Clinton Picks Kantor to Head Commerce Dept.

President Clinton on Friday named U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor to replace the late Ronald H. Brown as secretary of Commerce, positioning the combative Californian to be a forceful defender of Clinton trade policies--and the embattled department--in the upcoming presidential campaign.

In a White House ceremony, Clinton cited Kantor’s accomplishments in the trade post, including his critical role in negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, the global pact creating the World Trade Organization and 200 other international deals.

“No trade representative has ever amassed a record of achievement that surpasses Mickey Kantor’s,” Clinton said of the 56-year-old Los Angeles lawyer, who also helped manage Clinton’s 1992 campaign.

The choice brought praise from Republicans, who signaled that they would not try to bottle up Kantor’s confirmation in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Clinton’s likely campaign opponent, praised Kantor as “very fair, a good person to work with,” and predicted wide GOP support.

At the same time, Clinton named Charlene Barshevsky, the deputy trade representative, to take Kantor’s job on an acting basis. Also known as combative, Barshevsky has gained attention for her negotiation of trade deals with China and Japan.

Clinton also announced the selection of Franklin Raines, vice chairman of the Federal National Mortgage Assn., to replace Alice Rivlin as head of the Office of Management and Budget. Rivlin has been nominated for the Federal Reserve Board.

Kantor can step immediately into the new job--open because Brown died last week in a plane crash in the Balkans--since the nomination occurred while Congress is in recess. Although lawmakers return to work Monday, rules governing appointments allow Kantor to serve in the post without being confirmed until the end of the congressional session. But the White House said it will submit his name for the usual Senate confirmation process later in the year.

Kantor fills Clinton’s needs in a number of ways.

While Republicans apparently intend to raise no objections to his selection, they do plan a major assault on the Commerce Department and on the free-trade policies Clinton has made a centerpiece of his foreign affairs approach. Kantor is well-versed in the subject and is expected to be a formidable adversary.

To fill out the remainder of Brown’s term, Clinton needed a loyal soldier who knows the president’s mind. The selection also fits well because Kantor has largely accomplished his goals as trade emissary. And some administration aides said that his abrasive style has irritated enough of his counterparts in other key trading countries that it may be just as well for him to move on.

As Commerce secretary through the end of the term, Kantor probably will not be initiating many major changes in policy. But he will have an impact if he can preserve the agency, which many Republicans are holding out as the prime example of superfluous federal bureaucracies.

In the new post, Kantor will face critics’ charges that by lowering tariff barriers the Clinton administration has exported thousands of jobs to low-wage countries and depressed wages of other workers who remained. For this political task, the Commerce post probably gives him a better forum than the trade emissary job, which generally has been seen as less partisan.

Kantor’s tenure at Commerce could have an effect in California if he is able to preserve the department’s advanced technology program, which funds research in a variety of areas, including many under development in the state.

Kantor is not expected to stay on after the term ends if Clinton is reelected. But some insiders speculated that he could take another prominent job in the administration.

In considering Brown’s replacement, the White House approached Erskine Bowles, the former deputy chief of staff, who declined. Also considered were Stuart E. Eizenstat, the Jimmy Carter administration domestic policy aide; Hughes Electronics Chairman C. Michael Armstrong and Eastman Kodak Co. Chairman George Fisher.

The White House did not focus its search, as it often has, on female and minority candidates. But the two other appointments it announced went to a black--Raines at OMB--and a woman--Barshevsky as acting trade representative.

Kantor grew up in Nashville and graduated from Vanderbilt University. His father, the son of a Lithuanian immigrant, owned a furniture store.

He graduated from the law school at Georgetown University in 1968 and moved immediately into the liberal legal circles in which he has operated ever since.

He helped create South Florida Migrant Labor Services, a farm workers’ legal aid program that operated with federal funds, and worked on legislation in Washington creating the Legal Services Corp. There he met another young lawyer, Hillary Rodham Clinton--who, like Kantor, had become a member of the corporation’s board--and her husband, Bill Clinton.

Kantor moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and became a partner in the politically connected law firm that became Mannatt, Phelps, Phillips & Kantor. Even as he polished his liberal credentials, he took up the cause of the tobacco industry to fight a Beverly Hills anti-smoking ordinance--a fight he lost--and represented Occidental Petroleum Corp. as it tried to get permission to drill oil wells off the coast of Pacific Palisades, another fight that he uncharacteristically lost.

In 1976, he chaired former Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown’s presidential campaign. In 1984, he ran Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale’s California operation. In the early 1990s, he introduced the little-known Clinton to Hollywood figures who would become some of the Arkansas governor’s most important financial backers as he contemplated his 1992 campaign.

Although he was one of Clinton’s closest advisors, Kantor slipped from view in the Clinton camp in Little Rock, Ark., after the election in 1992. He was overshadowed by younger, newer “friends of Bill” who had become unhappy with Kantor’s take-no-prisoners operation of the campaign.

Although the trade post was widely perceived as a consolation prize, he accepted. And from a Civil War-era building a block from the White House, he steered one of the smallest agencies of government into an unprecedented role as a focal point of U.S. foreign policy operations.

Routinely conducting marathon day-and-night negotiating sessions, often backed up by his threat of imposing high import taxes, he concluded deals increasing opportunities in Japan for such diverse U.S. industries as glassmakers and builders of medical equipment.

His negotiating style was much tougher than Brown’s easier-going approach overseas, leading Kantor to joke once to Clinton that he was tired of playing the “bad cop” to Brown’s “good cop,” particularly in dealings with the Japanese.

“Now he gets to play good cop for a while,” the president told reporters Friday.

No negotiation--or subsequent agreement--with the Japanese attracted as much attention as last June’s automobile pact.

On Friday, the administration reported that in the areas covered by the 21 trade agreements it has reached with Tokyo, U.S. exports to Japan have grown 85% since Clinton took office. It also said that in 1995 U.S. exports to Japan grew five times as fast as imports from Japan, causing the U.S. trade deficit with Japan to drop 10%, its first decline in five years.

“Today, exports to Japan support more than 800,000 good-paying American jobs, including 150,000 new ones since 1992,” Clinton said.

But Dole said that the increased car sales the administration has touted represent a minuscule share of the Japanese market. The administration reported that sales of U.S.-made cars in Japan have climbed recently from 10,000 to 15,000 sales a month.