GOP Senate hopeful Jamie Radtke gets a bit of digital ink over at National Review Online’s “The Corner.” It’s not the most revealing of interviews – I’m partial to the one my colleague Scott Lee did with her back in March – though it does show that she is positioning herself to be the most fiscally hawkish candidate in the race.
But there was a throw-away line in the piece that will send some sectors of the GOP base into a snit:
Finally, Radtke, who reminds voters that her family’s military service reaches back to the Revolutionary War, spies “savings in the defense budget.”
It’s just a sentence, and a vague one at that. Savings in the defense budget? Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been pushing that line for a while now, going so far as to ruffle the feathers of just about every member of Virginia’s congressional delegation when he proposed shutting down the Joint Forces Command in Hampton Roads.
Even House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) has embraced Gates’ suggested cuts in his “radical” budget plan (which, depending upon your point of view may not cut much of anything).
But the idea of even illusory cutbacks in defense spending is anathema to a portion of the GOP base. That’s particularly so in Virginia, where Republicans make a great noise about federalism and fighting against Uncle Sam’s meddling in matters ranging from health insurance to light bulbs…but get positively indignant when someone threatens defense spending (and the jobs that come with it).
If Radtke is on board with Ryan, then she’s on board with a $78 billion reduction (real or not) and that puts her in good national company.
But I would hope that, as she prefers a more aggressive approach on entitlements than does Rep. Ryan, she would side with George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux, who wrote in one of his famous letters to the editor that even the president’s more aggressive $400 billion reduction (over 12 years) is peanuts:
Pres. Obama’s proposed “cut” amounts to being a proposal only to prevent the Pentagon from getting automatic increases in its baseline budget (although it will still get increases to adjust for inflation).
For those who are particularly enamored of defense spending, any cut represents a threat to civilization itself – or at least someone’s “phony baloney” job.
And that’s especially true in Virginia, where the establishment ire against the federal meddlers stops once government guns are added to the equation.
