President Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president at his party’s convention last night, when Democrats touted his national-security credentials.
The Democratic National Convention (DNC) included more public talk of the military and foreign relations than did the Republican convention in Tampa last week, when the GOP nominated Mitt Romney for president (Defense Daily, Aug. 31).
Before Obama took the stage for his acceptance speech, multiple speakers—including Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.)–lauded his administration’s military successes including killing Osama bin Laden.
Kerry argued during a speech on defense and foreign affairs that Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, are “the most-inexperienced foreign-policy twosome to run for president and vice president in decades.”
Obama struck a similar theme, saying: “In a world of new threats and new challenges, you can choose leadership that has been tested and proven.” He charged Romney and Ryan are “stuck in a Cold War time warp.” Obama cited his own administration’s military milestones including the end of the Iraq war and planned 2014 removal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Perhaps the overriding issue for the defense community in Washington–the size of the Pentagon budget–was cited at the DNC.
“While my opponent would spend more money on military hardware that our joint chiefs don’t want, I’ll use the money we’re no longer spending on war to pay down our debt and put more people back to work, rebuilding roads and bridges, schools and runways,” Obama said.
Former President Bill Clinton argued in a Wednesday night address to Democratic delegates that the GOP wants to go back to the “same old policies” that hurt the nation previously, slamming Republicans for wanting to “increase defense spending $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend the money on.”
Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee and chairman of the House Budget Committee, helped pass a budget resolution in the House in March that calls for billions of dollars more in Pentagon funding than Obama proposed for the coming years (Defense Daily, Aug. 14). Romney has said he wants to maintain defense spending at 4 percent of gross domestic product, which would require increases above the Pentagon’s planned spending in future years. And at a speech at the American Legion in Indianapolis last Thursday, which coincided with the Republican National Convention, Romney said he would not cut defense spending by nearly $1 trillion–a cut he claimed Obama is “set to” make (Defense Daily, Au, 30).
The Budget Control Act of 2011, which both parties in Congress passed and Obama signed into law, cuts planned defense spending by $487 billion over 10 years, a reduction the Pentagon has included in its budget. The law also set in motion a process that could result in another $500 billion in so-called sequestration cuts to the defense budget over the next decade, which the Obama administration has not yet factored in its longterm spending plans. Congressional Democrats and Republicans oppose the sequestration cuts, as does Obama, but have not yet agreed on an alternate plan to replace them.
The White House is expected to send Congress in the near future a report on how the sequestration budget cuts would be implemented. The report is required by the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, which Obama signed into law Aug. 7. The act says the report should be sent to Congress in 30 days. Some congressional aides view the due date as yesterday and others view it as today. No report was received on Capitol Hill as of late yesterday afternoon. The White House press office did not respond to a query about the report.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement yesterday that “it’s time for President Obama to obey the law he signed and tell the American people how he plans to implement (or replace) these devastating cuts.” Boehner’s office interprets the report’s due date to be today.