McCain campaigns as pork buster

Washington Times:

Sen. John McCain yesterday lashed out at fellow Republicans for wasting taxpayers' money, blaming last November's congressional losses on their failure to control federal spending and pledging to end pork-barrel politics if he is elected president.
The Arizona Republican, a longtime critic of congressional "earmarks" that set aside billions of tax dollars for projects in lawmakers' home districts, said Republicans had strayed far from the 1994 mandate that swept them to power on Capitol Hill and even further from the ideals set by President Reagan.
"When Republicans won a majority in Congress, we did so with the promise to restore to Americans their freedom and resources that had been wasted extravagantly, to mind our accounts as carefully as American families minded theirs, to govern less but govern better," the Republican candidate said in a speech to the Memphis Economic Forum.
"We forgot who we were: tightfisted stewards of the federal treasury who keep our priorities straight. We asked Americans to make us the governing party, and we rewarded them by becoming the party of government," he said.
Republicans paid a high price by straying from the ideals set out in the "Contract with America" by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
"I still believe our failure to control spending is what cost us the election, and it's costing us the confidence of the American people and mortgaging our children's futures. The fact that we did not restrain spending is a black mark on our party and our legacy for the future," Mr. McCain said afterward in answer to a question from The Washington Times.
Standing in front of a podium and reading his speech from a large screen more than 50 feet away, Mr. McCain ticked off the most egregious violations of pork-barrel spending as he ripped the Democrats' attempt to lard the emergency war-spending bill still deadlocked in Congress.
"They took the lid off the pork barrel and said to wavering members 'help yourself, there's plenty more where that came from.' They gave $7 million to research water quality on pig farms in Missouri, $24 million to sugar-beet farmers, $74 million for peanut storage, $95 million to dairy producers and nearly $400 million for highway projects, two years after we passed a $244 billion highway bill," he said.
As club members dined on sirloin strips, salad and fruit at the local Holiday Inn, Mr. McCain said that government spending adjusted for inflation has increased by $2,500 "for every man, woman and child in the country" since the days of Mr. Reagan.
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He is very compelling when he focuses on spending. The President and Tom Delay have defended spending before, but they have not been very convincing on the subject. I think one reason they have not been is because the spending was used as a tool to get discipline on things that were considered as more important. They were just more subtle than the Democrats were in their war "funding" legislation.