A cause endures: Gephardt is out. Is protectionism in?(Election 2004 II)

RICHARD GEPHARDT's quest for the Democratic presidential nomination is over, and so, apparently, is his political career. But one key element of his message continues to reverberate within his party.

While Howard Dean tapped the antiwar sentiment among Democrats, Gephardt tried to mine resentment against international trade. In his stump speeches, he blamed trade for most of America's perceived and real economic ills. He hammered home the fact that, in contrast to his rivals, he opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) bill that ushered China into the World Trade Organization. It's a message that, at least before the Iowa caucuses on January 19, seemed to resonate with many blue-collar union members.

No one could accuse Dick Gephardt of an eleventh-hour conversion to the protectionist gospel. The 14-term Missouri congressman has been preaching and practicing it for years. Back in the 1980s, he championed an amendment that would have imposed sanctions on countries that ran bilateral trade surpluses with the U.S. He not only opposed but led the charge in the House against NAFTA, PNTR with China, and trade-promotion authority (a.k.a. "fast track").

Gephardt wrapped his pronouncements against trade in near-apocalyptic language. The U.S. trade deficit "is both an American crisis and a global tragedy." U.S. multinational companies are aiding and abetting a global "race to the bottom" in which they "have thrown morality to the winds and sought out those countries where exploitation knows no bounds."

While his own bid failed, the former House Democratic leader won converts among his rivals. He justifiably bragged that the other candidates were sounding more like Dick Gephardt with each passing debate. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts voted for NAFTA, China PNTR, and trade-promotion authority, but he has now pledged to veto agreements that do not enforce strict labor and environmental standards on less developed countries (a poison pill that would preclude any new agreements). Howard Dean backed NAFTA when he was governor of Vermont, but now says he wants to renegotiate the deal to toughen standards. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who has a mixed voting record, has sounded harsher in his criticisms of free trade. Wesley Clark, a blank slate on trade, has adopted the tougher-standards mantra. Only Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut has defended the free-trade tradition, warning his fellow Democrats that protectionism would harm the U.S. economy and cost jobs in export-oriented farm states such as Iowa.

Gephardt chided his rivals for supporting "a trade policy that's exactly like George Bush's," skipping over the irony that what he really opposed were Bill Clinton's trade policies. After all, NAFTA and China PNTR, the two main targets of Gephardt's fire, were pushed through Congress by President Clinton. While Clinton had his lapses from free trade (as has his successor), he championed it rhetorically and delivered some genuine victories. Gephardt and the rest of the protectionist pack seem to have forgotten the pro-trade element in the centrist platform of the only Democrat to win two terms in office since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In supporting trade, it is Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman who represent "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party." In the days of FDR and John F. Kennedy, Democrats were the ones who understood that trade keeps prices down for working families by keeping competitive pressure up on domestic producers. It was Democrats such as Secretary of State Cordell Hull who turned our nation away from the disastrous protectionist policies of the 1930s and embraced trade as a tool of foreign policy. In the aftermath of World War II, trade spread hope to war-torn Europe and Japan, helped knit together a peaceful Western Europe, and helped cement the Cold War alliance.