Presidential candidates weigh in on tanker
Published 3:47 pm Monday, March 3, 2008
Presidential hopefuls Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., recently commented on the U.S. Air Force awarding a tanker contract to Northrop Grumman and EADS.
While campaigning in Ohio over the weekend, Obama told supporters it was difficult for him to believe “that having an American company that has been a traditional source of aeronautic excellence would not have done this job,” reports the Wall Street Journal. However, Obama acknowledged that he had not examined the tanker deal carefully.
Clinton told the publication that she was “deeply concerned” about the Pentagon’s selecting the Northrop-EADS tanker over Chicago-based Boeing’s.
Meanwhile, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius blasted Republican presidential candidate John McCain for Boeing’s loss while campaigning for Obama in Ohio, the Toledo Blade reports. Boeing workers in Wichita would have done finishing work on the company’s Everett-built KC-767 tanker.
“We just got a little gut check in Kansas yesterday when it was announced that our Department of Defense, our Air Force, had delivered the contract to build the tanker for our military to Airbus, a company based in France,” Sebelius said. “One of the people responsible for that contract going to Airbus instead of Boeing: John McCain.”
McCain, on Monday, said he’s still pondering the Pentagon contract.
“Having investigated the tanker lease scandal a few years ago, I have always insisted that the Air Force buy major weapons through fair and open competition,” McCain told The Associated Press. “I will be interested to learn how the Air Force came to its contract award decision here and whether it fairly applied its own rules in arriving at that decision.”
McCain, however, didn’t mince words when criticizing the Boeing Co.’s flawed virtual border fence project – a failure that some analysts say may have hurt Boeing in the tanker competition.
“And all of us who know the need to secure the border are very disappointed,” McCain told reporters in Phoenix. “It’s so disappointing when Americans – one of their highest priorities is to secure our borders – that we have a major corporation that gets a major contract and it turns into be a failed effort.”
U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., also laid blame on McCain, telling Reuters that McCain pushed the defense secretary to strike from contract consideration a trade dispute between Boeing and Airbus.
“The U.S. government is bringing an action against Airbus in the World Trade Organization and subsidies should have been taken into account” in this competition, Dicks said.
That certainly didn’t bother Alabama’s governor, Bob Riley, who endorsed McCain today. EADS-Northrop will build their tanker, based on Airbus’s commercial A330, in Mobile, Ala.
