McCain vs. Griz
Wildlife conservation rarely becomes an issue in presidential campaigns, but in the run-up to the November 2008 election, one politician has repeatedly invoked that great American, Ursus arctos horribilis, in his stump speeches and other public appearances. As recently as his nationally televised August 16 audience with evangelical superstar Rick Warren at Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, California, Republican candidate John McCain offered a now-familiar soundbite denouncing a federal expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana. “Now I don’t know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue,” McCain always ruefully adds, as he did at Saddleback. “But the point is, it was $3 million of your money. It was your money, and you know, we laugh about it, but we cry, and we should cry, because the Congress is supposed to be careful stewards of your tax dollars.”
Actually, we should cry because John McCain continues to inaccurately and dishonestly smear the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project (the grizzly population study in question), as an example of frivolous pork-barrel spending, when in fact, it is an example of prudent, cost-effective research whose findings are essential to properly manage the law of the land—in this case, the Endangered Species Act of 1973—and the species recovery plan that the law mandates. Sadly, McCain’s laugh lines are a dishonorable parroting of the Bush/Cheney administration’s war on science and a warning that its ignoble betrayal of the Teddy Roosevelt heritage of patriotic conservation will endure in a McCain White House.
McCain, should, and must, know better. It’s impossible to find a single source, anywhere, who is willing to back up McCain’s argument. Meanwhile, the Washington Post, Scientific American, Factcheck.org, the New York Times, the London Independent, and Time magazine, among others, have looked into McCain’s bear charges and have found them to be without merit. (Joel Achenbach’s WaPo reporting is especially devastating in documenting the thrifty elegance of scientist Katherine Kendall’s research, and shredding McCain’s cheap shots.) A McCain campaign commercial which also scorns the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project as an “unbelievable” ripoff cites as its chief source a Montana Outdoors article that carefully outlines why the research is significant and important. Not even McCain’s own Senate staff is willing to defend their boss’s bear-DNA riff. “Senator McCain does not question the merits of these projects,” an aide told the Post’s Achenbach. “It’s the process that he has a problem with.”
So is it fair to tell a little white lie about sound and prudent wildlife science in the service of a greater truth? Sorry. Sen. McCain has been deploring this particular “waste of money” as part of his effort to curb the growth of congressional budget earmarks and make the appropriations process more transparent. The New Republic’s Jon Chait recently did to McCain’s earmarks math what a hungry griz does when it get its claws around a fat marmot.
Photograph of a grizzly in Yellowstone National Park by mannyh808 / Flickr / Creative Commons
