Obama campaign: Republicans lying to Americans about sequestration

CHARLOTTE — Top Obama campaign officials are warning convention-goers here in North Carolina this week that Republicans are planning a nationwide campaign to "lie" about the president’s effort to avoid the looming defense cuts known as "sequestration."

"We are under attack. Romney will try to hang sequestration around the president’s neck," said Robert Diamond, the Obama campaign’s national veterans and military families vote director, at a reception hosted by the Truman National Security Project here on Monday. Diamond’s speech was a call to arms for Democrats to mount a grassroots campaign to defend President Barack Obama‘s record on defense spending.

"[The Romney campaign] will visit North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, New Hampshire, and every other state with military in it and lie to the American people about sequestration," Diamond said. "That is their line of national security attack. They don’t have anything else to talk about."

Top Obama national security campaign officials and surrogates drove home the Obama campaign’s message on defense spending and sequestration at a Tuesday event hosted by Bloomberg News, which included remarks from Obama campaign national security advisory team co-chair and former Pentagon official Michèle Flournoy, former Rep. Patrick Murphy, an Iraq war veteran, congressional candidate and Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth, and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Doug Wilson.

Flournoy argued that the impending cuts of $600 billion over 10 years to the defense budget as mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which Congress passed and the president signed, would probably be delayed somehow by Congress before the implementation date of Jan. 2.

"I would bet my mortgage that [Congress] will at the very least buy themselves some time. They will do something to extend that deadline on Jan 2," she said.

But Flournoy said that the Pentagon has understandably been reluctant to plan for sequestration and that the law doesn’t allow for careful planning anyway, just crude across-the-board cuts to all defense programs.

"Why would you want to support planning for something that would really harm national security when what you really need to do is put your fiscal house in order?" she asked. "If you go much further down this road, you will start giving up major pillars of American strategy and the Pentagon’s resistance to planning for this is because it’s such a bad idea."

Flournoy also criticized Mitt Romney‘s pledge to peg defense spending to 4 percent of GDP, pointing out that he hasn’t offered an explanation of how to pay for that, considering that he doesn’t support new revenues.

"When you ask Governor Romney, ‘What is your detailed defense plan?’ there isn’t an answer," she said. "You get an answer that is fundamentally incoherent: I want to raise defense spending to 4 percent of GDP but I don’t want to put revenues on the table. It doesn’t add up."

The Cable asked Flournoy how she would implement the cuts mandated by sequestration if she became the next defense secretary.

"I’m going to completely disregard the premise of your question because I think it’s false," she said, denying that she is in contention to be the first woman defense secretary in American history in a second Obama administration.