We’ve fielded a bunch of questions of late about just who’s paying the expenses for the Bamboozlepalooza Tour. And the question is raised again now by the fact that the administration has set up a Bamboozlepalooza website. (I kid you not.) In case you didn’t know, it’s strengtheningsocialsecurity.gov. Take a look. After all, you paid for it.
Now, about that question of who pays for this stuff …
Certainly, as the government has expanded onto the Internet, it is taken as a given (and rightly so, I think) that office-holders in different branches of government will use their government websites to advocate their views. The folks on the Hill on the both sides of the aisle do it. The White House website certainly presses the White House’s case. At the same time, there are strict rules about those sites not being used in political — or more specifically, electoral — campaigns.
It seems to me that there is some question about whether the White House can or should be able to set up a site for its own propaganda using a .gov extension. But that doesn’t seem to me to be the issue most worthy of discussion.
What about the Bamboozlepalooza Tour itself? Who pays? Yes, no doubt, presidents can go on tours of the country pressing their legislative agenda. You can go back to the ill-fated example of Woodrow Wilson to find precedents for that.
It is also true that presidents and cabinet secretaries make all sorts of appearances before private organizations where the public is not allowed or appearances where attendance is restricted on various bases. It is even true that tickets for presidential events are often doled out (under both parties) as a sort of minor patronage for local political supporters and bigwigs. And no one would deny that a White House can take practical steps to manage attendence at presidential events.
But it has become quite clear in this case — almost old-hat, you might say — that all the events the president is holding on Bamboozlepalooza are restricted to people who support his agenda. Sometimes disagree-ers (or should we call them dissidents?) slip through. But the White House takes affirmative and fairly successful steps to exclude those who are not supporters.
We got used to this during the campaign. But that’s different: Campaigns are private organizations. They have their own money. They can do pretty much what they want in this regard and are only limited by the constraints of public ridicule.
Taken altogether, though, something seems qualitatively different to me about what’s happening here — specifically, the nexus of taxpayer funding and ideological litmus tests for inclusion. Nobody would imagine that the president would or could restrict public White House tours to political supporters. Yet here the administration has undertaken what is quite publicly a taxpayer-funded public advocacy campaign. And yet only those who pass a political test are allowed to attend.
I know we all sort of already know that. But if it doesn’t violate a law (and perhaps it does), it should certainly violate public sensibilities more than it seems to be and provoke more than mere eye-rolling. Along with phony-baloney news, doctored government statistics and paid-off pundits, it is yet another sign — if now, admittedly, only on the margins — of the Pravdafication of civic discourse under this administration.
