Gephardt is out there singing your song. If he had his way, he would put us into a recession.
Gephardt Keeps Talking Trade
Candidate Hopes to Reprise '88 Iowa Victory
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 27, 2003; Page A01
Sixth in a series of occasional articles
COLUMBIA, S.C.
Under the fluorescent glow of a vast job-placement center, before a small audience of unemployed workers, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) hit his stride, excoriating trade policies that he says have ravaged the United States' manufacturing base, beggared its working class and sent well-paying jobs to exploited masses in the Third World.
"Go to where the workers lived," the Democratic White House hopeful said, his voice rising indignantly. "They live on the ground. They live in the cardboard boxes that bring the products to the United States -- raw sewage coming down the street, no water, no sewers, no electricity. They live in worse conditions than most animals live in the United States."
Are there any questions? he asks. After a long silence, Brenda Fay Leaphart, who had just lost a manufacturing job she'd held for 19 years, sheepishly raised her hand.
"If you're president," she asked, "are you going to stop this war?"
Over the din of war and terrorism, amid a field of Democrats who largely agree with him, the Missouri lawmaker has been struggling to push his signature issue of trade to critical mass. In the early days of the 1988 presidential campaign, his first shot at the White House, Gephardt stormed out of nowhere to sweep the Iowa Democratic caucuses on the strength of one legendary political commercial with one pointed message: Trade can hurt.
The message did not carry him to the finish line, but 15 years later, Gephardt and his allies, especially old-line industrial labor unions, are trying to make that Iowa lightning strike twice as they promote international wage and environmental standards, tougher labor rules within trade agreements, and a general slowing of trade-liberalization policies.
This time, they say, the trade issue should resonate well beyond Iowa and the industrial Midwest, with its hemorrhaging manufacturing base -- to Silicon Valley and Washington state, where software jobs are moving to India; to the Carolinas, where textile mills are crumbling under pressure from dirt-cheap Chinese competitors; to technical-support phone operators who are moving from New Hampshire to New Delhi. Even radiologists are threatened when overseas X-ray readers can look for fractures in an image broadcast from the United States over the Internet.
The Bush administration completed an agreement that would extend the North American free-trade zone south to four Central American nations this month, even as a wave of protectionist sentiment is cresting in Washington. And on Jan. 1, free-traders and opponents of globalization will mark the 10th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
"This election is going to be a bellwether on whether trade matters as much as we think it does," said Mike Mathis, governmental affairs director for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which has endorsed Gephardt. "If people don't see the negative impact [of free trade] this time, I don't see how we can make it a big issue anymore."
Gephardt and his campaign aides are loath to say that trade is the focal point of his campaign. They prefer to put the issue into the broader context of a return to prosperity, a context that encompasses his ideas on health care, education, pension portability and energy independence. But ever since Gephardt went to Washington in 1977 as a protégé of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), who became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in 1981, this son of a Teamsters milkman has been identified with protectionism. In the 1980s, his native St. Louis was the second-largest automotive center outside Detroit, said his longtime general counsel, Michael R. Wessel. Constituents Ralston Purina Co. and Monsanto Co. were intertwined in the international economy.
Before his rise as a presidential candidate in 1988, the lawmaker's name was firmly affixed to legislation known as the Gephardt amendment, a controversial push to force the White House to reduce trade surpluses with countries that protect their markets from U.S. exports.
"The interest in the trade issue came because St. Louis was so dramatically impacted by these trade issues," said Bill Carrick, Gephardt's 1988 campaign manager, who has returned to advise the campaign this year. "For Gephardt, it was simply a response to constituent need."
In the winter of 1987, the young congressman's presidential campaign was stuck in single digits, even in Iowa, where the heartland candidate needed to break out. Trade issues were already hot in Washington, thanks to inflammatory hearings at which lawmakers accused the Japanese of blocking U.S. ski exports by arguing that Japan's snow was incompatible, of keeping Federal Express out with the novel requirement that the contents of all shipments be checked and documented with hand-rendered drawings, and of killing cosmetics sales by claiming that American-made products could not work on Asian skin.
Gephardt's campaign aides -- Carrick; his deputy, Joe Trippi; David Doak; and Bob Shrum -- struggled to make the issue resonate beyond Capitol Hill. Skis would not win a lot of sympathy in Iowa, they recalled. Federal Express was based in Tennessee. Then Shrum and Trippi stumbled on the Chrysler K-car platform and South Korea's much-maligned Hyundai -- and an ad was born.
"They work their hearts out every day," Gephardt intoned in the voice-over. Yet after Korean taxes and tariffs, "a $10,000 Chrysler K-car costs $48,000 in South Korea. It's not their fault we can't sell our cars in a market like that, and I'm tired of hearing American workers blamed for it."
If he was elected, the candidate promised, the South Koreans would "be left asking themselves how many Americans are going to pay $48,000 for one of their Hyundais."
The ad went up in Iowa just after Christmas, when no other candidates were on the air. A blizzard kept voters inside, with their televisions, Carrick remembered. It was a sensation.
"We were more worried that the fuel would not ignite than how explosive the rocket would be," Doak said. "We had no idea how it would take off."
Within weeks, Gephardt rocketed to the top of the polls, ahead of favored Sen. Paul Simon (Ill.) and Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. That February, Gephardt captured 31 percent of Iowa's Democratic delegates. Simon took 26 percent, Dukakis 22 percent.
It was the high-water mark of a campaign that eked out a second-place finish in New Hampshire but then ran out of money and gas in March 1988's Super Tuesday primaries.
If anything, the trade issue should be bigger now, Gephardt insisted in an interview. Then, it was a fairly narrow critique of access to developed markets, primarily in South Korea and Japan. But NAFTA, normalized trade relations with China and the spreading power of the World Trade Organization have fundamentally changed the stakes. Now, Gephardt said, the United States has put itself on an unfair playing field, competing with low-wage workers laboring for industries with few environmental controls and virtually no labor standards.
"We've just kind of wandered into these trade treaties without any concept of how we're going to compete with these countries with such low standards, or how we can bring those standards up," he said. "What I predicted would happen has begun to happen."
But unlike in 1988, when Gephardt was roundly attacked for his protectionism, now all of the Democratic candidates are calling for tougher environmental and labor standards. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio) has outflanked Gephardt on the left, calling for the immediate abrogation of NAFTA and withdrawal from the WTO.
To differentiate himself, Gephardt has proposed setting an international minimum wage, to be negotiated through the WTO, hardly the stuff of bumper stickers, Democratic consultants say.
"Gephardt now has to say, 'But I was there first. I voted against NAFTA, and now you're all for environmental regulations and labor rules, but you want them as side agreements, not part of the main agreement,' " said one Democratic consultant, who asked not to be named. "It's a far more difficult case to make."
Trippi, who manages the campaign of former Vermont governor Howard Dean, insists that Gephardt's problem is more fundamental. "He's been talking about these issues for a long time," Trippi said. "But in the end, they still lost their plants, they still lost their jobs."
Gephardt's mere presence on the campaign trail underscores Dean's message of the need to overthrow the status quo in Washington, Trippi said. "The major theme of this election is, who's in control? If you have oil companies writing our energy policy, the pharmaceutical companies writing our drug policy, the multinational companies writing our trade policy," Trippi said, "how the hell are you going to change anything?"
Back in South Carolina, another problem becomes clear. Even the unemployed -- or the precariously employed -- seem to have other things on their mind.
At the Lunch Box diner in Union, owner Jack Bailey lamented the collapse of the textile industry, the loss of his own mill to international competition and the destitution of his once-thriving home town. As for President Bush, who won Bailey's vote in 2000, he said, "I'll say this: He hasn't helped matters."
But none of the Democrats has captured Bailey's attention, although the party's March 3 primary is rapidly approaching. "The only thing I think is going to hurt George W. Bush is the war," he confided. "We weren't told entirely the truth before we went in there, were we?"
Still, he may vote again for Bush, he said, if he sees the president as helping him with his and his wife's prescription drug bills and other retirement issues.
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