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Six months after promising to create an office to help the nation's struggling manufacturers, President Bush settled on someone to head it, but the nomination was being reconsidered last night after Democrats revealed that his candidate had opened a factory in China.
Several officials said the nomination may be scrapped because of the political risk but said that had not been decided. Bush's opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), has made job losses his chief point of attack, and some administration officials feared the nomination could hand him fresh ammunition.
In late afternoon, the administration announced that the new assistant secretary of commerce for manufacturing and services would be named at a ceremony this morning. Industry officials were told that the job would go to Anthony F. Raimondo, chairman and chief executive of a Nebraska company that makes metal buildings and grain silos.
But Kerry's campaign, tipped off about the impending nomination several hours earlier, hastened to distribute news reports that Raimondo's firm, Behlen Manufacturing Co. of Columbus, Neb., had laid off 75 U.S. workers in 2002, four months after announcing plans for a $3 million factory in northwest Beijing.
Bush aides said Behlen, founded in 1936, has four U.S. plants employing 1,000 people and a 150,000-square-foot plant in China employing 180.
A senior administration official, who refused to be named because Raimondo has not been nominated, said Behlen has exported products to China since 1984 but was losing market share to other U.S. firms. The official said that half the equipment used to build the factory was made in the United States.
"This is not a case of making goods more cheaply in China to sell back in the U.S.," the official said.
Democrats contended, however, that Raimondo's record helps illustrate why the nation has lost 2.2 million jobs, most of them in factories, during the Bush presidency. The layoffs have been concentrated in such swing states as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio.
Seventy-five minutes after the administration announced a news conference with Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans to name the official, an advisory went out saying the event had been "postponed due to scheduling conflicts."
By last night, three senior administration officials said Raimondo's nomination might be scuttled but said they did not know for sure. Bush announced the new office with fanfare on Labor Day, and Democrats had been saying for weeks that the long delay in naming the new assistant secretary reflected the low priority that Bush puts on preserving jobs.
An aide close to Bush said last night the uncertainty about the nomination had "nothing to do with Senator Kerry or his baseless charges." This aide, who thought the nomination would go forward, said the delay "more has to do with congressional notification issues and things like that than it does anything else."
The congressional issues concerned one of the senators from Raimondo's home state, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R). An aide said last night that Hagel had no comment.
Bush's White House prides itself on orderliness but has been on the defensive on economic issues. Last month, the White House had to disavow its own estimate that 2.6 million jobs would be created this year. The same economic report, issued under Bush's signature, touted the economic efficiencies of sending certain types of U.S. work overseas.
Business groups praised plans for the new position, which quickly became known among industry officials as a "manufacturing czar."
Raimondo, who is chairman of the Omaha Branch Board of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Board, contributed the maximum of $2,000 toward Bush's reelection in June, a month after the campaign opened for business.
Raimondo is a longtime board member of the National Association of Manufacturers. Michael E. Baroody, the group's executive vice president, called Raimondo "a class act who understands manufacturing and understands public policy."
When Bush announced the new position Sept. 1, he noted that the nation had "lost thousands of jobs in manufacturing . . . some of it because production moved overseas." He made the announcement in Ohio, which last year suffered the second-worst job losses of any state, mostly in manufacturing.
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