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Democrats oppose nafta wto { September 17 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21141-2003Sep16.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21141-2003Sep16.html
In Iowa, Gephardt Struggles to Keep a Key Constituency
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 17, 2003; 12:00 AM
One by one, Iowa's labor unions lined up behind Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.). The machinists. The steelworkers. The Teamsters, among others. In Iowa, where stress over America's shrinking manufacturing base runs high, they all said Gephardt was the guy who could best represent their interests in the White House.
But then something surprising happened. Polls started showing that former Vermont governor Howard Dean had moved ahead of Gephardt in Iowa. Even more shocking was this: One poll showed Gephardt trailing Dean in union households. How could it be that a virtual unknown from a tiny New England state could be leading the well-known pol from nearby St. Louis, who has led his party in Washington for years and stood up to both a Democratic and a Republican president on a host of trade of issues?
"Our membership is like everyone else in the state -- they watch the news," said Chuck Rocha, Gephardt's labor director, who is on leave from his permanent job as national political director of the United Steelworkers of America in Pittsburgh. "They see all the stuff about Dean. But it's early, and when [Iowa's union rank and file] start to get the information, you're going to see Dick Gephardt become the overwhelming favorite."
That education process has begun.
Union leaders have begun aggressively distributing opposition research on Dean's trade record among their members. Gephardt's folks accuse Dean of flip-flopping on trade issues, and they suggest his conversion to NAFTA critic is politically motivated to draw support among Democratic activists in states such as Iowa. And in a fiery speech last week, Gephardt accused Dean of siding with the Newt Gingrich-led GOP in trying to "privatize" and "scale back" Medicare and raise the Social Security retirement age to 70.
Gephardt on Friday stood before about 100 Iowans -- mostly men with rough hands and work boots -- telling them in the most urgent tones why he is the candidate who can best represent the interests of working people like them in the White House.
"We have a real difference of opinion on Medicare and Social Security and on how those issues should be handled," he said to reporters after the speech. "When I was fighting to hold a Democratic position against Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America, the governor was siding with the Republican few."
Gephardt's campaign wouldn't make him available for a one-on-one interview during my trip to Iowa last week, but Dean was eager to explain Gephardt's attacks on him. "Well, he's clearly in trouble, and he's trying to do what all the other candidates -- Lieberman, Kerry, all of them -- are trying to do, which is attack the frontrunner," Dean said in a phone call he made to me while I was waiting to talk with his campaign manager. "But to do it you have to be fair. It's fair to say I switched my position on trade, but to cast me as an enemy of Medicare and Social Security is beyond the pale."
Let It Be Known
During a visit last week to Gephardt's Des Moines headquarters, Bill Burton, the campaign's Iowa spokesman, handed out a copy of a letter Dean wrote to President Clinton in 1999. The letter urged Clinton to hold steadfast over union objections to the administration's push to admit China into the World Trade Organization.
Needless to say, this is not a position popular with the men and women of Iowa's labor unions, which consider the decade-long move toward trade liberalization a threat to their livelihoods.
Rocha and Burton shed some light last week on the Gephardt campaign strategy: Make sure every single one of the 35,000 union members belonging to the dozen state union organizations that have endorsed Gephardt know Dean's record on labor issues. Rocha and his political apparatus have been disseminating Dean's letter to Clinton as well as a fact sheet highlighting some of Dean's past statements.
Among the statements is this one from a January 1995 appearance on ABC's "This Week with David Brinkley": "I was a very strong supporter of NAFTA. … I believe it's going to create jobs in the United States of America." In March, he reiterated his support:"I still think NAFTA was a good thing."
Meanwhile, at Titan Tires …
To understand why a position like this is unpopular among some workers in Iowa, look no further than Titan Tires in Des Moines, where about 100 of 550 workers have been laid off in the last year, according to John Peno, president of United Steelworkers Local 164. Peno said Titan already has closed plants in recent years in Mississippi and Texas, and workers here perpetually worry that they're next. Peno said NAFTA created competition from other countries that are able to produce tires cheaper, partly because they don't adhere to the sorts of labor and environmental laws present in the United States.
"NAFTA and WTO, those are major issues," Peno said. "When we see manufacturing jobs leaving the country, we have to be concerned. And it's kind of a double-edged sword: If people are out of work, they can't buy the tires we make, which drives down our jobs in our company.
"Do I think Dean would be a good president? Sure I do. But I think Gephardt has the leadership to stop some of this exodus of jobs from the country."
Turning Up the Heat
The Teamsters hall in Des Moines on Friday was the symbolic center of Gephardt's dreams at that moment. Trouble is brewing for his campaign in Iowa. If he doesn't reach labor, he could be doomed.
Among other things, Gephardt said while he was leading the fight to preserve and strengthen Medicare and Social Security against GOP attacks, Dean was fighting to undermine those programs.
"And it was also during this time that Howard Dean, as chairman of the National Governors Association, was supporting Republican efforts to scale back Medicare," Gephardt thundered. "Howard Dean told a gathering of reporters that the way to balance the budget was to cut Social Security, move the retirement age to 70, and cut defense, Medicare and veterans' pensions. Well, I couldn't disagree more with Howard Dean. That is not what we stand for as Democrats."
Dean last week responded with a generalized repudiation of Gephardt, saying he was "deeply saddened that he has chosen to resort to the politics of the past by engaging in name-calling, guilt by association and scare tactics." He accused Gephardt of engaging in "the politics of the past, and attacks like these, that have caused so many people to opt out of the political process."
Whether those things are true, Dean will be forced to respond to these attacks with specifics, and sooner rather than later. In yesterday's interview, Dean acknowledged that he had previously supported NAFTA and normalized trade relations with China. He said that liberalized trade worked to the overall benefit of Vermont, whose interests he sought to promote during his governorship. But Dean said he has since become aware of the negative impact of NAFTA and other trade agreements on the Midwestern industrialized states. As president, he said, he would seek to renegotiate NAFTA to include the environmental, human rights and labor protections that labor unions in this country seek.
"What Dick is not telling people is that Vermont has Little Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws, a minimum wage of $7 an hour, and it's not a right-to-work state," Dean said. "Also, I have a 100 percent [AFL-CIO] record. My position on trade has changed because WTO and NAFTA aren't working. It is a siphon for the trade jobs. When I wasn't running for president, I wasn't spending time in the Midwest."
But Dean said Gephardt is clearly and purposely mischaracterizing his positions on Medicare and Social Security. He said that while he has supported giving some Medicare patients the right to enroll in HMO programs to be eligible for prescription drug benefits, he has never supported a broad scale privatization. He accused Gephardt of distorting his past criticisms of Medicare, saying those criticisms were about the sorry state of the program's bureaucracy, rather than the program itself.
"Frankly, I've done a lot more for health care than Dick Gephardt has ever thought of doing," Dean said. "Dick is a wonderful person. But Congress has produced virtually nothing on health care."
On Social Security, Dean acknowledges that he has said in the past that he might consider increasing the retirement age, but has now come to the firm conclusion that raising the age is not necessary to shore up the system.
Dean's lead in Iowa is tenuous. A non-partisan Zogby International poll of union members in Iowa indicates they favor Dean over Gephardt, 24 percent to 20 percent. The poll, conducted Sept. 8-9, put Dean's lead among all likely voters at 23 percent, with Gephardt following at 17 percent, Kerry running third at 11 percent and no one else in double digits.
But another poll has some good news for Gephardt. Harstad Strategic Research, a Democratic polling firm, surveyed people who had attended caucuses between 1984 and 2000 and found that Gephardt led the pack among those voters with 25 percent, with Dean and Kerry tied at 15 percent and Lieberman at 11 percent. That poll is worth noting because Iowa can be tricky to predict, since only a very small percentage of people actually make the effort to attend a caucus. Perhaps the Harstad results are more accurate by reflecting the opinions of the most activist voters.
Rocha said in 2000 about 35 percent of Democratic caucus goers came from union households.
"If we can get 35 percent for [former vice president Al] Gore, who was a free trader, we should be able to get 45 percent out for Gephardt," he said.
Gephardt's fate in Iowa -- and to a lesser extent beyond -- may depend on it.
© 2003 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
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