How will the Tea Party respond to Washington's conservative defense analysts?
John Noonan of The Weekly Standard and The Foreign Policy Initiative has responded to my piece on RealClearWorld from Monday which questioned whether Bill Kristol was a good messenger to the Tea Party movement. He also recorded a podcast today on the same subject.
Noonan writes:
Domenech nails it on message -a strong national defense is an inherently conservative principle- but whiffs on the messengers.Though various conservative organizations occasionally swim against fiscal conservative currents, Heritage, AEI, and FPI remain trusted proponents of conservative principles. The focus, therefore, should not be on the messengers â?? but rather the messaging.
Three major think-tanks unifying behind a single rallying call, handled â??Defending Defense,â? should be eye-opening. Such an alliance should not be interpreted as old-school Washington establishmentarians manning the bulwarks against a new, popular conservative grassroots movement, but rather a plea for the Tea Party to acknowledge the dilapidated condition of the US military, which is facing unheard of budget cuts and historically low spending during a time of a tough, protracted war against Islamic extremism.
I think the inherent problem here is that Noonan doesn't really answer the question. I warned that Tea Partiers won't take what Kristol and others tell them all that seriously because they are viewed as a DC insiders, a concern that is in no way allayed by saying "Tea Partiers should take it seriously that three DC thinktanks all agree about this important thing." It's not like these organizations have some wellspring of goodwill built up within this populist movement.
I don't think Noonan's viewpoint is entirely off-base, but they need a better response than that -- otherwise, expect the kind of response he got from the comment section: Tea Party movement types sick of hearing lectures on what they ought to believe from the old guard and the establishment.
Yet there's no reason to think that Tea Partiers are extreme libertarians on Defense spending. These folks don't want to raze the Pentagon. What they're most angry about is waste -- what they consider to be waste of their hard-earned tax dollars on bailouts, stimulus packages, and more. And this is likely to be their view on Defense spending as well.
Any reasonable observer can look at the Defense budget priorities and see that there is plenty of waste, spread across the bloated projects that have been more about providing military pork barrel spending across the country than serving our national defense needs (witness, for example, the ludicrous continuation of C-17 purchasing). For years, companies have played the same game of scare tactics, pork promises, and flag-waving to pull in political support -- but consistent fiscal conservatives should be in favor of responsible spending, which drives the branches to be more efficient in how they spend, at least forcing them to choose between their pet projects.
No matter who the messenger is, Tea Partiers shouldn't listen to those who suggest it undercuts our troops to end bloated corporate welfare which has for too long disguised itself as military funding. In an era when entitlement spending will put even more pressure on other budget line-items, it's about time that Defense started spending smart.
