NO POLITICS AT WORK IN THE STIMULUS.

Yesterday on Washington Journal I fumbled a bit when asked about this article from USA Today that suggests Barack Obama's administration is favoring counties that supported him in the 2008 election with federal stimulus funds. USA Today is not a paper I usually read before 9 a.m., or really at all, so my strained comments were about how more people voted for Obama in general and Democratic areas tend to have public officials who aren't desperately trying to reject federal aid. However, the central insinuation of the article -- captured in the prominent placement of this quote from WH Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: "There's no politics at work when it comes to spending for the recovery" -- remained unrefuted.

Actually reading the article shows it to be fairly self-refuting, but before I could write a post explaining why the report isn't very useful or important, Conor Clarke beat me to it:

And about that factual content: The Heath piece basically says (1) counties that voted for Obama get more money than counties that voted for McCain; (2) pretty much all of this money "has followed a well-worn path ... guided by formulas that have been in place for decades and leave little room for manipulation." There is no theory presented for how the spending could have been manipulated.

The article concludes by noting that "From 2005 through 2007, the counties that later voted for Obama collected about 50% more government aid than those that supported McCain, according to spending reports from the U.S. Census Bureau." Yikes! Either that completely destroys the premise of the article, or this pro-Obama conspiracy runs far deeper than even USA Today can imagine...

Makes sense to me.

-- Tim Fernholz