WASHINGTON-The campaign of leading Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean downplayed comments it said were misinterpreted as favoring wholesale re-regulation of telecommunications and other key industry sectors, but last week’s flap perhaps offered a glimpse into how the former Vermont governor sees technology fitting into the economic picture.
Press Secretary Jay Carson said Dean’s comments to reporters on a plane late last Tuesday night were taken out of context.
“The governor was talking about changing the direction the country is headed,” Carson told RCR Wireless News last Friday. “It shouldn’t be read as a radical shift to regulation.” While a presidential candidate’s chances will not turn on his or her technology policy, it is an important component because of the hundreds of billions of dollars-not to mention millions of jobs-that are tied up in the telecom and tech businesses.
Carson said Dean is committed to growing the economy and is continuing to develop ideas on how he would handle telecom and high-tech sectors that are engines of growth in the American economy.
At the same time, Carson said Dean is unhappy with the Bush administration’s oversight of major U.S. industries and wants better protections for workers and the environment-two hot-button issues for corporate America.
The controversy over Dean’s remarks comes at time when Bell telephone companies are trying to round up financial support from manufacturers-including Motorola Inc., Lucent Technologies Inc. and others that sell to wireline and wireless carriers-for greater deregulation of the telecom giants. The campaign has prompted calls for a congressional antitrust probe. Vendors, which have lost sales due to a sharp reduction in capital expenditures by companies, have been tight-lipped about whether they will back the Bell deregulatory initiative.
“Government oversight has been woefully lax,” said Carson.
In a speech last Tuesday in Houston, Dean called the Bush program “Enron economics.” In prepared remarks, he stated, “Today, economic power is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. But we can check the power of mega-businesses that make decisions which affect millions of us.”
While Dean’s position on big business-which is generally consistent with the party mainstream but to the left of centrist Democrats like fellow presidential-hopeful Sen. Joseph Leiberman (D-Conn.) and the last Democrat to occupy the White House, Bill Clinton-there is no indication Dean is anti-technology or that he lacks an understanding of its potential.
Indeed, Dean has tapped the Internet like no one else and set the gold standard for Web-based campaigns.
“Today, there are new technologies which can be the foundation of our economy for the next century. We can invest aggressively in them, just as our nation did when it invested in railroads, in rural electrification and in public roads and highways,” stated Dean.
Centrist Democrats are keen on high tech and its capability to leverage increased productivity and efficiency across the board in the private sector and government. Other Democrats-with major exceptions being lawmakers with major high-tech workforces in their districts and states-tend to be less starry-eyed about technology and concentrate more on labor, antitrust and environmental impacts of business.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), yet another Democratic presidential competitor, has been accused of being overly cozy with the mobile-phone industry.
Republicans, but especially the Bush White House, largely see high-tech as just another industry sector that would be better off with less regulation and fewer taxes. This posture rings true with wireless and other telecom sectors, yet there remains restrained angst in industry about what some see as this administration’s lack of outward enthusiasm and vision for American technology-at least compared to the Clinton-Gore team, whose animated embrace of technology was equaled only by that of the stock market during the Internet boom that subsequently went bust.
Dean is somewhere in the mix, with a key difference. Because his Internet presidential bid depends more on grassroots financial support than on hefty campaign contributions from industry, Dean cannot be held hostage to telecom or high tech or any other major sector. However, that could change were he to go the distance in next year’s election. Another complicating factor in technology policy: company size. This has come out in congressional efforts to repeal a tax loophole for firms that do business abroad and in the Chinese currency controversy.
During the Clinton administration, then-Gov. Dean teamed with the state’s congressional delegation to limit mobile-phone antenna siting in the state as part of a campaign that helped defeat industry’s effort to completely pre-empt state and local jurisdiction over the placement of cell towers on a national scale.
Elsewhere, another Democratic presidential contender, Wesley Clark, said he would eliminate the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and perhaps roll its functions into the Technology Administration, which mirrors a plan by Commerce Secretary Donald Evans that has yet to find a congressional sponsor.
