EDITOR’S COLUMN: Sullivan sees military as path to infrastructure investments in the Mat-Su

One of the true pleasures of running a liberal paper in Anchorage and a relatively conservative one in the Valley is that I often get to switch hats, sometimes in the same moment.

Some might find this sort of thing confusing, maddening, diabolical even, but to a stone cold Gemini, it’s just another day at the office.

On Tuesday I working out of the Frontiersman office in Wasilla when U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan came by for a semi-impromptu editorial board before heading off to catch the finale of the great pumpkin weigh-off at the state fair.

Sullivan’s strength as a politician and a leader is his ability to be focused with an unbridled enthusiasm for one thing at a time. Last year, that one thing was the opioid addiction crisis and 2017’s cause du an has been missile defense, what with Kim Jung Un threatening the United States generally, and Alaska most practically.

So it was interesting when he said he had two points of promotion he wanted to talk about — one, the bill he’s introduced on the Senate floor with the support of 27 lawmakers from both parties that would substantially increase missile defense technologies at Fort Greely, and two — the recent visit of Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao for what Sullivan described as a ‘Transportation Summit.’

“My goal was to get her in front of as many Alaskans as possible,” Sullivan said. “All the key players from literally all over the state. We started the day on the Alaska Railroad, met with cargo trade unions… we had a special lunch with the mayor of the Mat-Su Borough and borough manager, and the port director for Juneau. I just said, ‘look, you guys got an hour with the Secretary to talk with her about whatever you want.”

Like I said before, monomania is usually one of Sullivan’s strengths, so I asked whether the almost certain passage of his missile defense bill in the fall dovetailed directly with his excitement about Chao’s visit and infrastructure projects. He didn’t try to deny or walk back the connection at all.

“We are a resource rich but infrastructure poor state,” Sullivan said, adding later, “Some people say, it’s ‘pork for Alaska,’ but it’s not pork for Alaska — it’s physics; it’s geography. Every missile shot at New York, Miami or Chicago, it’s shot past us.”

So, putting on my snarky Press hat, I asked, “So are you going to name one of these new highways after Kim Jung Un?”

“I don’t wanna name anything after that idiot, but our missile defense system needs to be more robust to defend against him in the event…” Sullivan said.

Un’s idiocy not withstanding, there is a particular bit of sage advice we should glean from the North Korean regime, Sullivan said.

“The other thing my bill calls for is more testing. And Kim Jung Un — you never want to acknowledge you can learn from that guy, but even when you fail, you learn,” Sullivan said. “We stopped doing testing, because frankly when you test and fail, Congress will look at you and cut your budget. But look at our space program. In the 50s and 60s we were failing all the time, but we learned.”

Sullivan was pleased that his bill was written about expressly by the Wall Street Journal, and Alaska’s role in missile defense was going to be highlighted on CNN that night, and he’s immensely confident his bill will become law.

“I predict it will be signed by the president by the end of the year,” Sullivan said. “But it’s going to take some time for 28 more missiles, building 14 new silos at Fort Greely and 14 more for testing.”

Meanwhile, ‘that idiot’ keeps learning from his projectile failures.

“When this guy is making big strides in capability, we need to make effort to show we’re making strides,” Sullivan said. “This is one area I don’t think anyone wants to be stingy on. This is essentially insurance for every American city.”

Sullivan’s ‘Transportation Summit’ should be of particular interest to the Mat-Su Borough, as the junior Senator was bullish on the potential uses for the nearly mothballed Port MacKenzie. Sullivan even went so far as to suggest there could be military uses for it.

“We were trying to get her to essentially walk the ground at the Port MacKenzie project,” Sullivan said. “We just wanted her to walk the ground. The whole point of this was for them to see it, walk it, feel it, smell it, taste it and then let the experts work it out.”

Sullivan was open to the possibility of using the Mat-Su Port for moving military cargo.

“In Alaska, we constitute the three pillars of military might — we’re the cornerstone for defense, period; we’re the hub of air combat power in the Asian Pacific and the Arctic,” Sullivan said. “We’ve got all that here and I’m trying to grow it, then we’re a platform for expeditionary forces. That got us the 425th Airborne Brigade at JBER, the first Striker Brigade at Fort Wainwright. But you’ve got to move that stuff, get it on ships and deploy it. You can do that out of Port Mac, or the Port of Anchorage.”

As the topic turned to health care and the Senator’s disappointment with the narrow defeat of repeal of the ACA, it was my chance to put on my Frontiersman hat and commiserate over and sympathize about what went wrong in his side’s utter defeat in the P.R. battle.

“The message (to save the ACA) was millions of dollars of ads on TV and radio, and to be honest, it was hard to break through,” Sullivan said. “I had an op-ed here, a speech there, but we could have done a much better job of explaining it. The campaigning (in Alaska) caught us off guard.”

That Alaska campaign to save Obamacare was mostly directed at Sullivan’s fellow Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. That crowd had long since written off Sullivan disdainfully, often calling his professed passion to combatting opioid addiction to be a charade, because if you debone Medicaid, how are many of these addicts going to get any treatment at all?

That line of criticism stung Sullivan particularly.

“I fundamentally disagree with that… my heart and soul is into this opioid addiction (fight),” he said. “I was one of the Senators who pushed for a big fund of $45 billion for mental health and addiction recovery services. The state of Alaska would have received a lot — tens of millions, no doubt about it, and tied to Medicaid. Get it to the states.”

At this point, it occurred to me that in the debate leading up to the repeal vote, I hardly ever heard a Republican politician speak as an actual wonk about policy matters, and how the Senate’s replacement proposal had people backing it for reasons of substance and not mere spite.

But any rational voices there were drowned out by a mainstream media that proclaimed projections by the (always described as non-partisan) Congressional Budget Office of any Republican proposal costing tens of millions of Americans coverage, as sheer gospel.

Sullivan said he, and others, vehemently disagreed with how the CBO came to arrive at its scores, but they simply couldn’t be heard.

A lot of that was the fault, Sullivan conceded, fell on the White House, and it’s failure to spread the message of the intricacies of the Republican plan.

“What hurt is we didn’t have nearly so much support from the bully pulpit of the White House as we could have,” Sullivan said. “You had to explain it, and you know, the President has got a powerful, powerful… I mean look, when he did it, and I was with him a couple of times, he would walk through the bill and talk about how it would help, we were like, ‘great, yes!’ Now I would prefer it if you do a live primetime address to the nation and repeat it and get your surrogates out so we could work through it.”

Instead, Trump decided to take pot shots at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who just so happens to be the husband of Secretary Chao.

Talk about wearing two hats.