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PrioritiesNH: Time to Get a Grip on Military Spending
 PrioritiesNH is set to stir things up in the 2008 NH presidential primary. The Priorities project is the multi-media political arm of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a 700-member alliance of CEOs and business executives led by Ben Cohen (yes, Chunky Monkey Ben Cohen), and united behind the notion that the federal government blows way too much money in the wrong places. Specifically, the Pentagon.
With the assistance of its military advisory committee, including Adm. Jack Shanahan, Reagan Defense Undersecretary Larry Korb, and former CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner, they’ve identified $60 billion in cold-war era defense systems and nuclear weapons that need cutting from the current defense appropriation. Moreover, they want the funds budgeted back to communities for education, health care, job training, and homeland security.
To churn this sort of radical thinking into the presidential campaign, PrioritiesNH has put together an impressive bird-dogging campaign called the Power of 10. The plan is for their 6000 members to attend 10 presidential candidate events each – Democrats and Republicans – and ask them one of eight prescribed questions, the subtext of each being the re-ordering of our national priorities away from lopsided military-spending toward more humanitarian purposes. The presumption is that asking the questions enough will encourage the candidates to actually come up with coherent answers. The aim is to steer the conversation and the ultimately the candidates and press into a discussion of re-prioritizing the federal budget.
The program includes an exhaustive and up-to-date online schedule of where and when the candidates are during their campaign visits, and a database for logging questions and answers to chart their progress. PrioritiesNH has a sister organization in Iowa, so wherever the candidates go in the early campaigning, they’ll face the same agenda-driven questioning.
That’s the wonky part. The fun part is the tricked-out vehicles you see all over the state designed to draw attention to the budget’s problems in a way you can’t ignore.
Full disclosure: I’m signed up to drive the Pig Mobile in the spring.
~Jack McEnany
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