BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
President Obama is expected to spend a record-breaking $1 billion on his re-election campaign. That’s a lot of money, but there’s more. There are super PACS and interest groups and party organizations, all of which will spend added millions on his re-election.
There’s another pot of money, however, that should be added to the total–the growing amount of tax dollars being used to fund trips and functions that are classified by the White House as “official government business” but are in reality, purely partisan campaign events.
Speaker John Boehner finally spoke up last week, calling the President’s whirlwind taxpayer funded tour of college campuses “pathetic” and “beneath the dignity” of the White House. The President went to colleges in three battleground states, at taxpayers’ expense, presumably to rally support for a problem that was pretty much solved before Air Force One left the ground.
The college town tour was just one of many diversions of taxpayer funds to the campaign. It’s been going on for nine months, and it’s getting worse.
I wrote in January: “There is nothing new in what the President and his staff are doing. The distinctions between President and candidate have always been blurred and the role of the White House versus the campaign, confusing… But with each succeeding President, the distinctions are lost or ignored more frequently (and with greater arrogance and righteous indignation) and at greater cost to the taxpayers.”
Since then, the Obama White House has lowered the bar farther.
The judgments on what constitutes an official function and what constitutes a campaign function need to be challenged (regrettably, the Republican National Committee stepped in where it didn’t belong and called for a General Accountability Office (GAO) investigation when the responsibility for making judgments about the use and abuse of tax dollars belongs with Congress).
The President has been campaigning at break-neck speed since July of 2011 when the “grand bargain” budget talks broke down and both the White House and many on the Hill concluded that any major agreements between Republicans and Democrats thereafter were highly improbable, so, to hell with trying to govern.
The White House went on a taxpayer-financed campaign binge, unchallenged by the media, who should have been keeping a careful accounting and asking questions all along.
Late last year and early this year, the President took a trip to Kansas to call up the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt. He then abused his access to speeches before joint sessions of Congress with a campaign rally on job creation. He went to Detroit to rib Mitt Romney on the auto industry bailout and went all the way to New Mexico for a 30-minute campaign photo-op at an oilrig to tout his false claim that he is responsible for increased oil production in the U.S. He traveled to Florida for campaign appearances and an “official business” speech on the Buffett scheme for taxing the rich. He spent taxpayer dollars putting on a thinly disguised campaign event he called a women’s conference—in the White House, no less –and most recently, jetted off to the campaign battleground states of Iowa, Colorado and North Carolina for his student loan rallies. The President has even cutback on bill signing ceremonies to reinforce his ‘victims and villains’ campaign theme of blaming others for the nation’s ills, especially Congress.
These circus events must cost the taxpayers millions, but we don’t know how many millions because no one is really auditing the books. Think about it, each trip on Air Force One costs $179,000 an hour, according to press reports. Trip to North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado, what—8 hours there and back?
Cha-ching: $1.4 million.
Add to that Secret Service Protection, communications, and other staff support and, to paraphrase the late Senator Everett Dirksen, a million here and a million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Add this to the balance sheet: According to the Daily Caller, “President Obama, his immediate aides and his cabinet secretaries have used taxpayer dollars to woo young voters at more than 130 universities,” one third of them in swing states, between March of last year and March of this year. Cha-ching.
Acknowledging that the lines between governing and campaigning are grey most of the time, the media and interest groups can apply a simple test to each event or trip. Create a mental table with two columns, one public policy and one campaign strategy. List under each column the respective benefits of the trip. If the advantages under campaign exceed those under public policy, then it qualifies initially for further review as a campaign event that ought not to generate an invoice to the taxpayers.
Example: The Buffett rule and student loan rallies produced little in the way of a public policy benefit. The Buffett rule was dead on arrival in the Senate before the President began to really champion it and there was already bipartisan agreement on extending the student loan rates. The issue wasn’t extension, but how to pay for it.
Both the Buffett rule and the student loan issues, however, had high campaign value, speaking to the President’s basic campaign messages of fairness and educational opportunity. The speeches were before audiences Obama the candidate is going to need to win re-election and they generated serious and favorable media coverage in key campaign states, exactly what political handlers strive for, a lot of what is called “earned” Media to boost Presidential popularity numbers.
The President isn’t the only abuser. Republican and Democratic members of congress, governors and other elected officials make highly questionable calculations as well about what is partisan and what is policy.
More to the point, the issue stretches well beyond campaign spending abuses. The problem is bigger and more profound.
The abuses speak to a disturbing trend in our political process of blurring or simply eliminating the lines between campaigning and governing. With each passing congressional session and presidential term, more excuses are made for suspending the process of governing in favor of the Quixotic quest for ever–more partisan supremacy.
This irrational notion adhered to by both major parties and both dominant ideologies that the country will be better off if only one were in complete and permanent control of the apparatus of government is patently absurd when partisan advantage takes total precedence over governing. One-party rule is not what our Founding Fathers envisioned at all. Some of them didn’t like parties and thought they had no business being intertwined in the machinations of governing in the first place.
Perpetual campaigns and the bitter partisanship that such quests engender are destroying the vital cells of our body politic–an active and engaged and informed electorate, a responsible media, and public servants capable of and committed to fulfilling a public agenda rather than just framing it. Political campaigns are supposed to contribute to the process of governing not consume it, but they have done the latter, like a cancer.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.