GREENWOOD COMMONWEALTH: McDaniel short on specifics
Chris McDaniel had an opportunity to speak truth to power Friday about government spending. But he wouldn’t say if he did it.
McDaniel is considered by many impartial observers to be the favorite in the June 24 Republican runoff against six-term U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, although Cochran has shown more fight since the first primary’s nearly dead heat and may be shifting the momentum.
McDaniel, a tea party favorite, is a fierce critic of excessive government spending. He was in Cleveland Friday to speak to Delta farmers — who just happen to be large recipients of federal farm subsidies and crop insurance — and later made a stop in Greenwood.
Hundreds of millions of dollars a year are being paid to landowners in the Delta, and up to $30 billion a year paid by the government to farm interests nationwide.
So this would seem the perfect topic for a professed budget cutter such as McDaniel to address — that is, to be honest with the people who are being asked to believe he has a better way for agriculture than what Cochran has been instrumental in fashioning during his long tenure in Congress.
But McDaniel wouldn’t discuss the issue publicly on Friday.
He met with reporters after his session with farmers and said he told them that he would make sure that Mississippi farmers get “everything they need” to be successful, and that Mississippi agriculture would be able to grow along with other industries in the state.
When reporters asked if he meant growth without farm subsidies, McDaniel declined to say anything else. “I’ve answered the question,” he said.
In fact, everyone knows he didn’t answer it. Either he told the Delta farmers that he’d watch their backs with subsidies if he gets to Washington, or that they would be among many groups that must sacrifice to get federal spending under control.
Whatever he told the farmers in private, he chose not to reveal the details. Instead, he spoke in vague generalities without describing how to do things differently from the way they’re done now.
That sounds pitifully like the same old political blah-blah-blah that McDaniel has criticized. It should make voters wonder.
McDaniel talks a good game about reining in an out-of-control Washington, but when confronted about what that might mean for Mississippi, where more than three federal dollars are returned for every tax dollar sent there, he either backtracks or dodges the question.
Early in the campaign, the challenger questioned the tens of billions of dollars that Cochran helped secure for the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, but now McDaniel pronounces disaster relief a legitimate function of the federal government. He talks about there being nothing in the Constitution to justify federal involvement in education, then when confronted with the data of the billions of dollars that Washington provides to Mississippi’s kindergartens through graduate schools, he backs away and says he just wants to do away with the U.S. Department of Education, not the flow of money. Now it’s farm subsidies that he’s foggy about, apparently thinking he may need some Delta votes after all to win next Tuesday.
There is an argument that can be made against farm subsidies. We’ve heard at least one local farmer make it: namely, that the government, by picking winners and losers on commodities, hamstrings free-market forces and props up inefficient producers.
If McDaniel won’t even say that much publicly, how much backbone does he really have?
Greenwood Commonwealth
6/17/14
Magnolia Tribune
