As Washington’s fight over a roughly $40 billion Air Force refueling tanker contract dragged into March 2008, Alabama’s senior senator took his defense of the deal to the pages of a London-based financial newspaper, arguing that the award to a Northrop Grumman-EADS team would bring, not export, American jobs.
The contract, which called for a new assembly line at Mobile’s Brookley Field, had drawn fire in Washington almost from the moment the Air Force chose the Northrop Grumman-EADS team over Boeing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used the award as a political cudgel against Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who years earlier had pushed the Air Force away from a leasing arrangement with Boeing after that plan produced criminal convictions for a Boeing executive and an Air Force procurement officer. In the weeks since the award, critics in Congress and the press had largely lined up against the Air Force’s decision, with few voices beyond Alabama’s congressional delegation willing to defend it publicly.
Sen. Richard Shelby had been one of the most visible of those defenders, making a string of cable news appearances to make the case for the award. On March 10, he added an op-ed in the Financial Times to that effort.
“As members of Congress, we are concerned about US jobs. But any assertion that this award ‘outsources’ jobs to France is simply false. With a new assembly site in Mobile, Alabama, this contract will bring tens of thousands of jobs into the US,” Shelby wrote. “According to the job-forecasting tool from the department of commerce, Northrop Grumman will employ about the same number of US workers on the tanker contract as Boeing would have. The Northrop Grumman tanker team will employ about 25,000 US workers at more than 230 supplier companies in 49 states.”
For Mobile, the stakes in that argument went well beyond a single senator’s talking points. Brookley Field had sat largely dormant since the Air Force closed Brookley Air Force Base in 1969, a closure that cost the city thousands of jobs and, by some estimates, a meaningful share of its population. A new aircraft assembly line on those same runways represented one of the largest economic development prospects Mobile had seen in a generation, which is why local and state officials worked so hard to keep the deal from unraveling under congressional pressure.
The choice of outlet was notable. The Financial Times, a European financial publication, had generally been sympathetic to EADS throughout the tanker fight, giving Shelby a friendly platform but not necessarily one that would move skeptical American lawmakers or reporters. Still, with domestic media coverage tilted toward Boeing’s objections and the broader American economy already showing signs of strain, Shelby and the rest of Alabama’s delegation needed every outlet they could get to keep the jobs argument in front of readers, in Washington and beyond.