Category: Spring 2004
Howard Stern’s Suspension is Met with Mixed Reactions
By Brian Dolan
WASHINGTON—Connecticut Congress members had mixed reactions Thursday to Clear Channel’s suspension of the Howard Stern Show the night before a congressional hearing on indecency in the media.
A spokeswoman for Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4th, said the congressman has nothing to say in reaction to Clear Channel’s decision or to the recent general debate over indecency in the media.
“Clear Channel drew a line in the sand today with regard to protecting our listeners from indecent content, and Howard Stern’s show blew right through it,” John Hogan, president and CEO of Clear Channel Radio, said in a press release Wednesday. “It was vulgar, offensive and insulting, not just to women and African-Americans but to anyone with a sense of common decency.”
Hogan said in the press release that Clear Channel stations would not air the Howard Stern Show until they could be assured that the show will conform to their standards of decency.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., introduced legislation last month that proposes to increase the penalties for television and radio broadcasters that transmit obscene, indecent andprofane language. The Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act would allow the Federal Communications Commission to issue a maximum fine for each violation of $275,000, up tenfold from $27,500.
“I share senator Brownback’s concerns, as well as those of millions of parents,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said in a statement Friday. “I will be taking a close look at his bill and other possible solutions to this problem.”
“We were very happy to see today’s news that part of [Stern’s] show has been scrubbed,” Upton said Thursday at a hearing on indecency in the media before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “I don’t think what he said this week is much different from what he’s been saying for years. Why didn’t this happen earlier?”
At the hearing, Hogan agreed that Stern’s show was no more indecent Tuesday than in previous shows, but Clear Channel’s regulations for indecency have become less tolerant.
Upton said that Viacom president Mel Karmazin, after testifying at a previous congressional hearing, has heard Congress’s message “loud and clear.” Viacom subsidiary Infinity Broadcasting Operations Inc. owns Stern’s show.
“Karmazin had a conference call with the execs of all 180 Infinity radio stations telling them they’ll be fired if they violate the company’s new ‘zero tolerance’ policy on obscenity,” Upton said.
The hearing Thursday was the second this month after Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed during the Super Bowl halftime show Feb. 1.
“There must be a level of expectation when a parent turns on the TV or radio between the hours of 6 a.m. and10 p.m. that the content will be suitable for children,” said Upton, chairman of the Energy And Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. “You should not have to think twice about the content on the public airwaves—unfortunately, that situation is far from reality.”
Congress Considers Taxing Internet Sales
WASHINGTON – A pair of L.L.Bean blue jeans costs 5 percent more when shipped to a customer in Maine than to one in New Hampshire . That’s because the clothing company does not have to collect sales taxes when it ships to any of the 46 states where it doesn’t have a retail store, including New Hampshire .
But that might be about to change.
Bipartisan legislation in Congress would force companies to collect sales taxes on behalf of any state they ship to even if the merchandise was ordered by mail, by telephone or through the Internet.
New Hampshire is one of only five states without a sales tax, but the indirect reverberations of an Internet sales tax could nevertheless affect its residents and companies .
“If you live in New Hampshire and you're buying from a seller and sending it to a relative in California , you'll have to pay California sales tax,” said Mark Micali, vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.
New Hampshire-based companies like Brookstone and J. Jill would have to collect sales taxes when they shipped products out of state, even to states where they had no stores.
Micali said an Internet sales tax is unfair to out-of-state retailers. “We have very vigorously opposed it for quite a while,” he said. He added that businesses are put at a disadvantage in tax disputes when they have to plead a case where they have “no presence and no political clout.”
“If you go to a foreign state, you're really nobody there,” he said.
Under current law, whether customers pay sales taxes in online transactions varies from merchant to merchant. Micali said that because J.C. Penney has stores in every state, every remote purchase—online, mail-order or phone—from the company is taxed. But Amazon.com rarely charges sales taxes because it has no stores.
Supporters of the so-called Internet sales tax say it’s not really a new tax, but rather increasing enforcement of laws already on the books.
“Our position is that the legislation is already there,” said Jacquelyn Byers, director of research at the National Association of Counties. Many counties levy sales taxes.
Enforcing taxes on online purchases might discourage some people from buying online, but the Internet’s main advantage over local retail shopping is convenience, not price, Byers said.
A small price increase for the consumer could make a big difference for the states that would receive the money. As increasing proportions of retail purchases are bought online, states worry that without an Internet sales tax, they will lose more and more money. And with states’ continuing budget crises, new income streams are welcome.
“Somewhere between $3 billion and $5 billion of revenue has been lost since the boom in Internet sales in the past five to seven years,” Byers said. “It’s a phenomenal amount of money.”
Byers also discounted concerns that new tax-collecting responsibilities would mean headaches for businesses. “It’s a single piece of software,” she said, referring to programs that can help companies keep track of what sales tax they need to collect and submit to each state. Byers said, “It’s a much easier job to collect this tax than people think it is”
States are already working to simplify their sales tax guidelines and make it easier to keep track of which taxes are owed.
At the Multistate Tax Commission, a joint state agency that deals with interstate commerce, executive director Dan Bucks said that once tax codes are simplified, they should be made “equitable” for local and remote sellers. When online sellers don’t have to collect sales taxes, their prices can be slightly lower, leading to what Bucks calls “an unfair advantage” over sellers down the street.
In 1992, the Supreme Court said that if states simplified and standardized their tax codes, Congress could give states new authority to tax interstate commerce—authority that would cover businesses not physically located in their jurisdictions.
Bucks said, “The assumption is that [remote sellers] have a collection cost disadvantage over local sellers” because it’s more complicated for them to calculate, collect, and submit sales taxes for out-of-state locales. States couldn’t tax Internet sales in the past because “remote sellers had to be protected” from the higher cost of collecting, he said.
Bucks said that because simplification of tax codes has eliminated the collection cost disadvantage, states should be able to level the field for local sellers to compete with remote sellers.
Rep. Charles Bass (R-N.H.) is “categorically, unequivocally opposed to the bill and opposed to allowing other states to impose their sales taxes on New Hampshire consumers, and equally opposed to allowing other states to force New Hampshire businesses to collect sales taxes for them,” said spokesman Tad Furtado.
“It’s an issue we’ve been working on for a long time, and the congressman feels very, very strongly about it,” he said.
Furtado discounted tax code simplification as a rationale for taxing remote sales. “Even if every jurisdiction in the country had a 5 percent sales tax, it would still take an act of Congress” to let them collect out-of-state taxes, he said.
Although the current legislation would allow “point-of-destination” states to collect the taxes, “point-of-origin” sales taxes have also been discussed by proponents of the tax, Furtado said. Under that kind of law, states could collect sales taxes from their own businesses that sold products to out-of-state customers, but not from businesses in other states.
“You wouldn’t need a federal law to pass a point-of-origin Internet tax law,” Furtado said, adding that Bass opposes any form of Internet taxes. Instead of point-of-origin, he said, states are interested in point-of-destination because it would let them collect taxes from businesses they’re not accountable to.
“It’s just not right for states to export their taxes,” he said. “We think that there’s value in tax competition.”
Furtado said that an Internet sales tax might even lead—someday—to a sales tax in New Hampshire if the new tax caused too much money to leave the state. New Hampshire ’s lack of a sales tax means the state would not see any money from an Internet sales tax.
G. Philip Blatsos, commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration, said that although the proposed law wouldn’t affect New Hampshire ’s tax structure or revenue stream, it would have “a detrimental effect” on New Hampshire businesses because it would penalize the five states without sales taxes.
In Concord , Charlie Arlinghaus, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, agreed that an Internet sales tax wouldn’t help consumers. “I don’t ever trust the government when they say they’re going to simplify my taxes,” he said. The center is a free-market think tank.
Arlinghaus said the Internet sales tax is “government in search of more money, rather than making economic sense.”
“You raise taxes on anything and you get less of it. There’s no advantage to that. One of the advantages of not having an Internet tax is that it creates an economic incentive for people to lower taxes” in stores, Arlinghaus said. “For example, people shop in New Hampshire and not in Massachusetts because there’s no sales tax in New Hampshire … Internet taxes is the same thing.”
The bill before Congress exempts small businesses with less than $5 million nationwide in remote sales from sales tax collection. But Arlinghaus said the exemption wouldn’t help. He said its very presence “acknowledges that there is an economic burden involved in the collection of the taxes. What we’re saying is that if your company is big enough, we don’t care about your economic burden…and that’s a silly distinction.”
Bucks, at the Multistate Tax Commission, disagreed. “The small-business exception recognizes the fact that it’s more costly for small business to collect the sales tax than larger businesses,” he said. “But once the business grows to the point where the cost is not material to their operations, then they should collect the sales tax. The economic incentive for a company to grow is greater than any sales tax burden.”
Durkin, Wyman Dispute over 1974 Senate Election
WASHINGTON -Not very many New Hampshire residents remember what was once the famous Senate election of 1974-which turned into the Senate election of 1975.
"If you were involved in politics, you would remember," Lou D'Allesandro, a New Hampshire state senator, said in an interview.
"History repeats itself," said D'Allesandro, who is also a history teacher at Franklin Pierce College . "We have to learn from it."
That 1974 race was between former state Insurance Commissioner John A. Durkin, a Democrat, and U.S. Rep. Louis C. Wyman, a Republican. The election was unbelievably close, and when the votes were finally officially certified by the state, Wyman was declared the winner by two votes.
Durkin, however, insisted that he had won, and ultimately took his case to the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate.
It took until the following August, nine months after the election, for the Senate finally to declare the seat vacant until a special section could be held. On Sept. 16, Durkin and Wyman squared off once again. Durkin won handily and took his seat in the Senate.
But he lasted only one term. In 1980, Republican Warren Rudman defeated Durkin's bid for reelection.
"I remember like it was yesterday," said Bill Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state. After Durkin demanded a recount, he recalled, the state legislature "counted [the ballots] for one week," he said.
Another who remembers is Durkin himself. "Watching the Senate trying to decide was a Chinese water torture," Durkin said in an interview.
Because the Senate was unable to decide, D'Allesandro said, it was fair that the people of New Hampshire were allowed to vote again. "That was an example of democracy," he said. D'Allesandro said that process compared favorably to the one in which the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to decide the outcome of the 2000 presidential election.
In 1974 and 1975, New Hampshire , traditionally a Republican state, was "shocked" by the controversy, D'Allesandro said. "The state got energized over politics, [even though] the Republicans have been here since Christ was a Catholic," he said with a laugh.
Voters elected Durkin in the special election by more than 25,000, he said. "The unions were [everywhere]," he said, recalling their 'keep Durkin working' slogan.
Wyman, meanwhile, had a brief moment of glory. On Dec. 31, 1974 , the New Hampshire governor appointed him to fill out what remained of the term of New Hampshire Sen. Norris Cotton, who had not sought reelection. Cotton resigned that day, and Wyman served until Jan. 3, the day Cotton's elected successor took the seat.
Dodd Introduces New Job Protection Legislation to Conn. Workers
WASHINGTON - Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., asked leaders of 25 grassroots, labor and business organizations Tuesday to support a bill that he said would keep American tax dollars invested in the nation's workforce.
"Workers in Connecticut and across the nation are first-rate," Dodd said at a press conference attended by members of the advocacy groups. "It simply doesn't make sense to ship their jobs and opportunities half way around the world to save a buck.
"This legislation is a step towards stopping the needless export of good American jobs."
The U.S. Workers Protection Act of 2004, which Dodd introduced earlier this month, would deny federal contracts to companies using overseas labor to do work previously done in the United States . It would also bar state governments from using federal money for services performed outside the United States .
Dodd's office said that 40 percent of Fortune 1000 companies use foreign labor and as many as 3.3. million jobs may be sent overseas in the next 15 years, causing American workers to lose up to $136 billion in wages.
The senator did not say how many contracts or how much federal money his legislation would affect. The senator did acknowledge the bill had little chance of passing in a Republican-controlled Congress.
Frank Johnston, president of the Manufacturing Alliance of Connecticut, said his organization would back the bill.
"It's an outrage how many jobs we are losing in this country," said Johnston , whose organization represents workers. "So having somebody like Sen. Dodd come forward and raise awareness on the issue and get it out in the public debate can only be helpful."
Seven representatives of labor unions and manufacturing companies across Connecticut , including the Bridgeport Chamber of Commerce and The Organization for the Rights of American Workers, attended Dodd's press conference.
Johnston said the community, labor and business leaders turned out of concern for the 28,000 manufacturing jobs the state has lost in the past 36 months.
" Connecticut has always been the cradle of innovation," he said. "We have a real strong, passionate group in Connecticut that is very concerned about the whole array of jobs we are losing. We believe that if something is going to get done, we have to do it."
Officials from the Connecticut Department of Labor agreed that Dodd's legislation deals with an issue important to the state.
"Its initial purpose is that we don't start shipping jobs over, regardless," said department economist John Tirinzonie. "But manufacturing is an important issue, and of all areas the manufacturing sector is where we have to protect our workers here in Connecticut ."
Tirinzonie added that "it's just to ensure that every bit of outsourcing stays here in the state. . It certainly would be a help."
But economist Peter Gioia of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association warned that the act might not be the answer to the state's job woes and could, in fact, make a grave situation worse.
"When we propose legislation like this, foreign countries could retaliate," he said. "What if they introduced legislation that mirrored this U.S. legislation?"
Such action could seriously harm the hundreds of thousands of jobs provided by the 1,200 foreign-owned companies based in Connecticut , Gioia said.
"The legislation, where it may be well-meaning, could be very detrimental in practice to American business overall and could have unforeseen negative impacts."
Veterans Ask For Better Care
WASHINGTON-President Bush's proposal to increase federal spending on veterans' medical care, while putting the total significantly higher than when he took office, still falls far short of what the aging veterans' population needs, lawmakers and former military service members said at a congressional hearing this week.
Further, the veterans and some Congress members said, care is not available in all the places they need it - such as New Hampshire.
"A nation that abandons its warriors once the swords of its enemies lie rusting on the ground dishonors itself and imperils its future," Alan W. Bowers, national commander of the Disabled American Veterans, told a joint hearing of the House and Senate Veterans' Affairs committees Tuesday.
There are about 140,000 veterans in New Hampshire , 15 percent of the state population, and more than 25 million veterans nationwide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And while the veterans' population is slowly declining, its medical demands are rising, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Bush has proposed spending $29.5 billion for veterans' medical care in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. That's an increase of 4 percent from fiscal 2004 and 40 percent from 2001, the year Bush took office.
"As a result, today we provide quality medical care to a million more veterans than we did in 2001," Anthony J. Principi, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, said earlier this month.
Still, said Jeb Bradley, R.-N.H., "it is not sufficient to take care of our veterans."
"Veteran's health care deserves priority," said Bradley, a member of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee.
The number of veterans seeking care at VA facilities rose 134 percent between 1996 and 2003, an increase that dwarfs the growth in spending in recent years, according to the Partnership for Veterans Health Care Budget Reform, a consortium of nine veterans service organizations.
"We're at war," said Adjutant John Zachodny Jr. of the American Legion of New Hampshire. "We feel that the hospitals are not capable of handling our servicemen that are coming back with wounds," Zachodny, 57 and a Vietnam War veteran, said in a telephone interview.
"Unfortunately, there's never enough money," said Richard E. Manner, 82, who was wounded in the leg and the back during World War II and who attended the hearing. "They can throw it overseas, but they always forget about the veterans."
Some Congress members said they supported increased spending on veterans even in the face of a record federal deficit.
"Yes, we want to work towards eliminating the deficit," said Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Fla. "But it shouldn't come at the expense of our veterans."
Bradley questioned why 5,000 New Hampshire veterans have to travel to other states to receive medical attention. The VA Medical Center in Manchester , servicing 17,000 patients, stopped providing in-patient acute services in 1999. Veterans who need hospitalization are transferred to VA medical facilities in other states or to a local hospital, said Jim Thompson, a spokesman for the center.
Veterans have to travel three hours each way to other states, such as Vermont and Massachusetts , to receive in-patient care at a VA hospital, said Dr. Brian K. Matchett, commander of Disabled American Veterans in New Hampshire .
Congressional Art Competition to Expire Soon
WASHINGTON -Anyone who strolls through the underground tunnel between the United States Capitol and the office buildings that house members of the House of Representatives is likely to walk past James Marsh's photograph.
Marsh, a freshman at Groucher College outside of Baltimore , snapped the black-and-white photo last year, when he was a senior at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton . The photo, entitled "Posture Posture," has been on display in the tunnel since last June, when Marsh became one of hundreds of students nationwide to win a congressional art contest in a competition with others in their home districts.
Once again, this year, high school students nationwide are competing in "An Artistic Discovery," the 22 nd year of the Congressional Art Competition. The contest is sponsored by House members.
Schools submit students' artwork to judges, selected by Congress members, by May 21.
Marsh, who is studying studio art and music, won first prize for New Hampshire 's first congressional district last year. He received $250 and a free airline ticket to Washington .
Marsh's photo of a high school girl peering out a window was sponsored by Rep. Jeb Bradley, R-N.H. It was selected from among 50 entries in the first district.
"It was a compliment for me," said Marsh, 19. He visited the Capitol last summer to see his work on display.
Marsh's work comes from a series of pictures taken of a friend he was helping to prepare her own art portfolio to send to college admissions offices.
Art teachers can submit the work of up to four of their students, said Jill Berry, Marsh's high school art teacher. "We try not to limit the type of work submitted," said Berry , who has supervised the participating students at Winnacunnet for five years.
Berry said she hasn't decided which students to enter in the contest this year. "Last year, we had about 50 pieces and seven schools from the first district," Crawford said. But the number varies each year, depending on how many schools participate, she said.
The contest includes paintings, drawings, collages, prints and photography
Congressional offices raise money from area businesses to pay contest winners, said T.J. Crawford, Bradley's press secretary.
In the past, Bradley's office appointed judges for the first district from the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester and the New Hampshire Art Institute.
Rowland Finds Comfort in Nation’s Capital
By Brian Dolan
WASHINGTON —At home, many are calling for his impeachment. But in the nation’s capital, Gov. John Rowland had, by his own testimony, a “good weekend.”
Roland attended the National Governors Association winter meeting and discussed issues including funding for roads and highways and the Pentagon’s decision to cancel production of the Comanche helicopter. Scandal in Connecticut was hardly mentioned, he said.
After repeated denials, Rowland admitted in December that he accepted gifts and free work from politically connected contractors who renovated his lakeside cottage in Litchfield. He says he did not return the favors.
Many of the governors “treated me very matter-of-factly,” Rowland said in an interview. “A lot of them don’t even seem to know anything about it. The ones that do just said, ‘Hang in there.’ But it hasn’t really affected anything that’s gone on here.”
Rowland and other Republican governors met with President Bush over the weekend. Bush greeted Rowland warmly and slapped him on the back, also telling him to “hang in there.”
At the White House, Rowland and his colleagues met with senators and Cabinet members to discuss the proposed disbursement formula in the $318 billion highway spending bill, which would give Connecticut the smallest increase in highway funding of any state.
“The transportation issue has been an important one,” Rowland said. “The formula in particular is not working for us.”
The Pentagon also created an important issue for Connecticut when it canceled the $39 billion Comanche helicopter program. Stratford-based Sikorsky Aircraft unit of United Technologies Corp. teamed up with the Boeing Co. to develop the helicopter, which it started building last August in a new Bridgeport facility.
“The big issue is the Comanche helicopter being cut,” Rowland said. “So we are busy putting the fire out on that one.”
Army leaders said at a press conference Monday they planned to divert billions of dollars earmarked for Comanches to buy and modernize other helicopters.
Rowland met Tuesday with Sens. Christopher Dodd and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., to discuss how to reverse the Comanche decision.
“It simply doesn’t make sense to pull the plug on the Comanche,” Dodd said in a statement Monday. “Obviously, this will not be an easy fight, but I intend to work with other members of the Connecticut congressional delegation to seek to retain the Comanche as part of our military arsenal.”
Lieberman expressed a similar concern.
“I am outraged by the Army’s decision to terminate the Comanche program,” Lieberman said in a statement Monday. “Canceling Comanche will not only cost jobs, it could also weaken our national security—something I am determined to prevent.”
NEA Receives Proposed Budget Boost
WASHINGTON-The Alice James Poetry Cooperative Inc., affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington, publishes six books of poetry a year by authors across the country, selected through national and New England regional contests. This year, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded it a $24,000 grant.
"The NEA grants are a godsend because you can apply them to all the expenses of publishing the books," said the cooperative's director, April Ossmann.
For four years in a row, the cooperative has received one of about 2,200 annual NEA grants to individuals, state arts councils and nongovernmental art organizations. If Congress approves President Bush's fiscal 2005 proposal of $139.4 million for the NEA, more grants will be given out next year.
Bush's recommendation to boost NEA funding by $18 million, the largest increase since 1984, would benefit local artists. Since 1991, funding for the independent federal agency rapidly decreased until 2001.
It is too soon to know whether Congress will accept Bush's proposal. "It is very early in the budget process," said NEA spokeswoman Felicia Knight. A House Appropriations subcommittee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the NEA appropriation April 1.
If Congress passes Bush's proposal, state arts organizations would receive $53 million, according to the NEA. Each state receives a base amount plus extra money allocated according to population and competitiveness, such as reaching underserved areas, said Rebecca Lawrence, director of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.
The Maine Arts Commission in Augusta was awarded about $850,000 this year, $20,000 more than last year, assistant director Bryan Knicely said.
The NEA requires matching grants for most of the awards, a "fundraising tool" that "inspires more donations from the community," Knight said. In what she described as "a highly competitive, rigorous process," grant requests are reviewed by a panel, with its recommendations based on artistic merit. A national advisory board makes the final decision.
This year , the NEA awarded 788 creativity grants totaling $19.8 million, with grants of $99,000 to six arts organizations in Maine .
VSA Arts of Maine, a Portland-based organization that helps more than 200,000 disabled people in the state, received $10,000 this year for a cultural access project. VSA Maine will use the money to expand the accessibility of cultural facilities in the state, executive director David C. Webster said.
The Alice James Poetry Cooperative Inc. received $5,000 in 2001, $18,000 in 2002 and $25,000 last year. Unlike other grants that must be used for a specific purpose, NEA grants can be applied for general purposes, said the cooperative's director, Ossmann.
Lieberman’s Conservatism to Blame for Campaign Failure, Experts Say
WASHINGTON --Sen. Joseph Lieberman's moderate views and mild manner dealt insurmountable blows to his chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, political experts said Wednesday.
Lieberman withdrew from the race Tuesday night, after finishing far behind the frontrunner in eight state contests and lagging in campaign contributions. He returned home to Connecticut Wednesday and was embraced by state politicians in both parties.
Lieberman set himself apart from leading Democratic candidates by vociferously supporting the war in Iraq , a position that did not go over well with the largely liberal voters who participate in Democratic primaries and caucuses, said Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which has done extensive polling on the race.
"The war was just so widely unpopular with primary voters. That issue set him back enormously," Doherty said.
While some other contenders, including the current frontrunner, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts , initially voted to give President Bush authority to go to war, they have since criticized his handling of the aftermath. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who once led in the polls but has failed to win any states so far, gained popularity by opposing the war from the outset.
Although polls showed Lieberman "in the top tier of candidates" late last year, Doherty said primary voters were turned off by what to Democrats is a conservative message. The turnaround, he said, was "stunning."
In political campaigns, "ideas matter," Doherty said. "He was on the wrong side of the big issues."
Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey , said Lieberman was too tame for primary voters and caucusgoers.
"He had a centrist view that wasn't appealing to angry Democrats who wanted revenge on George Bush," he said. "His manner of expression is mild. He's reassuring rather than belligerent."
The most conservative of the Democratic candidates, Lieberman tried to garner support from moderate Democrats and independents. But his platform never caught fire.
Allan Lichtman, chairman of the History Department at American University in Washington , said that primary voters were not inspired by Lieberman's message. "Democrats are angry and they want someone who can beat Bush," Lichtman said. "Lieberman seemed too close to Bush" on policy issues.
Political experts also said the nature of primary elections worked against Lieberman. People who vote in primaries, whether Democratic or Republican, are generally not as centrist as those who vote in national elections. "In primaries, the Democrats who vote are more distinctively liberal than average Democrats," said Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Iowa .
Lieberman started the race with a great advantage: name recognition, a result of his run for vice president on Al Gore's ticket in 2000. "In our polls this year he was by far the best-known candidate in a crowded field, which is a significant advantage," Doherty said.
But Goldford said that the national recognition did little to propel Lieberman's campaign.
"While he certainly was known to those in the New England area and those who followed national politics, he really had no national constituency," Goldford said.
Goldford said that Lieberman was "plucked from relative obscurity" when Gore made him his running mate in 2000. And while he is recognized nationally, Goldford said it is merely as "a loser on the presidential ticket."
Lieberman also became known in 2000 as the first Jewish candidate on a national ticket.
When Gore chose him, questions arose as to whether his religion would hurt the Democrats' chance of retaining the White House. But commentators generally have dismissed religion as the explanation for Gore's loss of the presidency in 2000 or Lieberman's poor showing now. Baker said religion was "absolutely not" a factor this year.
Lichtman said because Lieberman was on the ticket four years ago, "he had to start out ahead and stay ahead" to have a chance of winning the nomination.
Lieberman's inability to raise campaign funds also crippled him. Dean raised three times as much and Kerry twice as much as Lieberman.
John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Politics at Akron University in Ohio , said that Lieberman was hurt by Gore's endorsement of Dean. Fundraisers who had previously worked with Gore and former President Bill Clinton "signed on with other candidates because they want to go with the one who's most likely to win," Green said.
Dodd Legislation Blasts Outsourcing
WASHINGTON -Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., told a group of small-business and labor leaders Tuesday that keeping manufacturing jobs in the United States was vital to the economic health of the nation.
At a luncheon, Dodd blasted the Bush administration for supporting companies that hire workers overseas to keep business costs low. Dodd has introduced a bill, the U.S. Workers Protection Act of 2004, that would combat such outsourcing by prohibiting federal money from being used to contract for foreign workers.
Dodd said that he supported "the idea of fair and free trade. Jobs in Connecticut depend in no small measure on there being a foreign market" for the state's manufacturing products.
However, he said, federal tax dollars should not be used to take jobs away from Americans.
"We understand that people are trying to compete and lower costs," Dodd said. "But when that private company subcontracts those jobs to some foreign worker, that is not a level playing field. That is not legitimate competition, in my view."
Fred Tedesco, president of MADe in the USA , a trade organization, dubbed the small-business owners and representatives of manufacturing organizations and labor unions who attended the luncheon "the most unusual coalition of modern times." The groups, often on opposing sides of labor issues, have joined together to fight the movement of jobs overseas.
But Peter Gioia, an economist at the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, a lobbying group, said that outsourcing could benefit American businesses. He said that 1,200 businesses in Connecticut were foreign-owned, including pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim and the international bank, UBS Warburg.
"These are huge firms," which provide hundreds of thousands of jobs for American workers, Gioia said.
Gioia said Dodd's legislation could backfire because foreign labor plays an important role in U.S. manufacturing businesses. He noted that sometimes components of products are more "effectively" assembled in foreign markets. But, Gioia said, the high-value, high-technology work is performed by Americans, who ultimately benefited from the finished product.
Gioia said Dodd's legislation could encourage foreign countries to introduce their own outsourcing legislation, which might limit foreign business coming to the United States . "You ultimately end up shooting yourself in the foot," he said.
"Open, fair, and free trade is something that is absolutely essential to the Connecticut economy and economic growth," Gioia said.
Dodd acknowledged that his legislation was intended to "provide a forum" for discussion and expressed some doubts about the chances it would pass. "I realize it's a tough bill," he said. But, Dodd said, there has been a "spontaneous groundswell emerging across the country."
Dodd said that 2.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost in the United States in the last seven months. He predicted that $140 billion in wages could be lost in the next 15 years if company? tax incentives are not provided to keep work in the United States .
John Bauman, president of The Organization for the Rights of American Workers, a worker advocacy group, urged immigration reforms and visa limitations to curb the flow of foreign workers coming into the United States .
"These are people coming to our country to replace the American worker," Bauman said at the luncheon.
