ustxtxb_obs_1983_11_11_50_00010-00000_000.pdf

1978 as it turned out I ran ahead of him on’the Democratic ticket. I campaigned the state in 1980 for the Democratic ticket, never ran into any of these other Democratic candidates out there on the stump. I was out there in ’82 for Garry Mauro and then for the Democratic ticket. I never ran into him there. Are we talking about Doggett? We’re talking about anybody else who’s running right now. I never saw Doggett or Hance, never saw them once during the campaign. And so I find it hard to understand how they could somehow consider themselves pure Deomcrats. If one wants to talk about where I was in the Democratic Party, I think one ought to look at what a person is and where he comes from. It did not take much guts in 1961 to be black and sit down at a Woolworths in New York City. It took a little bit more guts to do the same thing in Greensboro, North Carolina. Right? In the district that I went to, in Congress, the year before I ran, two years before, George McGovern got 24 % of the vote in my district. I think it was the third lowest; I believe that in Collins’ and Archer’s districts, he got less, but not any other. My predecessor announced each year that he had again received a zero rating from the ADA and a zero rating from COPE. I got one near 50% rating from COPE. It probably would have been higher than that except by the support of my own natural gas bills, I was getting a lower COPE rating. He was in for 32 years with a zero rating, and my rating went from 35 to 50 % at one point. My rating was in fact right at the center, more or less, of the Texas Democrats. My district, to judge by the votes of my predecessor: no, probably not at that position. How did you walk that line? I walked that line because I tried to look at every issue, and I knew that the people from my area were not bigots, and I went back and explained. When I was first elected, I got 53%, the Republican 45 % , and the American Party candidate two. In ’76, when I ran for re-election, I doubled Jimmy Carter’s vote in my district. He got 36% and, I got 72 % . I got 72 % against a Republican, an American Party, and a La Raza Unida; I had three opponents. But I went back and I explained, and you can build up trust with people. Most people are not ideologues; there are some who are, but most are not. But what most people want is an individual whom they can trust. . . . Labor Questions Let me ask you about some other votes and see how they fit philosophically. The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment bill. Humphrey-Hawkins was a bad bill. It was unrealistic. It didn’t specify any way in which these jobs would be created or anything else. So I didn’t support it. The votes on OSHA. In three of four years you were in Congress, you cast votes against OSHA. I don’t know how many votes I cast for it or against it. OSHA was an agency with a mixed record. I went in, for example, to one place in Runnels County where they showed me a stairway, and there was no way that OSHA was going to allow them to have a stairway they had had for countless number of years because they couldn’t get a stairway wide enough to satisfy that particular OSHA inspector’s requirements and so forth. It varies from circumstance to circumstance. Obviously the government has to be concerned with the protection of individuals. That doesn’t mean that I would vote for every OSHA bill that came down the line. Same way with things like toxic substances. In some cases I have voted for it; on some others, maybe on that particular amendment, I might have voted against it. How about common situs picketing in 1977? I didn’t support that, wouldn’t expect to. For what reason? Just didn’t think it was a good bill. Let’s jump from the past to the present and talk about defense spending B-1 bombers, Pershing missiles, nuclear policy. Of course, the Reagan administration has almost doubled the expenditures on defense in a two-year period. It has increased it by approximately a hundred billion dollars, which breaks down to about five hundred dollars for every person in this country. I think that we Democrats made a mistake in 1970 because we saw a set of social problems, and, in a number of instances, we said we’ve got to respond. We, in effect, said let us spend money on them, and we tried. In some cases it didn’t work. What happened was that people would come to us and say, “Look, such-and-such a program is not working,” and we would say ; “Yeah, but we still have the problem; we have to try something.” So we continue with those programs, and what happens, first Jimmy Carter got in, being elected on cutting back on government back in 1976 which was, of course, a principal claim then people didn’t feel he did. In 1980, Ronald Reagan came in with a vengeance, and I think what is happening now is that Republicans are making the same mistake in regard to the defense budget. They’ve said, “We have certain defense problems; let us throw money at them.” Weinberger came into office, he didn’t even know what he was going to spend a lot of those dollars on; he didn’t even try to explain it to the House or the Senate, and it passed overwhelmingly because everybody was afraid to be judged to be, quotes, against defense. So we have money now going for an MX missile system; we don’t know 0 7.4 0 0 _0 _C 0Krueger at AFL-CIO Labor Day march, 1983. 10 NOVEMBER 11, 1983