Fun With Earmarks

Thursday night, Jim DeMint forced a vote in the Senate, looking for a one-year moratorium on earmarks. However noble it may have been, only twenty-nine Senators voted in favor. Obama, McCain, and Clinton all voted yea. The peerless Dick Durbin voted nay. But this post isn't about him, it's about Obama getting tripped up in his own stupidity yet again (see previous post).

Because in the same week that he voted for that one-year moratorium, it emerges that in 2006 he requested a $1 million earmark for the University of Chicago hospital. Where his wife just happened to be Vice President of Community Affairs, a position created especially for her. [Jim Geraghty adds a spicy detail about this that makes following that link worthwhile, and a hat-tip to the HotAir folks for bringing it to my attention in the first place.] You have to wonder - did the conversation occur over dinner? "Honey, can you pass the salt and, you know, get a million in federal dollars for the hospital?" "Sure Michelle, and dinner's delicious." Elsewhere? I won't speculate.

So given that Obama = Change, one might expect him to recant and say that he shouldn't have requested the earmark in the first place. Instead, in that same Tribune interview, he says that he should have asked Dick Durbin to get the money instead. Imagine that conversation. "Dick, Michelle's asking me to, you know, steer federal funds to her employer. It looks bad, so can you do me a favor and get it?"

Apologies in advance for the weakness of what I'm about to say: given the old line about a million here and a million there suddenly being real money in Washington, one wonders whether a "paltry" million is the sort of change Obama stands for. Weak sauce. Feel free to hate.