Pa. Senate race focus shifts to national security for a week

WASHINGTON - As global conflict dominated headlines, national security grabbed the spotlight last week in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, offering a glimpse of a debate that could prove critical in this fall's election.

Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican seeking a second term, sought to flex his foreign-policy muscles, blasting President Obama - and his Democratic challengers - over the international nuclear deal with Iran and that country's recent ballistic missile tests.

"It's extremely dangerous if the administration goes ahead and rewards the Iranians' egregiously bad behavior," Toomey told reporters in a conference call Tuesday, the same day he used an op-ed piece published in The Inquirer to urge the president not to lift sanctions.

Joe Sestak, one of three Democrats running to challenge Toomey, was quick to respond.

The one-time congressman has made his career as a former three-star admiral who commanded an aircraft carrier battle group in Afghanistan and Iraq, led the Navy's antiterrorism unit, and served as director of defense policy on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council a central part of his public appeal. His campaign literature still calls him "Admiral."

"Maybe if you had a little more experience in it and actually understood what it took to win," Sestak said, scolding Toomey hours later in his own call to reporters. "It isn't just sitting in Washington, D.C., and coming out to an aircraft carrier and visiting and just saying 'a lot more sanctions.' "

He, like fellow Democratic candidates Katie McGinty and John Fetterman, stood by the Iran deal.

With ISIS, China, Middle East chaos, and North Korean aggression also roiling world affairs - and incidents such as the Thursday night shooting of a Philadelphia police officer by a man who invoked ISIS - security has soared to the top of voters' concerns.

After terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., a mid-December Gallup poll found 16 percent of Americans ranked terrorism as the nation's biggest problem - the most of any issue, and its largest share in a decade.

The fear has been reflected in the GOP presidential race, where Donald Trump profanely promises to unleash a bombing campaign against ISIS and other candidates are jockeying to show their toughness.

It's too early to tell if security will still top voters' minds in November - or if the economy will reclaim its familiar place as issue No. 1 - said Kyle Kondik, an analyst at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

And while Sestak's resume bristles with international affairs experience, Republicans have long held the edge in public perception of who keeps the country safer, Kondik said.

"Republicans are actively trying to make this election about foreign policy," Kondik said. "They think they have an advantage."

Toomey, a banker who made his political name on fiscal and economic issues, has spent months attacking the Iran accord - in speeches, bills, and, in March, a letter he and other Republican senators drafted to Iranian leaders seeking to undercut negotiations.

In the op-ed piece, written with former Pennsylvania governor and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, Toomey implored Obama not to release $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets, as promised. Separately, he pushed for new sanctions in response to Iran's ballistic missile tests.

"They're going to do the absolute minimum they need to to get the money," Toomey told reporters. "We should have no confidence that they intend to honor the spirit or the letter of the agreement beyond that."

His campaign has linked his challengers to what he calls Obama's "feckless foreign policy" and, seeking to erode Sestak's claims of expertise, has pounded the Democrat's 2014 comment that ISIS was "out of gas."

On Friday, the campaign followed up by using Sestak's Iran comments in a fund-raising appeal while Toomey spoke about the deal to the Wilkes-Barre Jewish Community Center.

Sestak has said his ISIS assessment has proven accurate because the group stopped expanding its territory. And he has taken every opportunity to contrast his views with Toomey's in competing speeches, columns, and attacks.

On Tuesday, he described the nuclear deal as the best way to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear bomb while avoiding a military conflict. As evidence of success, Sestak noted that in late December Iran shipped out nearly all of its low-enriched uranium.

"For us to not meet our end, our word of the deal, and to unfreeze assets . . . means that we will harm America's and Israel's security," Sestak said.

Sestak agreed that new sanctions should be applied for the missile tests, but said that issue is distinct from the nuclear treaty. He also chastised Toomey for his 2002 House vote supporting the second Iraq war.

"He's not that well grounded in foreign policy experience," Sestak said of Toomey. "It's always one-thing-fits-all: more sanctions, more sanctions, more sanctions."

The two clashed in similar fashion in the 2010 race: Sestak highlighted his military background and Toomey called for tougher sanctions on Iran. But elections that year ultimately turned on economic worry and the Affordable Care Act, not security.

The other Democrats in this year's race have largely touted domestic issues.

McGinty, Gov. Wolf's former chief of staff, has focused on middle-class economic concern. Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, Pa., has trumpeted his work to revitalize a borough battered by economic change.

McGinty, in a telephone interview, said she dealt with international negotiations and crises, such as the Chernobyl disaster, while working on environment and energy policy in the Clinton White House.

She also backs the nuclear deal and said Obama should impose sanctions for Iran's missile tests.

Voters want "somebody with the experience to bring good judgment to a vast array of enormously complex issues," she said. "You don't get the luxury of only caring about one issue."

Fetterman said he supported Obama's foreign policy, including the nuclear pact. In foreign affairs and especially the Middle East, he said, "experience is overrated."

"Someone who had impeccable credentials and experience was a guy named Dick Cheney," he said, blaming the former vice president for the Iraq War.

"Restraint is the most important concept that has been missing," he said, dismissing "chicken-hawk, armchair tough guy talk."

For the average voter, the question on security is likely to boil down to a gut reaction, said Franklin and Marshall pollster G. Terry Madonna: Do you support Obama's moves, or not?

Democrats in the Pennsylvania race are largely in line with the president.

Their party, though, usually focuses on economic issues, Madonna said.

While 24 percent of Republicans rated terrorism as their top concern in the Gallup poll, only 9 percent of Democrats did so.

The influence on Election Day, Madonna said, depends on what the chaotic world churns out next.

Pocketbook issues may seize attention again. But another terror attack, he said, and "all of a sudden, it dominates virtually every aspect of the campaign."

jtamari@phillynews.com

@JonathanTamari

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