One Man’s Pork Is Another’s Reelection

At this stage in an election year, two distinct strategies reveal themselves: the politics of getting elected and the politics of getting reelected.

Rep. Frank Riggs, a Republican from the state’s northernmost congressional district, is presently in reelection mode. He wants his constituents to know how hard he has worked for them during the past two years.

What better way to show how much he cares than pointing to the pile of federal appropriations he has corralled in Washington to finance a veterans hospital, a university agriculture building and the dredging of Humboldt Harbor near Eureka?

All told, these and other projects are worth nearly $35 million to Riggs’ 1st Congressional District, which stretches along the Pacific Coast from the Oregon line south to the wine country northwest of San Francisco.

This is what delivering for the home folks is all about, even though such projects often fall into the category of good ol’ pork barrel spending.

The only trouble with this record of success is that Riggs two years ago ran as a convert to the GOP’s Contract With America, which called for fiscal prudence, a balanced budget and an end to the Democrats’ wasteful ways with the federal purse, particularly those porcine expenditures.

But that was when he was in his get-elected mode. Now the circumstances--the final months of a tight race against an energetic Democratic challenger--have changed. Riggs, too, has shifted gears.

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Hypocrisy? No way, says Riggs. Just doing his job.

“I campaigned on a ‘jobs first’ platform,” Riggs says. “In a rural district such as ours we have to maintain our economic base, which does depend on federal funding, at least in part. But I am willing to walk my talk as a fiscal conservative and deficit hawk. I don’t think there is any contradiction whatsoever.”

Riggs is not alone in facing this dilemma. The Republican wave that took over Congress in 1994--if it was about any one thing--was about changing the way Congress does business. But banish pork? It’s one of the things that Congress is really good at.

Speaker Newt Gingrich earlier this year, in a now-famous memo to House appropriations subcommittee chairmen, asked them to consider how their respective bills would benefit or hurt incumbent Republicans, particularly those in worrisome contests such as Riggs’ and Brian Bilbray’s down the coast in San Diego. In that memo, Gingrich also baldly called on appropriators to keep California’s mother lode of 54 electoral votes in the forefront of their minds as they carved up the money pie.

For instance, when the $3-million Humboldt Harbor project in Eureka, where Riggs and local officials foresee a new commercial shipping center, failed to appear in the energy-water appropriations bill, Gingrich instructed the chairman to include it, despite a policy against such unauthorized projects.

It’s not just in California where the pork is being pushed. The Gingrich memo and election jitters helped spark a surge of similar requests for incumbents nationwide. The swift reversion to business as usual left the high-minded sentiments of the budget-cutters ringing hollow.

“The reason that some Republican freshmen are subject to a good deal of criticism now is that they made such a big deal about the need to cut pork and thereby balance the budget when they first came in,” says Thomas E. Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution.

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Riggs’ Democrat challenger, Michela Alioto, finds her Republican opponent’s flaunting of homebound federal money as nothing more than election-year desperation.

“All of a sudden, right before an election, he starts talking about a hospital at Travis Air Force Base and a transportation hub in Humboldt. This from a man who claimed two years ago that his priority was balancing the budget. He’s gone way off target in the last few weeks . . . because he feels he won’t win this race unless he gives the people something. It’s like a payoff.”

But, obviously, Alioto, the wheelchair-bound granddaughter of former San Francisco Mayor Joe Alioto, is in her own get-elected mode. She must attack Riggs for actions she would sorely be tempted to replicate if she beats him and goes to Washington to scour funds for Northern California.

“What bothers me about it is not what he is trying to do . . . so much as how he is going about doing it,” she says. In other words, it’s tough reading the headlines about Riggs’ latest gift from Capitol Hill when you are trying to get his job.

But the persistent squealing about pork tends to obfuscate its role in the budget-balancing melodrama. Discretionary spending is only 36% of the federal budget, capped by spending limits.

Pork-barreling merely moves an existing pot of money around somewhat differently, guiding it to specific locations rather than leaving it to the discretion of the executive branch.

Partially to dampen the pork barrel reflex, Congress gave the president the power of the line-item veto, which kicks in next year. But no one can predict how that new budgetary tool will be wielded--or even if the historic shift of power is constitutional.

“The public has been buffaloed into believing that we can deal with our fiscal problems by getting rid of all this shocking waste, fraud, and abuse,” says Mann. “It has been quite destructive of efforts to deal honestly and responsibly with our fiscal problems.”

Given the fact that the Republicans hyped this issue beyond any recognition of the underlying budget reality, he says, it’s only fair that in the scramble to ingratiate themselves with a surly electorate that they be called on it.

But eradicating pork as we know it? Don’t bet the farm.