It took one sentence on public radio to unite Alabama’s feuding politicians, and the sentence belonged to a senator from Washington state.
Sen. Patty Murray, defending Boeing’s position in the $40 billion competition to build the Air Force’s next aerial refueling tanker, told NPR’s “All Things Considered”: “I have stood on the line in Everett, Washington, where we have thousands of workers who go to work every day to build these planes. I would challenge anybody to tell me that they’ve stood on a line in Alabama and seen anybody building anything.”
The response from Alabama was immediate, bipartisan and, in places, gleeful. Democrats and Republicans, officeholders and candidates, elbowed one another aside for the chance to be Murray’s most prominent critic. Insult a man’s mother, kick his dog, or question his work ethic — the last of these had just been done to an entire state.
The mayor writes to her doctor
Mobile Mayor Sam Jones bypassed the senator altogether. He addressed his letter to Murray’s “personal physician.”
“Would you please check on your patient?” Jones wrote. “Her recent remarks indicating that she has never seen anybody in Alabama building anything makes me believe that she may be off her medications.”
Beneath the needling was a serious argument. Jones pointed out that Northrop Grumman and its suppliers already employed more than 400 people in Washington state with an annual economic impact of over $500 million, and that a dual award would add some 2,700 more jobs there. He listed Washington suppliers supporting the Northrop tanker: ELDEC in Lynnwood, Honeywell in Redmond, Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane Valley, Accra Manufacturing in Bothell, Exotic Metals Forming in Kent.
Then he issued an invitation: come to Mobile, tour the plants, walk the deck of the littoral combat ship USS Independence built here by Austal, and visit the aerospace facilities at Brookley Field.
The county commissioner accepts the challenge
Mobile County Commissioner Stephen Nodine took Murray’s dare literally.
“I accept the challenge,” he wrote. “In Mobile, Ala., I’ve stood on a line and seen thousands of technicians keeping what Boeing builds in the air.”
He was talking about ST Mobile Aerospace Engineering at the Brookley Industrial Complex — the city’s largest private employer — where crews performed scheduled maintenance and major modifications on wide-body and narrow-body aircraft, servicing six models of Boeing commercial airliners from the 727 to the 777. “Maybe the last time you flew to Washington you were on a United Airlines jet repaired in Mobile,” Nodine wrote. Much of the FedEx fleet, he added, had been worked on in Mobile too.
He also pointed to Airbus’s engineering center at Brookley, where scientists were designing next-generation aircraft, and to Airbus Military North America’s new 30,000-square-foot repair and overhaul center near Mobile Regional Airport, which supported the Coast Guard’s C-212 and CN-235 tactical transports.
“Throughout the tanker competition, Boeing supporters such as you and others in Washington state have portrayed Alabamians as simpletons incapable of producing such an aircraft,” Nodine wrote. “This is stereotyping at its worst.”
A candidate offers to pay her way
Bradley Byrne, the Baldwin County Republican running for governor, offered to personally pay Murray’s way to Alabama. He invited her to Huntsville to watch Boeing’s own Alabama workers on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, which he said supported nearly 5,600 jobs; to the ThyssenKrupp steel plant north of Mobile, which was about to make Alabama the second-largest steel-producing state in the nation; and to Austal USA, whose aluminum modular process he called the most effective shipbuilding method in the world.
He could not resist the obvious counterpunch. Mercedes-Benz was moving C-Class production from Germany to Alabama, Byrne noted — while Boeing was moving a second 787 line out of Washington state to South Carolina.
“Simply because you haven’t stood on a line and seen Alabamians building world-class products using cutting-edge technology,” he wrote, “that’s no reason to imply that it isn’t happening.”
Sessions goes to the floor
U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, professing “great admiration” for his colleague, noted that “the people of Alabama get a little bit offended when people suggest they are not able to produce anything of world-class quality,” and delivered the longest rejoinder of all from the Senate floor.
Underneath the theater lay real money: an aircraft assembly line at Brookley, thousands of jobs, and a decade of industrial development that Mobile had been chasing since the airfield closed.