Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege and often financial aid that an organization or individual bestows to another. In some countries the term is used to describe political patronage, which is the use of state resources to reward individuals for their electoral support.
Since Congress passed President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill in February, administration officials have traveled to at least 66 events across the country to tout the massive spending program or hand out stimulus cash to grateful local officials.
But a POLITICO examination of the travel reveals a distinctly political trend line: Top officials have hosted events predominantly in states that Obama won in 2008.
What’s more, the examination revealed that Obama officials all but avoided Southern states that Obama lost.
What should not surprise anyone anymore is the notion that porkulus had anything to do with actually creating (or the Administration’s favored fallback term “saving”) jobs. Enough time has elapsed so that the numbers reveal what we’ve been saying all along: this was about political payback and jumpstarting the Great Society II and nothing else.
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