Oh those liberals at The Heritage Foundation! It turns out McCain is only exaggerating by roughly 1000%. First, here's what McCain said:

John McCain boasts that he can save $100 billion a year "immediately" by eliminating the so-called earmarks that legislators attach to spending bills to finance pet projects, usually in their home state. But he has refused to say exactly which projects he would cut, and his estimates of the amount of money that is being spent on earmarks have been challenged by independent experts.

Now, here's what Bruce Riedl of The Heritage Foundation said (same article):

Bruce Riedl, a budget analyst with the Heritage Foundation, says it might be possible to eliminate roughly half the expenditure on earmarks every year, i.e. around $9 billion, using the Taxpayers for Commonsense figures. He identified $5 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds, most of which goes to local governments, as a prime target for cuts. Even if earmarks were eliminated altogether, many other expenditures would have to be shifted to other parts of the budget.

Like other analysts, Riedl was mystified by McCain's argument that previous year's earmarks automatically become a "permanent part of the budget." "I don't understand how they come up with that," he told me.

Excluding those programs McCain has promised to preserve, the draconian slashing of earmark expenditures might save around $10 billion a year. But that is still a long way from the $100 billion in savings that McCain says that he can identify "immediately."

So once again, like with "Iran training Al Qaeda or "having no conflicts of interest" on his staff, McCain has once again been forced to back off of a false statement (same article):

The McCain camp now says that the senator never meant to suggest that his proposed $100 billion in savings would all come from earmarks. Holtz-Eakin told me that McCain had simply promised to cut overall spending by around $100 billion. Some of these savings will come from earmarks, some from other parts of the budget. He declined to identify which specific projects would be cut.

Asked whether McCain had misspoke or whether he had been misunderstood in his focus on eliminating earmarks, Holtz-Eakin replied: "a bit of both."

One more thing, from my book The Real McCain, from well-respected former longtime Senate staffer Winslow Wheeler, who challenged McCain on his failure to live up to his rhetoric on trying to eliminate pork, and paid for it with his job (McCain smeared him and got him fired):

This kind of talk was too much for at least one man. Wins-low Wheeler spent thirty-one years working for Senate mem-bers and at the General Accounting Office (GAO). Still a reg-istered Republican, he worked in the Senate for one Democ-rat, former Arkansas Senator David Pryor, and three Republi-cans, all belonging to the traditional center-right wing of the party: the late Senator Jacob Javits of New York, former Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas, and Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico.

Wheeler isn’t exactly someone you’d expect to launch a withering critique of fellow Republicans. But he did, and it raised the ire of a certain senator from Arizona, who helped end Wheeler’s career in the Senate.

Wheeler had long noticed McCain’s tough talk on pork-barrel spending. In fact, cutting pork from spending bills is one of the planks McCain is running on in 2008 — an effort to appeal to conservatives tired of the free-spending Bush years as well as to display his supposed credentials as a “reformer.” But Wheeler hadn’t noticed much in the way of action from McCain. In 2002 he published a short book, under the pseu-donym Spartacus, called Mr. Smith Is Dead: No One Stands in the Way as Congress Lards Post-–September 11 Defense Bills with Pork. His purpose was to give McCain “a kick in the ass.”16

One of Wheeler’s anecdotes is particularly telling. When Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was pushing for a $26 billion Boeing 767 lease that made no economic or strategic sense, McCain and Phil Gramm offered an amendment to thwart it. But according to Wheeler, here’s what really happened.

McCain included a cauterization of it in his “pork buster” speech: he called the operating lease “a sweet deal for the Boeing Company that I’m sure is the envy of corporate lobbyists from one end of K Street to the other.” He was supported by Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, who said, “I do not think I have even seen a proposal that makes less sense economically and I have been here for 22 years.” Given the strong rhetoric, one would expect some strong action, right?

Not exactly. McCain and Gramm did offer an amendment to modify the 767 deal. Stevens accepted it without debate. He was smart to do so. As he explained to Gramm and McCain, the terms of the amendment changed nothing, and he would accept it for that reason. The amendment was pure cosmetics, but now McCain and Gramm could claim they did something.

Shortly after this charade, the Senate passed the bill and sent it to conference with the House to conform the two bodies’ different versions into one.17

McCain’s response? He got Wheeler fired. According to Wheeler (and a second source who wished to remain anony-mous), McCain went to Wheeler’s boss, Senator Pete Domenici, as well as other top-ranking Republican staffers, to argue that Wheeler could not be trusted. McCain made it clear, according to Wheeler, that he would be angry if Wheeler were not fired. Problem solved. McCain didn’t change his behavior to match his rhetoric — he just got rid of the guy who was willing to call him on it.

After Wheeler and I had discussed these circumstances at some length, he ended our conversation by saying in a fore-boding voice, “It’s frightening to think of a man with his tem-perament with all the things a President has at his fingertips — the IRS, CIA, FBI. . . .18

Say hello to The Real McCain.