Gore Juggles Opposite Roles on Trade Policy

Vice President Al Gore came face to face Thursday with the dichotomy of his political life:

As a Democratic candidate for president, he promised the nation’s union leaders that, in office, he would make sure any trade agreements his administration negotiates would protect the interests of labor and the environment. As vice president, he stepped back from that position to support a trade agreement with China that labor opposes.

And the fact that he could support one policy, while saying that he’d advance another once in office, raised few eyebrows among labor leaders.

“That’s the difference between being No. 1 and being No. 2,” said John J. Sweeney, the president of the AFL-CIO.

Gore spent much of the morning with the labor federation’s executive council, reassuring the union officials--apparently with enough success to maintain their enthusiasm for his candidacy--that as president he would be more insistent than President Clinton has been in negotiating trade pacts that protect labor standards, human rights and the environment.

“He gave his word,” said Vincent A. Panvini, the director of governmental affairs of the Sheet Metal Workers’s International Assn.

But, said George Becker, president of the United Steel Workers, Gore still wears his vice presidential hat--and continued to talk in the private meeting about the Clinton administration’s goal of gaining Senate approval of the agreement bringing China into the World Trade Organization.

Becker was the first to raise the China trade issue, a Gore aide said, and pressed the vice president about whether he continued to favor China’s accession to the WTO.

Organized labor’s disagreement with the administration over the question of easing China’s access to U.S. markets through the trade pact couldn’t be greater. Yet, the ease with which Gore and the labor leaders stepped around the dispute--and with which the vice president showed no hesitancy in outlining the current differences he has with them--suggested their willingness to overlook the differences to advance his candidacy.

Still, it is awkward. It places Gore in the position this spring of defending what is likely to be a major effort by the White House to win approval of the China trade pact, one that he suggests to his allies in labor he would not negotiate himself.

Gore fought hard to gain the AFL-CIO’s endorsement last October in Los Angeles, and now he is trying to both keep that support and turn it into votes, not just of the union members themselves, but of those they can influence through their work at telephone banks and other support-building activities.

In California two years ago, approximately one-third of the voters in the primary election were union members. Steve Rosenthal, the AFL-CIO’s political director, said he expects the union participation to be nearly as high in the primary vote on March 7.

The position Gore outlined on China was similar to the one he presented to the unions in Los Angeles. But the unions have grown more adamant in their opposition to the administration’s policy.

While Gore huddled with union leaders Thursday, his opponent, Bill Bradley, drove south through New England on a one-day bus tour, trying to shore up support in a region where many say he has the best chance of success.

In Boston, he told community members fighting violence that he offers the best gun control platform of any candidate. Later, in New Haven, Conn., he told hundreds of cheering Yale students gathered in a local club that he was running to offer them “a new politics.”

Bradley planned on ending the day in New York, where he was going to speak at a college on women’s issues.

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Times staff writer Matea Gold with the Bradley campaign in New England also contributed to this story.