ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Base Politics

Several Orange County congressmen adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the planned closing of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. They stayed on the sidelines during the week’s hectic lobbying to keep major military bases from closing. What were they waiting to find out?

Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) will never be accused of being first into the fight, as the Marines have been in the nation’s conflicts.

Yet the Board of Supervisors had no trouble seeing immediately the $400-million yearly problem that the closing would be for the local economy.

But Cox and Rohrabacher argued for the primacy of national security considerations over local economic conditions in base closings. A spokesman for Dornan said that he was not yet making any commitment. But local economic conditions surely can’t be overlooked.

Clearly, these conservative congressmen are wary of being perceived as overly parochial. And Cox and Rohrabacher may be consistent in their fiscal conservativism.

But in addition to its economic value, El Toro has served the nation’s strategic needs well. Its military mission always has been brought up whenever proponents of a local commercial airport at El Toro wanted to close the base. And in recent years, it dispatched thousands of Marines to the sands of Saudia Arabia and to Somalia. What does a base have to do to prove its value?