Kingston canned

NO PRESIDENT has ever been elected because the electorate found him unpresidential. Movie stars do not earn their huge salaries by looking ordinary. So perhaps it should not be surprising that Jack Kingston this week lost his bid to chair the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Mr Kingston, a nine-term Republican from Savannah has been described approvingly by Mark Meckler, a spokesman for Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group for anti-tax “tea-party” organisations, as “not an appropriator”. What Mr Meckler meant was that Mr Kingston impressed him as someone who would trim the budget rather than use his position to dole out pork. What Mr Kingston's loss showed is that for all that tea-party energy, there is life in the old porkers yet.

At 55 and with 16 years of service on the Appropriations Committee, Mr Kingston was the junior candidate: Jerry Lewis, from California, is 76 and arrived in 1981; he chaired the committee from 2005 to 2007. Mr Kingston and Mr Lewis split endorsements from tea-party groups, with Mr Kingston garnering support from the Tea Party Patriots and Mr Lewis winning the endorsement of the Tea Party Express—and, in the best revolutionary tradition, the contempt of the other group. Mr Meckler called him “one of the kings of pork” and said it was “highly inappropriate that he would even be running for Appropriations”. In the end, they both lost: Harold Rogers, a 72-year-old Kentuckian who has served on the committee since 1983, will head it come January.

None of the three candidates were earmark virgins: before Mr Lewis signed on to the informal earmark ban earlier this year, he proved himself adroit at the practice, garnering $317m between 2008 and 2010. Mr Kingston's earmark total during that period topped $211m, while Harold Rogers—named an “Oinker of the Year” by Citizens Against Government Waste—garnered around $246m. Then they all got anti-spending religion, though perhaps none more zealously than Mr Kingston. Presenting his case to the Republican steering committee, which chooses committee chairmen, he vowed to “destroy the infrastructure of spending” by ending grants, emergency spending and duplicate programmes. He also encouraged co-ordination with conservative think-tanks such as Heritage, Cato and Americans for Tax Reform, better communication with voters, a cut in non-defence discretionary spending to 2008 levels and ultimately a reduction of federal spending to 18% of GDP.

If his anti-spending zeal endeared him to tea-partiers, it caused some jitters closer to home. Plans to dredge Savannah's port to accommodate the huge ships that pass through the Panama Canal have been in the works for 14 years. Since 2008 Savannah's harbour has received nearly $44m in earmarks; not all were sponsored by Mr Kingston, but some were. With Georgia's congressional delegation heavily Republican, and therefore in principle anti-earmark, getting federal funds for the harbour looks a bit more complicated.

Both Mr Kingston and Robert Morris, a spokesman for the Georgia Ports Authority, hoped funding would come directly from Barack Obama's next budget, thus avoiding the need to top up federal funds through earmarks. If that fails to happen, Savannians might want to look not toward their congressman but to their senior senator, Saxby Chambliss, who said at once that he supported the earmark ban but noted that “there are times when…issues come forth of such importance to Georgia, such as critical support to the port of Savannah, and the nation that I reserve the right to ask Congress and the president to approve funding.” In other words, earmarks are pork except when they're mine. More tea, anyone?