John Fund has more on Allen at the Club at opinionjournal.com (sub required):
Across town, Virginia Senator George Allen was shmoozing donors to the free-market Club for Growth. The Virginia Senator has often been a diffident speaker in the past but last night he was firing on all cylinders. He decried the failure to find offsetting cuts to pay for Katrina spending, saying the signal threatened the rest of the GOP agenda in Congress. He also proposed that the new Medicare drug benefit set to take effect next year be delayed in light of Katrina.
Mr. Allen also had a more comprehensive take on how to tackle budget problems. As governor of Virginia, to let the state legislature know that he meant business, he vetoed 99 bills. But lest this be interpreted as a criticism of President Bush, who has yet to veto a single bill, a staffer was quick to say Mr. Allen’s point was that the presidency was burdened with weaker budget control powers than most governors have. In Virginia, he enjoyed line-item veto authority and a rule that required the legislature to restrict bills to a single subject. “Bush might find it a lot easier to tackle the budget if a president had those advantages,” the staffer said.
Mr. Allen also praised former California Gov. Pete Wilson’s use of incentives to encourage private contractors to finish highway repairs more quickly after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. “We should do that for Katrina reconstruction and also consider extending that principle to all federal construction projects,” the senator said.
The audience left impressed with Mr. Allen’s pitch. One club member told me that the message was “coherent, consistent and conservative,” and that’s a sound starting point for Senator Allen to win over the conservative base of the party as he prepares his White House run.