ASHINGTON - A grant to spur tourism in the Mississippi Delta. Grants for community-based technology centers in three states. A local loan fund for small businesses. A grant to promote e-commerce in low-income communities. And much, much more.
It turns out that the prince of pork for the year 2000 isn't a committee chairman or an appropriations baron. It's the vice president of the United States.
Heaping helpings
Al Gore is campaigning like Johnny Appleseed, and the seed money is yours, because as he campaigns around the country, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is leaving more than confetti and bumper stickers behind. He's leaving grants, loans, loan guarantees - and new federal jobs.
Vice presidents have a natural advantage in running for the top job, but seldom has a campaigning second-in-command been so eager a distributor of largesse as Gore. In one day alone last month, the vice president announced 10 pork projects before the sun even set. They included assistance to small businesses, computer kiosks for local universities to display federal job opportunities, and grants for employment training and job placement centers in four states (all of them key battlegrounds for November).
Earlier this spring he allocated $825 million in safe-drinking-water grants expected to be distributed this year (more than a tenth of it going to California, which provides precisely one-fifth the number of electoral votes required to win the White House). During the days leading to the round of Southern primaries, Gore canceled a town meeting in Macon, Ga., and flew (at taxpayers' expense) to Camilla, Ga., to tour areas devastated by a tornado - and to deliver federal disaster relief.
Political pork is not exactly a new concept; candidates who haven't even been elected yet have been known to serve up a helping or two. Shortly after being named Senator John F. Kennedy's running mate in 1960, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson took a train trip through the South. ''And so, my friends,'' he said in a small Virginia town, ''I ask you, what did Richard Nixon ever do for Culpeper?''
Johnson in time would do a lot, porkwise, for Culpeper and a lot of other places. His vision of a Great Society, outlined four years later after he became president, included massive infusions of federal funds for education, roads and bridges, and public-assistance programs. Indeed, at his remarks outlining the Great Society five months before the 1964 election, Johnson talked about housing, environmental and educational proposals - all plans, the president said, ''to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.''
Johnson's remarks underline the soft underbelly of pork. It's not always intended to poison the national diet. LBJ's programs, much criticized at the time and later, grew out of a desire to use federal money to change the country, to smooth out its rough edges, to soften the harshness of life. Just last week, former House speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, speaking to a conference of scientists, gave a conservative's defense of government spending, noting that federal money can also be spent to advance causes embraced on the right.
Gorepork
Most of the slices of Gorepork the vice president has been slinging about in his travels around the country grow directly out of administration efforts to invest in regions of economic distress. The money was appropriated by Congress, which is controlled by Republicans. But one of the benefits of holding executive office is that Gore gets to hand it out.
Though GOP strategists professed shock when informed of the extent the vice president is providing home delivery of sliced pork, all these projects were funded with money provided by George W. Bush's allies on Capitol Hill. The political frustration facing the GOP is that the Republicans' presidential hopeful doesn't get to deliver even one sewer grant.
The precise amount of Gorepork is difficult to determine, especially since the vice president isn't above announcing grants that have already been delivered. Last fall, for example, Gore flew into New England and announced $5 million in emergency aid for the region's beleaguered fishermen. That was good politics right before the New Hampshire primary, but it sure surprised the fishermen and New England lawmakers, who had announced the grant 11 months earlier.
Some of the Gorepork is undeniably new, however. A prime example: a program, designed to help farmers protect their lands while improving water quality, which Gore announced this spring. The cost: as much as $168 million in federal funds. The target for the money: Ohio. A special dividend for the vice president: a state with 21 electoral votes being heavily contested by both Gore and Bush.
