Defense focus of campaign

With U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, National Guard units being called up for war and the state’s biggest employer struggling to secure a major new military contract, the two top candidates for Washington’s Senate seat have plenty to discuss regarding defense.

But that’s not what Democratic incumbent Patty Murray and Republican challenger George Nethercutt have been arguing about in recent weeks as they question each other’s stands on defense.

Nethercutt, a 10-year-member of the House of Representatives, is pointing to a handful of votes Murray cast in the mid-1990s to say she’s weak on defense.

Murray, a 12-year Senate veteran, is countering that Nethercutt is a rubber stamp for the Bush administration and the conservative Republicans who have controlled the House for the last decade, and complaining that he’s soft on domestic security.

Nethercutt started the who-voted-for-what comparison in his recent speeches that officially kicked off the campaign he’s been running for months.

“I can’t think of an issue on which Patty Murray and I disagree more sharply than the defense of our country,” the Spokane Republican said in a speech to a hometown crowd.

It’s true that they voted differently on one of the biggest defense issues of the last two years, a resolution to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. But that wasn’t the distinction Nethercutt was emphasizing. Instead, he insisted she regularly voted to cut defense while he worked to spend more on it.

Murray and Nethercutt essentially have the same record on defense spending, countered Alex Glass, a spokeswoman for the Murray campaign.

That’s a lie, contended Alex Conant, Nethercutt’s campaign spokesman, and quickly produced a congressional record that showed Murray voted no on the final defense appropriations proposal for fiscal 1996.

An examination of the voting records, and the defense budget debate more than eight years past, shows both campaigns can find a way to prove they’re right.

Most budget bills have multiple votes, and in 1995 Murray voted yes on the Senate version of the Pentagon’s $242.7 billion budget for 1996 while Nethercutt voted yes on the House version, which came in at $244 billion. The two bills went to a conference committee, and the compromise bill, worth $243.2 billion, went to the House, which rejected it when social conservatives balked at provisions to allow privately funded abortions at overseas military hospitals. Nethercutt, however, voted for the bill.

More than two months later, House and Senate negotiators agreed to some restrictions on abortions at overseas military hospitals, and the bill passed both houses. Nethercutt again voted yes; Murray voted no. So did several Republicans, including Arizona’s John McCain, noted Glass.

“The bill became a major test case on this very symbolic abortion thing,” said Pat Towell, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who in 1996 covered defense matters for Congressional Quarterly.

Glass contends Murray’s vote had nothing to do with abortion and in her floor speech against the final compromise, she didn’t mention it. Instead she said the bill went far beyond President Clinton’s budget at a time when federal programs for schools, health care and veterans were being forced to take cuts. It had $700 million for a new Seawolf submarine and hundreds of millions for other programs that the Pentagon hadn’t requested, she said.

“At the very least, Congress should hold defense spending to the president’s level until the Pentagon can … bring some accountability to the system. We owe that much to the nation’s taxpayers,” she said.

The Senate bill Murray had supported a few years earlier was, however, larger than Clinton’s request and also had that same $700 million for a Seawolf submarine and an extra $465 million for new fighter planes the Air Force hadn’t requested.

The vote on the final version of the fiscal 1996 defense budget is one of the few points of difference on military spending between Murray and Nethercutt during the 10 years they’ve both been in Congress. That’s no surprise, say analysts of all political persuasions who follow defense issues. The major spending bills almost always have strong bipartisan support and members of Congress sometimes vote no on a bill they know will pass to make a point on a more narrow issue.

Analyst John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World, a Washington, D.C., based organization which monitors defense issues, finds it odd that the Nethercutt campaign would bring up Murray’s 1995 vote now.

“Issues like how someone voted 10 years ago on a defense bill don’t matter one whit now,” said Isaacs, who added that his organization has endorsed Murray in the past and is doing it again this year. “To vote against a bill because of a protest of one issue doesn’t mean you’re against the entire bill.”

The council, which supports arms control and reductions of nuclear weapons, rated Murray as voting for its key issues 75 percent of the time in its most recent survey, while Nethercutt rated a 0.

Analyst Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative defense organization in Washington, D.C., agreed that budget votes really aren’t the best indicator of a candidate’s stand on defense. They usually pass by large margins, almost always have more money than the Pentagon requests and “are not terribly illuminating.”

The center – which strongly supports missile defense programs and opposes a comprehensive test ban, arms reductions, most-favored-nation status for China and increased trade with Cuba – usually picks about 10 other votes on defense issues for its congressional score cards.

“What we look for are issues that we think matter, that are not slam dunks,” Gaffney said.

Murray consistently receives low scores – once as low as 0, never higher than 16 percent – on the center’s report cards. Nethercutt has scored as high as 100 percent, and never lower than 84 percent.

Glass accused Republicans of trying to smear Murray as “soft on defense” the same way the GOP attacked Georgia Sen. Max Cleland in 2002. Cleland, a decorated Vietnam veteran who lost three limbs in the war and voted to give President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq, was ousted two years ago after a campaign tried to link him to Osama bin Laden for voting against the administration’s proposal to establish the Department of Homeland Security.

To underscore the point that Murray does not intend to be painted with that brush, she and Cleland campaigned this past week in Seattle.

The Murray campaign also questioned Nethercutt’s votes on Democratic budget proposals on domestic security, particularly for border and port security. Nethercutt voted for Republican proposals to fund many of the same programs, but at lower levels than the Bush administration wanted.

Nethercutt has a counter complaint about another aspect of domestic security:

“Senator Murray voted to cut U.S. intelligence spending by almost $6 billion, and we have paid a price for not having a stronger and more effective U.S. intelligence operation,” he told a crowd of supporters in Spokane.

The bulk of that amount, Nethercutt spokesman Conant said, was $5.4 billion in a 1994 amendment to a budget resolution that proposed shifting money from certain intelligence programs like a backup military communications satellite to special education programs throughout the country.

Murray did vote for Senate Consolidated Resolution 63, which failed on a 33-65 vote.

But because the proposal failed, it’s hard to prove the nation “paid the price” with less effective intelligence. The Murray campaign also noted that several Republicans also voted for the amendment, including future Senate Majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, and Slade Gorton, Washington’s senior senator at the time and one of the people who helped introduce Nethercutt to the crowds at his kickoff events.

Nethercutt insists the votes on the intelligence and defense budgets show a clear difference between the two candidates. But arguably no difference is as great as their votes on the 2002 resolution that paved the way for the war in Iraq. While Nethercutt is clear about his support for Bush and the war, he is not currently criticizing Murray on that vote, nor complaining that she “flip-flopped” by voting for the $87 billion appropriation to fund the war the way the Bush campaign is hammering Democrat John Kerry for supporting the war resolution but voting against the money.

“I think it’s interesting that he’s staying so far away from Iraq,” Glass said.

Both candidates have suffered campaign missteps on Iraq or the war on terrorism.

Murray said she was misunderstood as supporting Osama bin Laden when she told Vancouver students in late 2002 that the al Qaeda leader is more popular in some parts of the Muslim world because he spends money to build roads, schools and day-care centers and the United States hasn’t. She later said she was merely trying to get the students thinking about how the country can improve its relations around the world.

Nethercutt contended his comments last fall were deliberately misquoted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer – which the newspaper denied – so that he seemed indifferent to American casualties. He told a Seattle crowd that the news media wasn’t reporting the good that U.S. troops were doing in Iraq even though “it’s a better and more important story than losing a couple soldiers every day.”

In February, Nethercutt criticized Murray for “scaring the families” by publicly demanding answers from the Pentagon about reports of inadequate supplies of body armor for National Guard troops being sent to Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and high-ranking military officials had assured him at a congressional hearing that the equipment was available. Asking the question at a hearing was the right way to handle those concerns, Nethercutt contended; making a public statement was the wrong way.

But Murray refused to apologize for her inquiry, and produced a letter from Rumsfeld that was less positive that the troops had all the equipment. A month later, Nethercutt himself began to question whether the troops had all the equipment they needed. In early May, when Rumsfeld made his surprise visit to Baghdad, one of the first questions he received was from a soldier wondering when they would get some of the body armor they’d been promised.

Nethercutt said that didn’t mean Murray was right months earlier. “Let’s find out what the deficiencies are. The (Department of Defense) is trying their best to get it over there, to get everything they need for the troops, period. They’re fighting a very difficult war.”