— Philadelphia
THOUGH BILLED as a fete for the working stiff, the Republican tribute to Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa last Monday night turned out to be one of the most A-list gatherings of the Republican convention. The Marriott ballroom was mobbed with conservative dignitaries: senators Arlen Specter (Penn.), Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Colo.), Spencer Abraham (Mich.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Rick Santorum (Penn.), and Ted Stevens (Alaska); governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania; and a raft of congressmen — Tom Davis (Va.), Henry Hyde (Ill.), Pete King and Jack Quinn (both of N.Y.), Chris Smith and Frank LoBiondo (N.J.), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.), and Georgia’s Bob Barr, fresh from a Service Employees event, and so enthusiastic about the Teamsters initiative that he showed up late for his own party that began at the same time. A beaming RNC chairman Jim Nicholson expressed his “respect for this great labor organization” and said of Hoffa, “He’s a reformer, too.”
Republicans are wooing the Teamsters with a zeal they haven’t shown in two decades. Several factors make this union, which has branched out from its corps of truckers and other transportation workers, electorally appetizing. With 1.5 million members, the Teamsters are the largest union outside of the AFL-CIO, and one of the most independent. They endorsed Democrats in 1968 and 1972, Republicans in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, and stayed neutral in 1976 and 1996. What’s more, they’re concentrated in the very states that will be the bloodiest electoral battlegrounds this autumn: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and to a lesser extent, Illinois and California.
Hoffa has announced that around Labor Day, the union will either endorse one of the tickets or declare its neutrality.
Hoffa will be a delegate to the Democratic convention in Los Angeles next week. On the issues, Democrats provide him with a better fit. His outspoken attacks on globalism and free trade have won him praise in the Nation. The Clinton administration has, at Hoffa’s insistence, reneged on NAFTA agreements to keep Mexican trucks from entering the United States. Hoffa, like most other trade unionists, dislikes free-trading Republicans.
But his dislike of free-trading Democrats — since it’s compounded by a sense of betrayal — is even more intense. And Hoffa has deeper reasons not to trust the Democrats, particularly those in the Clinton wing of the party. In 1996, Democrats backed the misnamed “reform” forces of ex-president Ron Carey, who defeated Hoffa in a close fought election. In 1997, Carey was ousted for having engaged in a $ 750,000 money-laundering scheme that involved Democratic party fund-raising. One Teamster at last week’s event repeated a line that is now a refrain among Hoffa forces: “The Teamsters are no longer going to be an ATM for the Democratic party.”
This means playing hardball. Hoffa is reassessing his party loyalties. He’s met with both Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan. The union has not released a penny to the 73 Democrats who voted for permanent normal trade relations with China, a measure the Teamsters opposed. Since his election, Hoffa has reinvigorated the union’s political might to the extent that they’re a welcome voice in AFL-CIO meetings.
The gala was the brainchild of Scott Reed, campaign manager for Bob Dole’s failed 1996 presidential run. Reed suggested the fete to Nicholson in May. Nicholson, knowing George W. Bush had had a successful meeting with Hoffa in April, okayed the plan. By June, the event was on the calendar, and Bush had followed up with a lengthy conference call to the union’s executive board.
At the height of the Carey scandals, the two judiciary chairmen, Hyde in the House and Hatch in the Senate, really “stepped up to the plate,” according to Hoffa. Michigan congressman Pete Hoekstra turned his office into a clearinghouse for all the information that investigators turned up. Hyde has since deepened the relationship by working to lower gasoline prices and to remove the antitrust exemption that puts Teamsters truckers at a disadvantage when negotiating with shipping companies. That’s why Hyde is perhaps the most optimistic of Republicans about what could arise from the party’s courtship of Hoffa. Asked at the tribute whether it would be a sufficient victory merely to keep the Teamsters neutral, Hyde replied with a sharp: “No: The best would be the endorsement.”
Michigan governor John Engler, whose campaign estimates he won half the labor vote in his 1998 reelection effort, points out that two married UAW workers would qualify, by Al Gore’s definition, as too “rich” for tax cuts or expanded IRAs. Hoffa certainly appears to be making peace. At the Republican gala, he dodged a hostile reporter’s question regarding Dick Cheney’s voting record. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Teamsters gave the Bush campaign a friendly tip-off about possible unfair labor practices by Overnite Transportation, on whose board Cheney sits.
But all these may pale beside the one big issue: the continued oversight of the Teamsters by an independent review board, under the jurisdiction of the Southern District of New York federal court, that has overseen the union’s finances and activities since the corruption scandals of the 1980s. Hoffa must run for reelection in 2002 and keenly wants the review board out by them. Teamsters make the point that the program drains hundreds of thousands a year out of union funds; that since every member of the board gets a Teamsters pension, the oversight program amounts to a “golden parachute” for friends of the court. What’s more, the review board did nothing to stop the DNC-Teamsters fund swap in the mid-1990s. To pave the way for oversight to be lifted, Hoffa has installed a former federal prosecutor — with a staff of former FBI agents — as inspector general of the union.
Republicans think Democrats, because of their role in the Carey scandals, cannot realistically call off the review board. The GOP, however, could, and would like to. One Bush adviser says, “Republicans would be more than flexible on this question.” But here’s where accounts diverge. Republicans, and official Teamsters sources, say Hoffa and the union have made a principled decision to “keep that question out of the process at this point.” One Teamster, however, speaking off the record, says Bush told the executive board two things that stuck in everyone’s mind. First, “I would like your support, but if I don’t get it, I want you to know I’ll be the president for all Americans. Second, that “government should not be in the business of regulating unions.”
Republicans — whose Soul Train convention in Philadelphia showed that incursions into Democrats’ black and female base will be at the heart of the campaign — seek to sever Gore from his labor base as well. Scott Reed thinks they’re already doing it. “He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t think Gore was a questionable candidate,” said Reed at the rally. “Gore looks like a loser.” The Teamsters periodically survey their members on their political learnings; one such survey last spring found Bush more popular than Gore. If Gore still trails by double digits in the first week of September, a Teamsters endorsement of Bush could prove the better part of valor.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
