All the speculation over House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt's intentions in 1996 shines the searchlight in the wrong corner. Gephardt (D-Mo.) is such a creature of party and institution, and so personally methodical, that it's difficult to imagine him rolling the dice on a high-risk primary assault against President Clinton next year.
But whatever his plans for the presidency, Gephardt is already challenging Clinton as the leader of the Democratic opposition. With increasing boldness, Gephardt is presenting a vision for the party that veers decisively from Clinton's. In a series of speeches since the election, Gephardt has rejected the core of Clinton's economic vision--just as he resisted the essence of Clinton's social policy agenda in his legislative decisions over the past two years.
In his economic agenda, Clinton represents the Democrats' internationalist wing. Influenced by thinkers like Robert B. Reich, now the secretary of labor, Clinton argues for a strategy of adapting to the globalization of the economy rather than resisting it. Clinton maintains that no one can stop the migration of low-skill jobs to low-wage countries like Mexico and China. Rather, he says, government's role should be to train Americans to move into higher-skill jobs--and to open new markets abroad for high-value American products through trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Gephardt champions the party's competing economic nationalist wing. In a speech earlier this month to the Economic Policy Institute--the intellectual center of that camp--Gephardt repudiated both pillars of Clinton's vision. Gephardt, who opposed NAFTA, ridiculed the idea that "new skills and training and education alone will help us weather the storm" and condemned "new trade relationships . . . (that) have thrown us into roller-coaster competition with . . . nations with rock-bottom wages."
Instead, Gephardt argued, the United States should enter into trade agreements only with nations that will commit to raising domestic living standards and guaranteeing worker rights--hurdles that would significantly slow, if not entirely derail, Clinton's push for free-trade zones across Latin America and Asia. And Gephardt called for a new corporate "code of conduct" that would push American companies to share profits and power with their workers.
