main problem with Republican governance over the last decade.  Still, this is the field where McCain and Palin have chosen to fight, and this is what they are choosing to lie about, so it seems fair that they pay some political price for that.