President to face election backlash for trade move

Published on Sunday 7 December 2003 00:00

POLITICAL fall-out from President George W Bush’s decision to lift the import tariffs cushioning the US steel industry could have critical repercussions for his re-election hopes.

In a presidential election, each state is worth a certain number of votes in the "electoral college" system, making some more valuable than others.

The Rust Belt states of West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania together carry 46 of the 270 electoral college votes that a presidential candidate requires to win an election, meaning the states are seen as "heavy hitters".

Voters here are traditionally Democratic, yet by a slim margin Ohio and West Virginia fell to Bush in 2003, possibly because of disillusionment among steelworkers over what they perceived to be broken campaign promises by previous president, Bill Clinton, and his deputy, Al Gore, to help save their jobs.

Independent Steelworkers’ Union spokesman David Gossett said: "They came to Weirton and said: ‘We will protect the US steel industry. We will not let it be harmed by foreign imports,’ then did nothing to help us for eight years. So when Gore stood against Bush in 2000, there wasn’t a lot of love for Bush, but there was even less for Gore.

"I believe people here are now going to send a powerful message to Bush: ‘We are going to do to you what we did to Al Gore.’ There’s a lot of political clout in this valley. In 2004, steelworkers will see to it that President Bush joins thousands of them on the job queue."

But the repeal of the tariffs could have a see-saw effect on the voting. Steel users in manufacturing states such as Michigan and Minnesota have long complained that the tariffs had caused domestic steel prices to skyrocket, making products more expensive to produce.

JT Battenberg III, chairman of the Michigan-based car parts manufacturer Delphi Corporation, said: "This decision is going to return stability to the industry. This is really good news for us."