Dems come out for raising taxes? Good luck! Bush has got them by the short hairs on this one.
In Phila., Democrats joust on tax cuts, war
By Dick Polman
Inquirer Staff Writer
The last sighting of the Democratic presidential candidates - before they were buried in the news by Arnold Schwarzenegger - was last week in Chicago, when they were vying in vain for the AFL-CIO's endorsement and jousting over whether centrism or liberalism was the best path to the White House.
They are still wooing labor and dueling among themselves. Last night, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, seven candidates auditioned on a pristine mezzanine packed with union workers, clashing repeatedly on everything from tax cuts to war.
As evidenced by the responses of the major contenders, in a forum sponsored by the Sheet Metal Workers' International Association, a pattern seems to have emerged: On domestic issues, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and former House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri are running as liberals; Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman is running as a moderate; and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry is somewhere between.
There is now, for example, a Democratic disagreement on what to do about the Bush tax cuts. Dean and Gephardt want to cancel them all, across all income levels, and use the money for domestic programs, particularly universal health care. Gephardt said the Bush tax cuts were "like handing out candy."
Dean, the pace-setting candidate who was on the covers of Time and Newsweek last week, was asked whether it was fair to halt all tax cuts to the middle class. He replied that it would be impossible to cut the tax bills of those citizens and finance urgently needed federal programs at the same time.
"We can't promise more than we can deliver," he said. "We can do health insurance, but not [with] a tax cut. We can't have both. It's wrong to tell middle-class people, 'We'll let you have that $200 or $300 and health insurance, too.' That's not going to wash. We have to show we can be truthful about money."
But Kerry, taking a page from the playbook of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, said the middle class should be allowed to keep the Bush tax cuts. Taking them away, he said, "is bad economics, it's bad social policy, and it's bad politics... . The last time I looked, the problem in America is not that the middle class has too much money."
Kerry did not explain what he meant by "bad politics," but many Democrats fear that President Bush will have an easier time wooing middle-class votes next year if the Democratic nominee is campaigning for an across-the-board cancellation of the Bush tax cuts.
Lieberman, who is trying to gain traction in this race, amid evidence of sluggish fund-raising, has been seeking to market himself as the electable centrist. It remains to be seen whether that approach can fire up the liberal voters and union stalwarts who tend to dominate Democratic primaries, but last night he rebuked the more left-leaning candidates anyway.
Lieberman listened as Gephardt hawked an ambitious health-care plan that would be financed by the money retrieved from the Bush tax cuts, and as former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun touted a single-payer, Canada-style government health plan. Then Lieberman said: "We're forgetting again about all the changes that Bill Clinton and Al Gore made in the Democratic Party [during the 1990s], when they took us out of the political wilderness, when they said the era of big government is over."
The senator also took a fresh shot at Dean, who has stoked the Democratic grassroots with his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq. Lieberman, the most hawkish Democratic candidate, had implied in a speech last week that if Dean became the nominee, his antiwar stance would alienate centrist voters who worry about national security. Lieberman did it again last night.
"The American people," Lieberman said, "won't elect anyone they can't trust on security... . They will not elect as president a Democrat who sounds an uncertain trumpet in these dangerous times."
Dean defended himself, saying that he had backed the first Persian Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan. But he said he always opposed the second Gulf War because Bush had not made the case for conflict."
In the midst of his answer, Dean also managed to take a swipe at Kerry, who voted for the war resolution last autumn but later attacked Bush for moving too fast. "You can't say you opposed the rush to war when you've voted to allow the President to rush to war," Dean said.
Lieberman pounced on Kerry as well, contending that "decisiveness... is what people expect in their president, not uncertainty and ambivalence."
That is a theme of choice for Kerry' rivals, as they seek to undermine his status as a Vietnam war hero.
Kerry defended his war vote, and, on the domestic front, he also managed to pitch his health-care plan, which puts heavy emphasis on cost containment. He boasted that Time magazine called it "the best big idea" of the campaign.
However, he did not mention a flap over the plan. The National Journal magazine asked 10 bipartisan health experts to assess the various Democratic health-care plans for the July 19 issue. The experts did not pick a favorite, but Kerry's Web site claimed last week that Kerry's plan had been rated the best - and heralded the news with a graphic of a prize ribbon. But last week, the experts told the Washington Post that Kerry's claim was "patently untrue."
Meanwhile, the three long-shot candidates were also on stage: Braun, Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich and the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist from New York. Kucinich seemed offended when was asked to render an opinion about Schwarzenegger ("Is this a serious question?"), but all seven candidates weighed in on what they saw as the evils of the California recall.
Sharpton declared that he would seek to push the other candidates to embrace more liberal positions.
Two candidates - Sens. John Edwards of North Carolina and Bob Graham of Florida - did not attend, because they were concentrating on Iowa. But the fact that seven showed up, at an event cohosted by Gov. Rendell with Mayor Street, spoke volumes about the political math of 2004: Pennsylvania has 23 electoral votes, and the state probably cannot be won without a 3-1 ratio for a Democrat in the city of Philadelphia.
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