Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) lost in the primary after his opponent criticized his earmark spending. (Vivian Ronay/ZUMA Press)

During Utah’s bruising Republican Senate primary battle, challenger Mike Lee repeatedly attacked longtime incumbent Bob Bennett for his habit of requesting earmarks. But Lee also pledged to fight to keep NASA’s Constellation program — a big source of jobs in Utah — alive through congressional spending. Bennett tried in vain to point out the inconsistency of Lee’s statements, but to no avail. He lost his party’s nomination in June.

[Congress1] The cause for Bennett’s downfall was by no means limited to earmarks — his vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which bailed out Wall Street banks, arguably played a much bigger role — but it highlights the increasingly thorny political calculus around the longstanding practice of requesting federal funds for specific projects in one’s state or district. Earmarks represent a minuscule portion of the federal budget. But they are acting as potent weapons in political contests this midterm election season, given the widespread concern about the national debt and the yawning budget deficit.

For challengers, the issue is easy: Pick an earmark, describe it as a waste of taxpayer dollars and paint your opponent as fiscally irresponsible. For incumbents, choosing a response is difficult: Swear off the practice and risk appearing hypocritical for accepting prior funds, argue for specific projects but advocate loudly for reform or double down and brag about the benefits of earmarks.

Once considered as natural in politics as kissing babies, earmarks took increased political significance in the run up to the 2006 midterm elections. When a number of scandals involving Republican lawmakers and the beneficiaries of their congressionally directed funds came to light, Democrats seized upon them as a sign that Republicans were hopelessly corrupt. As a result, Democrats rode a wave of anti-corruption, anti-earmark fervor into office and quickly instituted a number of reforms to make the process more transparent.

In a year where the electorate has acquired — or at least politicians believe the electorate has acquired — a maniacal fascination with spending and deficits, however, earmarks have taken on another sense of importance: tangible signs of at times reckless and wasteful spending that politicians can single out in a time of painful belt-tightening for the electorate.

“The population is feeling really antsy for the first time about the deficit and the debt,” notes Steve Ellis, vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It’s hard to get your head around big entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, but it’s easy to talk about a million dollar boondoggle.”

Further amplifying politicians’ fears are the surprising number of incumbents known for being “big providers” for their home states — typically considered the safest kind — who have lost their primary races. Along with Sen. Bennett, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) was a longtime member on the Senate Appropriations committee and has since lost his primary election. In the House, Reps. Allan Mollohan (D-W.V) and Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.) also both sat on the Appropriations Committee — and lost their chance to represent their party this November as well.

All these politicians faced extenuating circumstances ranging from switching parties to the appearance of corruption, but together their fate is making candidates and pundits fear that bringing home the bacon isn’t the same proposition that is used to be.

“The point it that it isn’t a guarantee that it’ll help,” says Ellis. “It’s not as big a positive that people have often made it out to being. If earmarks equal votes, these people would be bulletproof at the ballot box.”

Both Republicans and Democrats in the House moved early to avoid the stigma, adopting measures among their caucus to voluntarily restrict or ban the use of earmarks for fiscal year 2011. Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) efforts to do something similar in the Senate have fallen flat, however, forcing candidates for the august body to chart out their own path on the issue.

One of the first Senate candidates to swear off earmarking was Rep. Paul Hodes (D-N.H), who recently pointed out the fact that he came out against the practice before his likely GOP challenger, former state attorney general Kelly Ayotte.

“The difficulty for Hodes is that he’s at a point where this whole question of who owns the fiscally conservative mantle [in New Hampshire] is really up for grabs right now,” notes Dante Scala, professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. After the Bush tax cuts, and the Obama stimulus, voters truly aren’t sure, and “he’s trying to say I’m not the typical Democrat. I’m different from that.”

Hodes denies that he stopped requesting earmarks as a political move. Rather, he describes it as the logical conclusion of a reformist who encountered Washington. “I’ve been in Washington long enough to see what’s broken, but not long enough to be contaminated,” he told MSNBC. But Ayotte, naturally, isn’t buying it, and has seized in a press release on his previous earmarks record as a “glaring example of [his] hypocrisy.”

In Pennsylvania, too, candidates face a changed electoral landscape from the one that elected Specter to five consecutive terms, partly on the basis of the infrastructure and health funding he faithfully channeled to the state. “‘I have the experience, the seniority, I’ve delivered for the state.’ There are nine out of ten elections in which that works. There’s one election in which it wont,” says G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College, referring to the present midterm election cycle.

Independent voters living in the suburbs — many of whom voted for Obama but now fret about deficits — are the key demographic both Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) and former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) are fighting over, notes Madonna, and the earmarks issue is “part of the larger mosaic in which Republicans will try to tie [Sestak] to debt and deficits.”

As a result, Sestak is attempting to walk a fine line, pushing legislation for all earmarks to be scrapped in favor of a system of competitive grants, but in the meantime still advocating for projects in his district.

“Joe is not going to take away the opportunity for projects to help people in his district when there really isn’t the mechanism for funding them otherwise,” says Jonathon Dworkin, his campaign spokesperson. “And as he’s working to change the system to remove political influence, he’ll work [within it] in as transparent a way as possible.”

It hasn’t stopped Toomey, however, from challenging Sestak to sign a pledge to not accept earmarks and arriving on Independence Mall in downtown Philadelphia with a small pig to make the announcement.

“I also want to welcome Porky,” he told the crowd. “Everyone can say hello to Porky, who symbolizes waste that we see in Washington all the time. If he were life size, in that sense, of course there wouldn’t be enough room in Philadelphia for him.”

The backlash against earmarks has at times burned Republicans, as well, however — like Rep. Roy Blunt in Missouri. Running for the open senate seat now held by Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), he’s had to be accommodating to the legendary Missourian’s way of doing things.

“Earmarks have been a tried-and-true method of congressmen serving their constituents as long as the republic has been around and Bond has been really good about making sure central Missouri is getting its slice of the pie,” says L. Marvin Overby, professor of political at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “That makes it difficult for Republicans running in the state, because he is the icon among Republican politics here… so someone like Blunt trying to take his place has to tread carefully around that legacy.”

Indeed, Blunt has stuck largely to the same path regarding earmarks as Bond, refusing to repudiate his own record or Bond’s on the issue, and he’s drawn heat from Tea Party groups and Democrats alike as as result. Blunt edged out a number of tea party candidates who challenged him on the issue in the primary, but he now faces Democrat and Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, who made a pledge to ban earmarks a central part of her campaign.

“Congressman Blunt has long supported the wasteful earmarking process and, during his tenure in Washington, earmarks have increased seven-fold from just 1,596 earmarks in 1997 to nearly 12,000 in 2008 and costing taxpayers over $228 billion,” Carnahan charged recently. “It is time for Washington politicians like Congressman Blunt to put fiscal responsibility before their pet projects.”

But then there are states like Nevada, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is too entrenched in Democratic leadership and the state’s political machinery to do anything but double down on the issue of earmarks — and brag about it.

“Reid made a comment in which he said something like, ‘It’s not because I’m special, but because of where I’m at, I can do things for Nevada that a new senator cannot. As a political scientist I’m like ‘Yeah, you’re right,’” says Eric Herzik, chair of the political science department at the University of Nevada-Reno.

Reid’s challenger, tea party favorite Sharron Angle, has vowed to not request earmarks for Nevada and pillories him for the practice, but she also often attacks Reid for not doing enough for Nevadans in the same breath.

By all accounts, it’s a bad year to be known for one’s appropriations, but that doesn’t mean the reputation can’t still hold sway among voters, especially in small states with a big chip on their shoulders.

“I think the Nevada electorate is far more accepting of the earmark process because we’re a small state that’s often ignored and here we have a guy who can deliver for us,” says Herzik. “Three states that are historically very accepting of the [earmark] process are West Virginia, Nevada, and Alaska. When you have a senior senator who delivers, often the anti-earmark rhetoric is less successful.”

More than a dozen Republican lawmakers, while denouncing the stimulus to the media and their constituents, privately sent letters to just one of the federal government’s many agencies seeking stimulus money for home-state pork projects.

The letters to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, expose the gulf between lawmakers’ public criticism of the overall stimulus package and their private lobbying for projects close to home.

Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), for example, sought more than $50 million for two projects in his state, the Times found. Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) also blasted the stimulus bill as wasteful, yet two days before voting against it, Bennett “privately forwarded to [USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack] a list of projects seeking stimulus money,” the Times notes.

“I believe the addition of federal funds to these projects would maximize the stimulative effect of these projects on the local economy,” he [Bennett] wrote.

Still another vocal stimulus opponent, Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson (R-S.C.), was also busy lobbying for pork, the Times discovered, even as he was accusing the Democrats of promoting the “same old, tired big spending agenda.” A Wilson spokeswoman defended the discrepancy, telling the Times that the lawmaker “opposed the stimulus as a ‘misguided spending bill,’ but once it passed, he wanted to make sure South Carolina residents ‘receive their share of the pie.’”

Some government watchdogs had a different take.

“It’s not illegal to talk out of both sides of your mouth, but it does seem to be a level of dishonesty troubling to the American public,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

In the process, he made few friends among critics of pork-barrel spending — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington deemed him recently to be among the top 20 most corrupt lawmakers on the Hill — but Murtha was unabashed. Indeed, he once called the Democrats’ push for ethics reform “total crap,” and he used to brag that his middle initial stood for “power.” But of course, for the residents of blue-collar Johnstown — Murtha’s hometown and a former steel mecca-turned-shell of itself — he was a godsend whose reputation no scandal or ethics lapse could tarnish.

A decorated veteran of Vietnam, Murtha’s voice carried a great deal of weight on issues related to Iraq and Afghanistan, most notably his undiluted 2005 endorsement of pulling troops out of Iraq.

“The war in Iraq is not going as advertised,” he said in November 2005. “It’s a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of the members of Congress.”

As The Hill’s Roxana Tiron points out today, “Murtha also questioned the new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and would have been a pivotal voice in the congressional debate over the issue this spring.”

More immediately, Murtha’s death opens up the chairmanship of the defense funding panel, leaving Rep. Norman Dicks (D-Wash.) — the third-ranking Democrat on the larger Appropriations Committee — next in line for the coveted spot. Indeed, although the decision is ultimately in the hands of Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.), Dicks’ office is already predicting that the 17-term Washingtonian will snag the seat.

“He likely will succeed Murtha,” George Behan, chief of staff for Dicks, told the Seattle Times today.

And that’s good news for Seattle-based Boeing.

That’s certainly been the case in the Senate’s health care reform bill, where it wasn’t just the moderate holdouts who successfully secured enormous earmarks for their states. Here’s the emerging list:

(1) Ben Nelson (D-Neb.): Making a joke of the earlier claim that his vote is “not for sale,” the Nebraska Democrat won three huge concessions for his state in the Senate bill: $100 million in extra Medicaid funds; an annual fee exemption for some Nebraska-based insurance companies; and another carve-out exempting some physician-owned hospitals in the state from new restrictions.

(2) Mary Landrieu (D-La.): Senate leaders secured her support with $300 million in new Medicaid funding for Louisiana.

(3) Max Baucus (D-Mont.): The Finance Committee chairman has long fought for federal funding surrounding an asbestos mine in Libby, Mont., The New York Times pointed out over the weekend. The health reform bill, most of which Baucus and his staff wrote, fulfilled his wish, including a provision to expand Medicare coverage to victims living near the mine.

(4) Bill Nelson (D-Fla.): Representing a state chock-full of seniors, the Florida Democrat has been concerned about the proposed cuts to the Medicare Advantage program, under which the government pays private insurers to cover Medicare beneficiaries. The result? Three counties in south Florida are exempt from the cuts.

(5) Chris Dodd (D-Conn.): Many senators have been scratching their heads in recent days trying to figure out who would benefit from a $100 million provision to build a new university-affiliated hospital. Turns out that Dodd, who ushered the health reform bill through the Senate HELP Committee in the absence of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), is eyeing the funding for UConn.

(6) Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) : The Vermont Independent had threatened to oppose the bill if it lacked a strong public insurance option. Instead, Senate leaders agreed to Sanders’ request for additional money for community health centers ($10 billion more, to be exact). Vermont was also among the handful of states to win extra federal Medicaid funding.

This, of course, is nothing new. As David Axlerod told CNN’s “State of the Union” over the weekend, “Every senator uses whatever leverage they have to help their states. That’s the way it has been. That’s the way it will always be.”

Although Smithfield is still denying that its hogs could possibly have been the source of the virus, I came across this illuminating document from the Center for Disease Control that details just how hazardous such Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, known as CAFOs, are — and why they’re tightly regulated in the United States.

U.S. regulations “require CAFOs to carry a permit and to develop nutrient-management plans designed to keep animal waste from contaminating surface water and groundwater,” according to the CDC.

I don’t know if Mexico has comparable regulations, but according to Mexico’s La Jornada (quoted by David Kirby in The Huffington Post):

Clouds of flies emanate from the lagoons where Granjas Carroll discharges the fecal waste from its hog barns – as well as air pollution that has already caused an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town.

If this is the case, it sure doesn’t sound like strict health or environmental rules there are being enforced.

According to the CDC:

People who work with livestock may develop adverse health effects, including chronic and acute respiratory illnesses and musculoskeletal injuries, and may be exposed to infections that travel from animals to humans. Residents in areas surrounding CAFOs report nuisances, such as odor and flies. In studies of CAFOs, CDC has shown that chemical and infectious compounds from swine and poultry waste are able to migrate into soil and water near CAFOs.

Plus, “manure-related discharges at CAFOs include … pathogens, such as parasites, bacteria, and viruses, which can cause disease in animals and humans.”

The World Health Organization confirms that “Humans usually contract swine influenza from infected pigs…”  And even though Smithfield says its pigs aren’t sick, the swine can be asymptomatic, yet still be carriers of the virus (pdf).

Of course, this doesn’t prove that the swine flu came from the Granjas Carroll hog farms — a subsidiary of Smithfield — in La Gloria, Mexico. (The WHO has sent experts down to Mexico to investigate the potential link.) But it does seem to call into question the claims of the Mexican pig farming industry that “pigs are not the cause of the flu that is affecting the country. It must remain clear that the flu problem is caused neither by the proximity to swine operations nor by the consumption of pork meat or pork products.”

The pork industry, worried about declining sales, has asked the WHO to change the name of the disease so as to protect the industry’s reputation; the health organization, however, insisting that the disease does come from pigs, has declined.

For a more detailed account of the development of this story and its latest twists and turns, check out Tom Philpott’s excellent reporting at Grist.

“We passed our list onto the leadership, and they passed it on to CNN,” said Coburn spokesman John Hart. “That’s fine by us. There’s a real hunger for information out there.”

Coburn is a friend of the president, with whom he sponsored the 2006 transparency bill that launched the spending-tracking site USAspending.gov. But in previous Congresses, he’d been something of a pariah among Republicans. That’s clearly changed as the GOP confronts the new Democratic president.

In 1991, McCain was embroiled in the The Keating Five Scandal, in which he and four other senators were implicated in a corruption investigation connected to the Savings & Loan crisis. Though McCain was cleared of wrongdoing in August, he was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising poor judgment for meeting with federal regulators on behalf of one of his major fund-raisers, Charles Keating Jr., the chairman of Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. Keating would spend four and a half years in prison for fraud and racketeering following the bank’s failure.

Facing re-election the following year, McCain sought to salvage his damaged reputation by re-branding himself as a champion of government reform and a foe of wasteful spending. According to the article from The Arizona Republic dated June 14, 1991, McCain joined with two other senators and nine House members June 13 to introduce legislation to rescind more than $1 billion in funding for 325 federal pork-barrel projects in the 1991 budget that had not yet been spent.

“Listen, my friends, the system is broke, and this is the way to start fixing it,” McCain announced at a news conference. “There may be legitimate projects on this list, but I assure you, they are the exception and not the rule.”

According to the article, within hours of the news conference, McCain’s press secretary, Scott Celley, announced three Arizona projects on the list “could be ‘justified’ and ‘would pass muster’ if they went through the traditional process of hearings.”

In an interview, McCain said, “I’m not criticizing the projects, I’m criticizing the process. You can make a big-deal story about John McCain opposing three Arizona projects. I’m sure it will make good copy.”

There was just one problem. McCain had circumvented the “traditional process of hearings” to secure the funding for one of the Arizona pork projects he was now criticizing, and supported the other two.

Among the projects that made McCain’s “pork list” were the construction of a forestry-science center at Northern Arizona University, the expansion of a border-crossing station at Mariposa, 10 miles west of Nogales, and the paving of a road in the Black Mesa area of the Hopi Indian Reservation, which for generations has been at the center of a land dispute between the Hopis and Navajos.

The projects were called pork because they were not subject to hearings, were awarded without competitive bidding, or were of purely local interest and not of national importance, among other reasons.

“The funds for the dubious local projects were ‘snuck through’ the normal budget process,” a McCain news release said.

However, McCain, along with Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, wrote a letter in July 1990 to Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., chairman of an Appropriations subcommittee that oversees transportation funds, specifically asking for $5.5 million for the Black Mesa road…

The project was given $4.7 million, apparently through actions by Lautenberg outside the normal legislative process.

“It seems pretty weird ,” said Bob Maynes, press secretary for Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., who is increasingly at odds with McCain. “I just don’t understand it. He (McCain) appears to have done exactly what he is criticizing.”

The article also notes that Celley, McCain’s press secretary, said McCain had supported the NAU forestry center, but pointed to $4.5 million appropriated for its construction from the Federal Buildings Fund, as pork. Celley said McCain also supported the $10.6 million expansion of the Mariposa border-crossing station.

McCain said he didn’t know what the Arizona projects were and said he would not comment on their merits.

“I have no comment, because I do not know if they are good or bad or indifferent,” McCain said. “They might be the most good and valuable project that all civilization rests on, I don’t know, but if they did not go through the correct process, then I think they are wrong.”

According to the article, this was apparently not the first time McCain had gone around the normal legislative process to fund pet projects.

Celley admitted that McCain has worked in the past to push appropriations through in whatever manner was necessary.

“We have worked for them (appropriations),” he said. “Letters were written about these projects, and the senator may have talked with people to work their way through.”

A June 15, 1991 editorial from The Republic recounted the episode, lambasting McCain’s hypocrisy.

While Mr. McCain spoke [at the news conference], a news release from his office thundered that “the funds for the dubious local projects were ‘snuck through’ the normal budget process.” In other words, these boondoggles had bypassed public hearings, the preferred practice for all 535 members when it comes to funding home-district projects that cannot stand on their own merits.

Much to his discomfort, Mr. McCain subsequently learned from a reporter that three Arizona projects were to be found on the diabolical list. In fact, Mr. McCain himself had sought funding for one of them, $4.7 million for the Turquoise Trail road, which would link Navajo and Hopi Indian communities.

“Oh, my God, is there three?” a chagrined Mr. McCain sputtered. “Oh…really? Is there really three in there?…I’m just shocked.”

Later on, the senator averred that what was really at issue was the “process,” not the projects themselves, although in the earlier news release he described the projects as “dubious.” Finally, Mr. McCain even back-pedaled on whether they actually had “snuck through” the process.

Had Mr. McCain attacked the process and even singled out those three Arizona projects as examples of extravagant spending, he could have made an important point. Instead, he was left defending his pet projects while criticizing everyone else’s pork-barreling. And that is precisely why Congress cannot get spending under control.

Even on McCain’s signature issue — his supposed career-long opposition to pork — he is not telling the truth.

First, is the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska. Second, is a $3-million study of grizzly bear DNA in Montana. When he mentions the latter, he often jokes, “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or a criminal issue.” What he doesn’t say is that he  voted for the 2003 omnibus appropriations bill that contained this earmark.

The McCain campaign has sought to portray Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain’s pork-fighting ” soul mate” — an image that seems to grow shakier by the day. It is now well-documented that she was an ardent supporter of the “Bridge to Nowhere” before she was against it.

Now, Politico’s Ben Smith has found an ironic item in Palin’s nearly $200-million worth of earmark requests from earlier this year: millions of dollars to study harbor seal DNA:

Some on Alaska’s list are the kind of uncontroversial projects that make most earmarks hard to cut — even if it’s difficult to see their importance to the nation, rather than the state: construction of Alaska National Guard facilities, for instance, to stop drug abuse, and to improve a crime database.

Many others, though, are of exactly the sort that McCain has made a career of mocking—like animal research.

“We’re not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana,” McCain has said during this year’s campaign, referring to a study he’s mocked for years of whether grizzlies need to keep their status as an endangered species.

Palin, meanwhile, has requested $3.2 million to be spent in part researching the “genetics of harbor seals,” in one of the state’s many requests for federal funding of research into Alaska’s fauna.

Big deal. Everybody knows grizzly bear DNA is basically useless –but harbor seal DNA! That has literally millions of practical applications.

In case the irony is lost on you, TPM dug up an old McCain campaign ad that drives it home:

At some point, a rational person would have to assume McCain might be forced to explain how his campaign can continue to push the “Palin-as-earmark-foe” meme when her past actions are so at odds with McCain’s — as well as her own — rhetoric.

But the McCain campaign finds itself in a tight spot: it has already settled into the narrative it wants to drive between now and November — McCain and Palin are a team of maverick reformers — but opponents have a mountain of ammunition to challenge that narrative, with more seeming to emerge daily.

McCain can’t — or won’t — come out and admit that the image it projects is a sham. All he can do is pretend the ammunition doesn’t exist and hope regular people who don’t follow the news as closely as, say, reporters and political junkies, don’t notice.

This is clearly the strategy, as demonstrated by the fact that Palin continues to claim that she said “thanks, but no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere,” after news outlets have been steadily reporting this is false for more than a week now.

The big question is: Will voters punish McCain for being dishonest?