George Allen Makes Defense Cuts His Issue in Virginia Race Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times Former Senator George Allen, a Republican trying to regain a seat in the Senate, with his wife, Susan, in Fairfax, Va., after debating his rival, former Gov. Tim Kaine, on Thursday. STAFFORD, Va. - Just outside the gates of the storied Quantico Marine Base, George Allen, the Republican nominee for a Senate seat from Virginia, sat down in the offices of a moving van company with more than a dozen defense contractors from his state last Monday to listen to them fret over government spending cuts. Scott Hirons's small software firm will probably have to shrink to five employees from 15 by the end of October if nothing is done to head off automatic, across-the-board defense cuts, he said. The cuts will not begin until January, if ever, but the threat alone has already frozen the contracting world, Mr. Hirons said. John Radziszewski worried not just about spending cuts but also about the Pentagon's recent moves to "in-source" work to government research labs to save money. "I personally could never imagine voting for something so devastating to our national security and jobs in Virginia," said Mr. Allen, a former senator seeking to regain the seat he lost six years ago to Jim Webb, a Democrat, who is retiring. In an election year when the Republican Party has set itself up as a paragon of small government and the scourge of federal debt, Mr. Allen is taking a different tack. He has made opposition to the bipartisan deficit reduction law of 2011 the centerpiece of his campaign. In Virginia, home to thousands of defense contractors ringing the Pentagon and vast military bases around Norfolk, Mr. Allen is seen as the Old Dominion's version of Senator Pothole - as former Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, Republican of New York, was known for his attention to local issues. It is a delicate target. After all, the Budget Control Act was written to end a Republican-made standoff over raising the nation's statutory borrowing limit. It passed with the votes of the entire Republican leadership, including Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. One person who did not vote for it was Mr. Allen's Democratic opponent, former Gov. Tim Kaine, who has never held a seat in Congress. But in what may still be the closest Senate contest in the country, Mr. Allen believes he has found an issue he can ride back to Washington. A recent round of polls suggests that Mr. Kaine has opened his first real lead of the contest. That has pushed Mr. Allen to press his case against the defense cuts even harder. "These folks really regret doing it," Mr. Allen said of fellow Republicans and their votes. Tim Kaine thinks it was the right thing to do. That's beyond me. Mr. Allen faces two risks. For one, the more he presses his case against the automatic defense cuts, the more opportunities Mr. Kaine has to demand a specific Allen program of deficit reduction to replace those cuts. For another, conservatives are questioning the fiscal bona fides of Republicans trying to undo the automatic cuts, which are known as sequestration. Chris Chocola, the president of the conservative political action committee Club for Growth, has been urging Republican candidates to stand by $1 trillion in additional spending cuts. "I need to see some sign that Congress is willing to do something really hard," he said. Sequestration is really hard, but they said they were going to do it. The automatic cuts are the ugly result of the showdown last year over raising the nation's statutory borrowing limit. A potentially crippling default was averted only after House Republicans and President Obama agreed to 10 years of caps on federal programs at the annual discretion of Congress. Moreover, a special committee was established to find an additional $1 trillion to cut over 10 years. If it failed, the cuts - half in defense, half in domestic programs - would kick in. It failed, and as the deadline for the cuts approaches, a blame game has begun. House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio on Friday again labeled it "the president's defense sequester." Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, called that "monstrously cynical," since the cuts were "100 percent their creation." "It's like a man who kills his mother and father and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan," he said. At a debate in Northern Virginia on Thursday, both Senate candidates jumped into the issue almost immediately, but they took very different approaches. In an interview, Mr. Allen said, "The responsible thing to do is to propose a way to avert these cuts." But at the debate, he spoke generally about how to head off the defense cuts while maintaining deficit reduction targets.