Bush Should Just Put Taxpayer Money in Bee’s Warchest

There has been much clamor over Bush’s visit to Tucson to host a fund-raiser for Senator Bee’s Congressional bid. Most commentary on the blogs has focused on Bee’s political tone-deafness in associating so closely with a deeply divisive and unpopular President, with Bush’s secretiveness during the visit, and about how the disruption and inconvenience caused by the visit of a President isn’t counterbalanced by a public appearance. Those are all valid and useful points.

Missing from this commentary, however, is that Bush’s visit uses far more public resources to raise money for Bee than Bee’s campaign will ever see. It would be more efficient if Bush simply wrote a check to Bee from the Federal treasury – and more honest. Every single dollar raised by the President’s visit will be matched by at least three dollars taken from the public treasury to pay for Bush’s visit.

The movement of a modern President is a logistical feat of enormous expense and complexity. All of it is paid for by the taxpayers. So when the President sets out on a campaign mission like this one, he generally schedules a minor public function so that all that expense can be justified. In this case, the awarding of the President’s Volunteer Service Award to Green Valley retiree Mary Frances Ward seems to be the pretexual "official" action justifying all the expense. Don’t you think Mary Frances Ward and her family would have been just as pleased to have been flown to DC first class, put up for a week at the Four Seasons, and escorted into the White House for a presentation ceremony? It would have been a lot less expensive for taxpayers than bringing the President here, but then, of course, she couldn’t have been used to conveniently justify the President’s campaign junket for Bee.

Keep in mind that simply moving the President’s retinue and equipment takes several planes and scores of personnel. The GAO estimated that just flying Air Force One costs over 50K per hour. (PDF) If it’s a six hour flight from DC to Tucson (being generous), the Office of the President has already plunked down over 300K to fly out to raise 100K for Bee. You can see that once you throw in the return trip, staff time, overtime, additional travel to and from the fund-raiser site, and the cost to Tucsonans for all the inconvenience of clearing the way for the safe movement of our Executive, we’d be much better off if Bush had just wrote a check.

If we are going to have our Executive playing rich uncle to politicians in the provinces, shouldn’t we be more honest about it, and at least benefit from a straight up accounting of how much this patronage is costing taxpayers? Instead of sticking the taxpayers for the costs of a thinly-veiled imperial progress to "fund-raise" for the local yokels, let’s just give the President a some public money to spread around to his political cronies like Bee.