Return George Allen to the Senate

Date published: 10/29/2006

Re-elect Allen

The junior senator has an eye on the future--where America should be focused

SEN. GEORGE ALLEN'S detractors often charge him with being a virtual automaton in supporting President Bush (an accusation not much wide of the mark). Along these lines, if Virginians were designing an actual Robo-senator, they might leave out some parts that Mr. Allen possesses and install some that he lacks. But by and large, Virginia's junior senator has moved correctly, if predictably, during the past six years to further the interests of Commonwealth and Union.

National politics magnify Mr. Allen's faults. He has rather blindly followed the president in his almost criminally inept prosecution of an optional war in Iraq. When, a few days ago, Mr. Bush's tune on the war changed, Mr. Allen sang along in the new key. It's now time, goes the witless Beltway locution, for Iraqis to "stand up" their military and police forces to defeat the insurgency. This smells like a sellout. Will Mr. Allen acquiesce in the cynical abandonment of an ally, now that fancy theorems and idees fixes have failed to get the job done, to worse terror and deeper chaos?

On the domestic side--again like Mr. Bush--Mr. Allen's laudable belief in the power of markets and entrepreneurship seems to exhaust his economic enthusiasm. There's little left over, once the commodores of commerce have been served, for the common seaman who must wait in real mortgage-and-tuition time for the rising tide to lift his dinghy.

But there's a brighter side to the George Allen story, which doesn't end with his successes (parole abolition, welfare reform, K-12 academic standards) as Virginia's governor during the 1990s. While in a body of 100--which must come to terms with a body of 435--it's sometimes hard to discern an individual senator's accomplishments, Mr. Allen's have not been negligible.

In 2003, for example, the senator steered $3.7 billion into research in nanotechnology--building machines on an atomic and molecular scale--on the conviction that it really is a small world after all, or soon will be, and the United States should be leading it. With America's industrial sector on the skids and many other jobs vulnerable to outsourcing, the nation needs a quantum high-tech boost to renewed prosperity. Nanotechnology could be it. Its best friend in Congress is George Allen.

Date published: 10/29/2006