At what point did the McCain campaign decide that earmarks — seriously, earmarks — are the single most important issue in the campaign? ~Steve Benen

I can’t give an exact date, but at least as far as domestic policy is concerned I believe it must have been in March or April 2007, or at least no more than a few weeks after McCain’s announcement of his candidacy.  By the fall of 2007 one of his favorite shots at the Democrats was his line (“I was tied up at the time”) about the earmark for a museum in Woodstock that Clinton had supported.  Throughout the primaries McCain’s main line of criticism against the GOP was that it had engaged in too much wasteful spending, by which he meant spending earmarked for various pork projects, and for most of 2008 the issue for McCain, as well as the House minority leadership and many Republican pundits, has been reforming earmarks.  One reason for this preoccupation has been the utterly mistaken impression that the 2006 midterms were a punishment for the GOP’s excessive use of earmarks.  (To his credit, the head of the NRCC, Tom Cole, has acknowledged that earmarks had nothing to do with the defeat in ’06.)  Naturally, having made this practically the centerpiece of his domestic agenda (before drilling became the obsession), he chose a soul running mate reputed for her acceptance of earmarks that McCain himself considered wasteful.  Of course, it is a testament to the establishment nature of the GOP leadership and of McCain himself that something as insiderish and obscure to most voters as earmarks has acquired such centrality in the Republican presidential campaign.  Nothing says that the GOP has been in power too long better than its insistence that its main failing was attaching too many pork projects to its legislation.

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