Kerry Strives To Highlight Pro-Market Side - WSJ

Senator Woos Buffett, Cites Rubin and Offers Proposals To Quell Business Skeptics

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The Massachusetts senator said reducing the federal deficit would help drive his economic policy. He noted that he has already pared back some of his own campaign proposals to save money and that would be "a strong indicator" of how he would govern. He says he crafted his health-care plan to appeal to business -- not just to labor -- and crafted a proposal aimed at curbing outsourcing that appears to leave most big companies relatively unscathed.

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He would roll back some but not all Bush tax cuts, and his commitment to the markets is coupled with hints he would be willing to intervene to adjust the value of the dollar and use power of the Oval Office to try to push markets up or down. He has a record of attacking deficits, having swung behind the cause of deficit-reduction immediately after winning his Senate seat in 1984. He helped found a Boston cookie company that still survives, and he invokes his background as an entrepreneur.


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Adjusted for inflation, Mr. Kerry's spending proposals are comparable in size to the four-year, $220 billion program of "investments" Mr. Clinton advocated against the current president's father in 1992.. The health plan Mr. Kerry is pushing relies on incentives, not the employer mandates Mr. Clinton eventually advocated, to expand health-insurance coverage. And Mr. Kerry tries to pitch it not just as a social-welfare plan, but as a form of business relief.


Concern for deficits and government's impact on business are both causes Mr. Kerry has trumpeted since first winning his Senate seat in 1984. As a freshman, he rushed to embrace the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction bill even as liberals warned it could trigger across-the-board reductions in social services from education to welfare to health care. In the 1990s, he broke early with Mr. Clinton by refusing to endorse the new president's health-care plan, and joined a bipartisan group trying to craft a scaled-down version.


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Kerry advisers say he hasn't abandoned his core free-trade philosophy, but needs to take the harder line to preserve some consensus for globalization in an era of heightened anxieties. Like President Bush, who himself backed temporary tariffs on imported steel, Mr. Kerry advocates further trade liberalization.

Liberals worry that, in the White House, Mr. Kerry is likely to tack even further toward the center. Some on the left complain Mr. Kerry is already doing so -- undercutting the populism that was a key part of Mr. Clinton's 1992 campaign. "The risk is that he's going to run the way Clinton governed, rather than the way Clinton ran," says Robert Kuttner, editor of the liberal American Prospect. "No president ever got elected by promising to appease the bond market."

Write to Jacob M. Schlesinger at jacob.schlesinger@wsj.com7 and John Harwood at john.harwood@wsj.com

a Populist. If Clinton did the opposite then maybe so can Kerry.

Buffet knows how. This is good news.

BTW,the last time there were "POPULISTS" they were racists. Hardly Democratic core values.