If anything is conspicuously absent from the document, it is the word “earmarks.” There is no doubt that the conservative crusade against earmarks is often more symbolic than substantive—earmarks are hardly at the core of our budget woes. But symbols matter, and for many voters, earmarks are a symbol of the corruption of our system of government. Republicans already took a no earmark pledge this past year. Some Republican members, particularly those on the appropriations committee, would rather not take another one, and the party’s leaders have been wobbly on the subject in recent weeks. They should straighten up, and make it very clear to voters that if Republicans win the majority, there will be no earmarks. That’s almost certain to be the case whatever the leadership wants—a massive new class of members elected for the first time this year is very likely to make sure of it. Why not make it clear in advance that this is where Republicans stand? ~Yuval Levin

Levin is proposing that the GOP take an uninspired “let’s go back to 2007” message and augment it with the Republican obsession with earmarks from 2008. What makes this worse than the usual anti-earmark rallying cry is that Levin understands perfectly well that earmarks are irrelevant to the government’s fiscal problems. He knows that a ban on earmarks would address none of the long-term liabilities that the “Pledge” document also avoids discussing. It is one step removed from promising spending reductions by targeting “fraud, waste and abuse.”

He says that earmarks are a “symbol of the corruption of our system of government,” but this isn’t true. Arguably, earmarks are one of the few things done by members of Congress that have something to do with serving members’ constituencies. Symbols of the corruption of our system of government abound from the TARP to Medicare Part D to the Iraq war, all of which most of the current Republican leadership in Congress supported. If they want to make symbolic gestures, it might be more useful if they acknowledged and repudiated those colossal errors.

Levin has managed to take a document roundly mocked as milquetoast from the right and fiscally disastrous from everywhere else and found a way to make it that much more easily ridiculed.