Democrats ply wider range of economic woes

Free-trade focus shifts to consumers' struggles

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. - Hillary Clinton's campaign has presented Pennsylvania's primary as a repeat performance of her Ohio victory earlier this month, in which a hard line on free trade helped Clinton claim bona fides on economic issues and forge an emotional connection with blue-collar voters.

Yet as they traveled through Pennsylvania last week, neither Clinton nor her opponent, Barack Obama, once mentioned the North American Free Trade Agreement - a frequent bugaboo in their Ohio politicking - and refrained from a prolonged discussion of trade issues altogether.

As the Democrats enter a 10-state closing stretch in which economic concerns are likely to dominate the debate, Clinton and Obama - who both gave speeches on the subject last week, as did John McCain - are expanding beyond their past populist appeals and using a broader language that can address different experiences of economic change.

In Pennsylvania, which on April 22 will host the largest of the remaining contests, Clinton and Obama have turned their emphasis from industrial policy to household economics, such as subprime mortgages, the rising price of gas, supermarket costs, and the interest rates charged on student loans.

Both Democrats have chosen to stress the domestic struggles of workers and consumers over the global challenges faced by producers.

"That shift from producer to consumer is a unifying theme for Democrats. It allows them to speak across the working-class/professional-class divide that has split them," said Richard Florida, a professor of business and creativity at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto.

Despite the iconic power of Pennsylvania industry - Obama stopped outside Pittsburgh on Friday to greet workers on a shift change at the nation's oldest steel plant, originally owned by Andrew Carnegie - observers of the local economy said such resource-driven production is no longer central to the state's increasingly diversified economic base.

"Most people have an older impression of Pennsylvania - that it's an industrial state, a coal and steel state like Ohio. That's a way-too-dated view of the state," said Dennis Yablonsky, Pennsylvania's secretary of economic and community development. "Our economy has been in transition from an industrial state to a knowledge-driven one for 20 years."

In Pennsylvania, economic anxiety has been an institutionalized element of political campaigns for decades, so much so that the wrenching transformations that candidates have promised to help stave off elsewhere in the Rust Belt are discussed here in the past tense.

"What Ohio and Michigan have been going through with the auto decline in the last decade, Pennsylvania experienced with steel in the 1970s," said Florida, a longtime resident of Pittsburgh. "Pennsylvania would have the same political culture as Ohio, but there's less important manufacturing left."

Both candidates have taken on a populist vim, finding fresh grist in the Federal Reserve's recent bailout of Bear Stearns.

In Western Pennsylvania last week, Clinton promised to be a "president who cares more about Westmoreland County than Wall Street."

"Is there any wonder, then, that the energy laws are written for the oil and gas companies and they're not written for you?" Obama asked a Pittsburgh crowd on Friday.

Yet neither candidate followed up with fierce talk on trade, as they did in Ohio, where both threatened to withdraw from NAFTA as part of a tough negotiating posture toward Mexico and Canada - a swagger that was softened in Pennsylvania.

"It's still an issue for labor, but when NAFTA came along, the demise of coal and steel were so far gone that nothing would have resurrected them," said state Senator John Wozniak, a Johnstown Democrat.

Although Obama said Friday in Pittsburgh that he wants to "make sure our trade agreements have labor standards," he waved off a call-center employee in Johnstown who blamed NAFTA for the outsourcing of such jobs. "NAFTA's actually not responsible for jobs being shipped to India from call centers," Obama said.

When she first campaigned in Pennsylvania after winning Ohio earlier in the month, Clinton repeated a charge that she had used often there, attacking Obama for what she described as his inconsistent positions on NAFTA and citing allegations that an Obama adviser had told a Canadian official not to take his trade rhetoric seriously.

Yet in two days of campaigning across the state last week, Clinton talked about trade only when directly asked about it by a voter in Greensburg, once the heart of western Pennsylvania manufacturing. Even then, she did not even mention NAFTA and was modest in her critique of current American trade policy.

"We have got to get to a different policy toward trade," Clinton said in Greensburg. "Many of the countries with whom we trade do not reciprocate. They don't open their markets the way we open our markets."

While the recent release of records from Clinton's White House years showing that she campaigned for NAFTA's passage in 1993 has complicated her ability to criticize Obama's consistency on the issue, local economic priorities have also made the topic less urgent in much of Pennsylvania.

"There is still a concern with jobs going overseas, but I don't think it's to the same degree as in Ohio," said state Representative Chelsa Wagner, a Democrat representing a Pittsburgh district. "I think it's a little more broad-based: We're not just concerned with jobs."

Both Clinton and Obama have found a unifying theme in talking about the increased costs of consumer life, including energy, housing, education, and healthcare.

Political observers said such an emphasis could resonate in working-class parts of the state and in southeastern Pennsylvania, where the economy is driven by life sciences and professional services. Both campaigns hope to win over suburban professionals, many of whom have traditionally identified with the Republican Party.

"Maybe her move is to appeal more broadly and mute those issues," Florida said, referring to Clinton's limited attention to trade policy. "It would be less divisive with more affluent, college-educated voters."

Appearing before backdrops reading "Solutions for the American Economy" and declaring that she would be "ready on day one to be commander-in-chief of our economy," Clinton drew on a more feminine frame of reference for her discussion of financial issues.

At a policy address in Philadelphia, where she recommended further federal intervention in the mortgage market, Clinton recounted the role home ownership played in her married life.

"That first home meant the world to us," Clinton said, while noting its need for kitchen renovations. "It was where we started our life together, celebrated birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays with our friends."

Illustrating the emotional relationship consumers have with the material world is a particularly effective technique for female voters, said one Clinton supporter who attended the speech.

"I think it's a sensitive way of doing it. Do women see housing through a different prism? The answer is yes," said Marjorie Margolies, a former Pennsylvania congresswoman who is now president of the advocacy group Women's Campaign International.

At a "Pennsylvania Women for Hillary" event later in the day in an upscale suburb, Clinton presented the mortgage crisis and the high cost of student loans within a litany of concerns targeted at the professional women in her audience, including work discrimination and a lack of equal pay.

Last night, Clinton detailed her proposals to regulate financial markets: tougher standards governing mortgage lenders, more independence for rating agencies, a 30 percent annual interest rate cap on all credit cards, and more immediate authority for the Federal Reserve to regulate financial institutions. She told Reuters that Bush administration plans, set to be unveiled today, are "simply too short on action."

Obama also is personalizing his connection to voters' economic concerns. His new ads situate him at points of economic unease: standing at a gas station in one now airing in Pennsylvania, and in a leather jacket in front of a steel plant's conveyor in a spot shown in Indiana.

"These are issues that he's not only concerned about but that he's experienced and he's lived," said David Ehrenwerth, an Obama fund-raiser in Pittsburgh. "He's had college loans and he's paid them off, not too long ago."

In Greensburg, Obama volunteered other middle-class credentials - "I was raised by a single mother, I did not have a trust fund" - as well as a familiarity with the grocery aisle.

"You've never paid more for a dozen eggs, a gallon of milk," Obama said in Greensburg, apparently prompting someone in the audience to volunteer something from a personal shopping list.

"Hamburger?" Obama asked. "That, too."