Having kept mum in the face of numerous attacks from his Democratic challengers over the past couple of months, Sen. Gordon Smith is gearing up into campaign mode.

His first issue? A response to Jeff Merkley’s accusations regarding the Buy American Act and its implications in the awarding of a $35 billion air tanker contracts to Northrop Grumman and the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. (EADS) instead of Boeing.

Merkley’s campaign is framing the contract as a contest between assigning the “contract to a French company rather than building it in America,” and fingering Smith’s 2003 vote for the Act as “pav[ing] a path for the European company.”

Smith’s camp pointed towards an op-ed Merkley wrote for the New York Times in 1989 in which he argues for discontinuation of the stealth bomber. Merkley’s argument here is that the bomber would not be able to “make contributions to national security proportional to its cost.”

While the issues are seemingly similar—support of American manufactured military aircraft and the jobs their production creates—they are not exactly equitable.

The stealth bomber was designed for the Cold War and could act as both a first and second-strike nuclear weapon. In 1989 when Merkley wrote his op-ed, the enormously expensive stealth bomber seemed redundant as the Soviet Union was crumbling.

“At a cost of $100 billion, the investment made in the stealth bomber could have created a path to home ownership for 20 million American families.  Deciding how to spend that money was an enormous decision for our nation, and the public deserved a full debate,” said Merkley.

The Air Force Tanker debate, on the other hand, is not over the usefulness of the plane in a changing military environment; rather it is a question of whether 60% or 85% of the tankers components will be manufactured in America.

"Everyone agrees that the aging KC-135 refueling tankers need to be replaced.  The question is whether they should be manufactured in America or in France.  I believe they should be manufactured in America to build our aerospace manufacturing expertise and create quality jobs for thousands of American families,” Merkley noted.

Merkley continued to hammer Smith’s vote on the Buy American Act amendment which exempted the Department of Defense from its purveyance; R.C. Hammond, Smith’s campaign spokesman defended the Senator’s vote on the Buy America Act. He told the Oregonian that the amendment was an attempt to give the military the option to buy needed supplies from a small number of allied countries.

Smith has also been reiterating his opposition to the Iraq war, an issue which will prove integral in his run against either Novick or Merkley, both of whom have thrown their support behind “A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq.”