Posted on 05/14/2005 5:19:42 AM PDT by MikeJ75
U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman looked crestfallen, and he didn't want to talk about blue states.
“I don't want to think that there was any politics in this,” Connecticut's junior senator said Friday, minutes after he and other state officials told a crowd of reporters at a press conference in New London what they already knew: Groton's Naval Submarine Base was on the list.
While Democratic-leaning Connecticut would take a huge hit if the Groton base is closed by the Pentagon, as was recommended Friday morning, Lieberman and the rest of the congressional delegation said they did not think it was partisan retribution for this small northeastern state's tendency to vote Democratic in Republican times.
“We discussed that issue this morning,” said Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2nd District. “We have no reason to believe that this is a red state-blue state issue.”
But the Pentagon's plan to close 33 major military installations will hammer the blue states — those that voted for Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election — with job losses, and none more so than Connecticut, which stands to lose more than 8,500 military jobs, the highest loss for any state in the nation.
While red states like Texas and Georgia would see some vital military bases close, experts said, it is the blue states like Connecticut and California that would lose the most jobs.
And while Simmons and Lieberman agreed that political deal-making had not determined the recommendations, they were gearing up for what will be an inherently political challenge: trying to lobby the sub base off the list.
The state's congressional delegation, along with Gov. M. Jodi Rell and the leaders of the state legislature, pledged to do everything in their power to persuade the Base Realignment and Closure Commission to reverse the Department of Defense's recommendation, beginning with an examination of the evidence the department relied upon in deciding to close down the base.
•••
Rell, Lieberman and Simmons, along with their counterparts from the legislature, looked stunned Friday morning at a press conference at the Radisson Hotel, but by the afternoon they were in action, with Simmons rolling from interview to interview decrying what he called a “terrible decision,” and Rell headed to Hartford to plan for next week, when she will meet with the full congressional delegation to plan the state's lobbying efforts.
Simmons' staff was planning to work through the weekend, said his chief of staff and spokesman Todd Mitchell, as they analyze the data the Pentagon used, preparing to counter the recommendation at the BRAC hearings that begin next week.
“I think now the important part is not to hang your head or cry in your soup,” Mitchell said in a telephone interview. “The Pentagon's part is over. Now, we have to immediately turn the wheel and turn toward the BRAC commission and work that group very, very hard and convince them that it's a bad decision.”
Mitchell also dismissed the suggestion that politics had guided Groton's placement on the list, saying he thought the Pentagon was more concerned with its overall plans for streamlining the military than focused on rewarding or punishing individual states.
The White House, Simmons said, “has specifically been excluded from the process up to this point in time. That's why we believe the results in this particular instance are based on flawed data (not politics).”
Some political observers said the list seemed to bear that out, as many states that had voted overwhelmingly for Bush and the Republican Party stand to lose military facilities if the current list is approved by the president and Congress.
“In looking at the list, it looks like every region is taking a hit,” said Darrell West, a professor of political science at Brown University. An attempt to find a pattern of closings aligned along the red state/blue state divide would likely be in vain, he said.
Heavily Democratic Rhode Island, for instance, where West said experts had been concerned about losing facilities, would see two installations close but the state would gain more than 500 military jobs.
“We actually made out very well,” said Stephen Hourahan, a spokesman for Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a Republican who has frequently bucked his party on key votes, to the consternation of leaders.
Meanwhile, Hourahan pointed out, South Dakota lost the Ellsworth Air Force base, despite being the home state of Sen. John Thune, a conservative Republican who unseated House Minority Leader Thomas Daschle last year after entering the race at the bidding of the White House.
“In John Thune's case, he ran against Daschle on the basis of being able to save Ellsworth,” Hourahan said, “and he lost it. It's closed.”
But others said Republican-leaning states stood to fair far better than their counterparts in avoiding job losses.
“I expected some (political) bias but not something this much,” said Jeff Ladewig, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut.
Ladewig Friday analyzed shifts in military and civilian personnel in response to the list of potential closings. In his study, he discovered the net gain of jobs leaned primarily toward states who voted Republican during the 2004 presidential election.
Those states will gain 11,863 jobs, he said, while blue states stand to lose 24,979.
Out of the top 12 states slated to gain jobs, only one — Maryland, which is at the top of the list and stands to gain 9,293 jobs — voted for Kerry.
Texas was third for net gain in the study, with 6,150 potential new positions. Connecticut, on the other hand, finished dead last with a net loss of 8,586 jobs.
Ladewig attributed Connecticut's poor showing in the base-closing debate to the sheer size of the sub base. More than four-fifths of the jobs to be lost are located there, he said.
•••
The future of the sub base is all important in the 2nd District, where Simmons has staked out an identity as a pragmatic, socially moderate Republican uniquely positioned to protect the state's defense industry and save the base. His campaign commercials in 2004 featured shots of him shaking hands with military veterans and workers at the Groton-based sub manufacturer Electric Boat.
On the eve of Election Day, Simmons invited Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to campaign with him outside the base's main gate, where Hunter promised to write to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to ask that the base be kept open.
Now, Simmons and his staff are ready for an all-out lobbying effort to get Groton off the list, which was well underway Friday morning, as both the congressman and Lieberman invoked the attacks on Pearl Harbor and global terrorism in criticizing the Pentagon decision.
“We've got to make our case” to the nine-person BRAC panel, said Mitchell. “That's now the task at hand. You focus on these nine members, and they're going to be hearing from Rob Simmons a lot between now and November.”
They had early support from Hunter, who said he would continue to back Connecticut's efforts.
“You simply have to make the case to the commission, and the case needs to be based on military value,” Hunter said. “That's a case that Rob needs to make, and I'll be standing there with him.”
But the scramble to save the installation, a process that met success when the Pentagon threatened to close the base in 1993, may have a less than positive effect during the present cycle.
“I think this there's a good chance this will stick,” West, the Brown professor, said of the sub base's closing, “just because there are limited options for members of Congress to stop the base closings. They could reject the whole list, but they don't vote on (the closings of) individual bases.”
For Simmons, and his colleagues, the stakes are high.
“It's his district, so the biggest weight will fall on him,” Ladewig said.
Are military recruiters allowed in the high schools and on college campuses in these states? If not, why should there be bases in states that don't support the military? The US military is not a jobs program. Let the blue states keep sucking up the welfare programs and keep the military in places that support them.
These whinny pissant liberals are trying to grasp at ANYTHING for their survival!
Article States, "“I expected some (political) bias but not something this much,” said Jeff Ladewig, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut."
Any political news article that ends up quoting a college professor (from Connecticut - no less) fails to pass the "anti-bias smell test." If this was about Clinton closing down bases in Republican states, the same professor would have insisted that studies indicated these were the bases that were old or no longer had a purpose.
I know for a fact that recruiters were not allowed in the 60's. One day I skipped school and played pool where a recruiter got to me in (Conn). I ended with a 30 year career, no thanks to the state, teachers and the liberal system. The schools that had high school ROTC got their first promotion right out of basic training and we had to wait, because our liberal states wouldn't allow these kind of programs. I said goodbye to New England at age 18, and haven't moved back.
I live in Mississippi, a red state, and FOUR of our military installations are on the list.
Democrats claiming victimization. Whoda thunk it?
In Michigan, a blue state, 4 military installations are also on the list. I see balance.
"In Michigan, a blue state, 4 military installations are also on the list. I see balance."
Exactly.
Yesterday the talking heads acted like they understood the significance of the moves and let it go with a "the bases will be consolidated and relocated in other areas". That's really cool but (rhetorically) how are they going to relocate Groton to Kansas?
I always thought that our subs pretty much got what they wanted/needed when they wanted/needed it.
I was stationed at Groton for 3 years. It is a major sub-training location. Honestly, I don't see how they could move it. Granted, all the sub training is don on-shore, but Kansas seems like a stretch. There are other facilities along both coasts that could take the slack, though.
Trying to figure out why government does what it does sometimes can lead to insanity, IMO. ;)
Agreed, closing Portsmouth is long overdue. The whole area is lousy with Blue-types. However, it is unfortunate that mASS. wasn't harder hit. From what I heard reported in the news yesterday, while they closed some facilities Kennedy-Kerry-Frank-land ends up with a net gain in jobs. I guess Bush wanted to protect his Kennedy buddy. On the other hand, maybe he wanted to give some cover to Gov. Romney - the mASS. political Eunoch!
1. It is time to get politics BACK into the decision-making on base closures.
2. We are at war and that is a strange time to be slashing bases or anything military.
3. Did I hear correctly that this fiasco is going to save a big $48 billion OVER 10 years (possibly offset by the associated expenses????) in an era that starts with $2.7 trillion annual budgets????? Gicve the boy a penny!
4. Insignificant as are the microscopic savings in the context of the fedbudget, the savings will devstate the host communities.
5. As most college and university campuses are sites for the development of leftist cancers in their host communities (Oh, isn't he being MEAN! Colleges bring us culture (!!!!) and music (that no one would be caught dead supporting in the free market place so e have to be taxed to extertain our cancerous elites) and drama (see last parentheses, and teach-ins and lots of folks with too much time on their hands and too little ability to detect truth, so military bases and installations tend to move a community in the, ummmm, right direction. Give me the chance and I will kill $4.8 billion a year in useless fedsubsidies to a few thousand Karl Marx Snobocracy Universities before breakfast each morning for the next month and then go to work on the rest of the bloated fedbudget's socialist schemes (you know, $100 million for a one year-study of the sex life of marble statues, $10 million for Alexander Calder to hang together and paint orange three tons of steel pipes and girders into some sort of phallic imagery that he calls art and stick it in public spaces where we cannot even ignore his rustpiles, Anfre Serrano's "Piss Christ", the anal photography of the late and unlamented Robert Mapplethorpe, National Public Radio/all of it, National Public Television/all of it including Barney the brain dead non-competitive dinosaur, et al.).
6. Create a National Endowment for the Preservation and Increase of Military Bases and Military Jobs and Military Hardware and for the vigorous use of those bases and personnel whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. Call it something traditional---the department of WAR.
7. Today (in wartime, no less) we spend about $400 billion per year on the military (allegedly) including vast sums for impact aid to local public miseducation districts in the vicinity of bases. The budget is about $2.7 trillion. We now spend a bit more than 15% of our budget on matters military which are among the few constitutional expenditures of the Leviathan federal government. Reality Check: John F. Kennedy's last budget spent SIXTY PER CENT OF ITS EXPENDITURES on military and he was scrapping battleships in progress (llinois and Kentucky): $60 billion of $100 billion. As Casey Stengel used to say, you could look it up.
8. Let's compromise. Return the fedbudget to a mere $1 trillion, spend 50% on the military, cut taxes accordingly, create a ten-year plan for social service closings instead of base closings and get back in the business of being America.
9. Pull out of GATT and WTO and raise tariff barriers.
10. AND, oh yes, DO NOT CLOSE THE UNITED STATES SUBMARINE BASE at Groton, Connecticut or Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. The sub base is the only remaining outpost of America in Connecticut, is vital to our national security in that it is the ultimate veto over Islamofascism or any other enemy of the USA, is sacred land/water, and if it is ever nuked only Rhode Island suffers from fallout. Let Lieberman "save" the sub base in exchange for ten votes to be cast first (Constitutional option, judges, Bolton, etc.). If John Thune got elected over Daschle on the promise of saving Ellsworth Air Force Base (has anyone in DC noticed the razor thin-magins in South Dakota elections to the House and Senate?????), by darn, Ellsworth Air Force must be saved and a point should be made of persuading South Dakota that Senator Timothy Johnson and that Socialistfem Congresscritter Hirseth had absolutely NADA to do with the save but that Thune and Governor Mounds made ALL THE DIFFERENCE in spite of them.
11. Feel free to suggest additional "political" options but the sub base and Ellsworth are non-negotiable. I would like to see a chemical warfare testing ground and base established at Hyannis Port and another in Cambridge.
Please Freepmail me if you want on or off my infrequent Connecticut ping list.
We should have no more bases than necessary for the defense of our nation. The point of the military is, after all, to provide defense, not jobs or make-work in certain communities. I don't know all the pros and cons of Groton versus Norfolk, but do we really need both?
we all talked about this being possible when I was working at Subase. They poured millions and millions of dollars into that base in the last 5 years to show that it was valuable.
It's sad, Simmons is a good guy and a ton better than the commie we got rid of
And if the recruiters are limited and restircted in the blue states - they can't staff the facilities in those states - the facilities close!!!
Rather simple math.
Our government is generally bloated beyond the imagination of mere humans. It is going to be a very big and long task to trim it down to constitutional size. The cuts should hit the military last. I also have no problem letting South Dakota know what a wise choice they made in electing John Thune, letting the likes of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and Lincoln Chafee and Arlen Spector and Chuck Hegel and George Voinovich know what happens if they defect on the constitutional option (not explicitly but let them worry), and, similarly, let Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and the Arkansas Democrat Senators see that there may be a relationship between the constitutional option and the fate of programs in their states. Those who pose for holy pictures wanting "to take the politics out of" whatever, are saying,giovernment decisions are nione of the public's business.
We need to bring Uzis to the Constitutional Option knife fight. We need to stand behind the military 1000%.
I did look it up. Both the Illinois and Kentucky were sold for scrap in 1958, JFK had nothing to do with either.
Bttt! Well said!
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