RE: The New Pork

...and quite hypocritical for a man like Reagan, who was supposedly above that sort of thing, right?

It would appear the answer is that Strother doesn't read the B.S. he posts. Is that supposed to be a good thing?

This article is a jumbled up piece of crap. While I have no problem with the premise, the way it goes about demonstrating it is something out of a failed seventh grade social studies paper.

First, Strother is keying off of (and crowing about) this line:

Each of these four presidents issued the largest number of disaster declarations of their administrations in the year they ran for re-election.

One of those four being Reagan. However the author neglected to point out that the high number of disaster declarations during the Reagan Administration, which was indeed in 1984, was lower than the number issued during two of the four years of the Carter Administration.

Since he obviously didn't read the article, Strother failed to notice this little gem:

The seven presidential administrations from Dwight Eisenhower through Reagan refused an average of 35 percent of all disaster-declaration requests they received.

The article points out that disaster declarations were made for events most of use would consider silly, like freezing rain, but Strother failed to notice that this didn't begin until the Clinton Administration. Strother also failed to notice that the serious dollar outlays, which would be the basis for a claim of "pork," didn't begin until 1989.

If the article wanted to make a point, rather than just demagoguery, it should have included information on the actual disasters declared. It tries to stretch its thesis by including Reagan in the mix, although it fails to produce anything quantitatively or qualitatively damning. It failed to take the obvious path and point out that the trend really began with Nixon, but then that would have introduced two downsides for the author: it would have skewered Carter and it would have shown that Reagan sharply reversed the trend. Instead, the author chose to stretch his thesis to transparency on the subject of Reagan. But if he hadn't done so, liberal, partisan Democrats like Strother would have nothing to crow about after skimming the article.