Gephardt addendum
The official announcement earlier today from Hillary Clinton's presidential team that Dick Gephardt had decided to play on her side also contained word that he gets a couples of titles: campaign co-chair and economic advisor.
The co-chair gig is honorific; the advisor's post --- even just on a surface level --- is worth contemplating.
Gephardt established his national profile in the late 1980s as the quintessential "old school" Democrat on economic policy: strongly pro-labor, highly skeptical of big business, deeply concerned that the globalization of trade was hurting U.S. workers.
As a Democratic House leader, he led, and lost, fights against President Bill Clinton's push for the North American Free Trade Agreement, in 1993, and normalization of commercial relations with China, in 2000.
Many of the White House aides and officials who twisted arms and browbeat fellow Democrats to get those measures passed signed up for Hillary Clinton's campaign ages ago. Now, presumably, Gephardt will be adding his voice to their discussions. We'd love to be a fly on the wall for those conversations.
Hillary Clinton, cognizant of the criticism from some Democratic quarters of her husband's trade policies, already has strayed from what was the company line during his presidency. She has expressed misgivings about how NAFTA has panned out. Recently, she came out against a pending trade accord with South Korea, earning (qualified) plaudits from several progressive activists, including David Sirota and Jonathan Tasini.
Still, these and many others on the left will be watching to see whether Gephardt's advisory role is mainly window-dressing.
-- Don Frederick
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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This would be a BIG blow to the stance Clinton takes on morals, ethics, humanity and genocide with Gephardt changing stances and being bought out by the Turkish lobby to fight that the Armenian Genocide does not get recognized.
Gephardt was a long time fighter for recognition, but has since reversed his position and has struck major deal to serve as a foreign agent for
the Turkish government. Gephardt has already begun lobbying on behalf of his
new client against the very same Armenian Genocide Resolution.
In 2000, as a Member of Congress, he wrote to Speaker Hastert urging immediate floor consideration of the Armenian Genocide Resolution, claiming ‘this issue requires little if any additional deliberation by the House.’"
As a member of the House, Gephardt cosponsored legislation
recognizing the Armenian Genocide.
But now he is on the Turkish government's payroll.
Posted by: Sevag Sarkissian | July 05, 2007 at 10:29 PM