WASHINGTON - The man who will be leading the charge in Congress against the world's biggest airline merger is a flinty miner's son from Minnesota's Iron Range.
Jim Oberstar, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, brings four decades in Washington and a lifetime of hard-knuckled labor politics to his post. And in the proposed Delta-Northwest Airlines merger, which could cost jobs and competition in Minnesota, he doesn't like what he sees.
The 73-year-old native of Chisholm acknowledges that there's little Congress can legally do to block the deal.
But he has a track record of making things painful for the airline industry when it falls short of his standards of safety and fairness.
Oberstar, who once watched a man die in a mine accident, was largely responsible for grounding hundreds of planes this month by insisting on rigorous FAA inspections. Federal regulators, he said, had been too "cozy" with the industry.
Oberstar is fond of saying that "safety regulations are written in blood," and he draws a direct link between the mines and the skies. He views both industries with a union man's skepticism that management will act in the best interests of its customers and workers.
For that, he has been criticized for favoring labor unions and burdensome government regulation over the long-term health of the airline industry. Said the Wall Street Journal: "We thought we'd left this hypernanny state mentality back in the 1970s."
But Oberstar makes no apologies for insisting on safety at 30,000 feet. Nor does he see himself as simply carrying water for workers.
In an interview last week, he said the labor issue is important, "but it's secondary to the larger issue of competition in a deregulated environment. My objective is to maintain competition."
Deep blue-collar roots
Oberstar, the longest-serving member of Congress in Minnesota history, was first elected in 1974, succeeding his mentor and boss, John Blatnik. Now in his 17th term, Oberstar is routinely reelected from northern Minnesota's Arrowhead region by more than 60 percent of the vote.
He has deep blue-collar roots. His father, Louis, was born and raised on the Range, working at first in underground ore mines and later in open pit mines. Louis Oberstar was a union organizer, too, becoming a safety committee chairman.
Oberstar's mother, Mary, from an Italian immigrant family, worked in a garment factory, and many of the mining union's meetings were held around the family's kitchen table.
When old Washington hands explain what Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party brings to the national Democratic Party, they have politicians like Oberstar in mind.
"His labor bona fides were born at the breakfast table back on the Iron Range, where his father came and went with a lunch bucket every day," said Dennis McGrann, a longtime Washington lobbyist for Minnesota cities and counties. "He was raised in a household of working-class people who helped build unions, and saw what unions were able to do for people. He's a perfect example of that."
Oberstar also worked in the mines during the summers to pay his way through college, where he learned to speak French. It was during one of those stints that he saw a miner accidentally run down by a 15-ton truck backing up with a load of iron ore.
"He was standing in the wrong place," Oberstar said. "His life was just snuffed out. ... All it would have taken was a training program, but they didn't do that."
Different views of merger
Oberstar's lifelong affinity for people who work and sometimes take risks for a paycheck translates directly into a concern for Northwest's unionized pilots, flight attendants and ground workers. In the Delta workforce, only the pilots are unionized, and they haven't been able to come to terms with their counterparts at Northwest over a merged seniority system.
In Oberstar's view, the coming wave of mergers "will put all of labor at risk."
But it's by no means clear what portents the merger might bring for Northwest's 11,500 Minnesota employees. Rep. John Kline, a Republican whose district includes the company's Eagan headquarters, takes a much less pessimistic view of the merger.
"If you're trying to make sure that you've got a strong, viable airline that's going to continue to provide a hub kind of service and keep by far the bulk of the jobs -- and at the end of this ... I would hope that the net effect is that we even increase the total number of jobs."
Kline and many other Republicans say they want to learn more about the merger proposal before they line up for or against it.
"Mr. Oberstar is the dean of the delegation and he's going to try everything he can to try and stop the merger, and I'm not sure that's the best thing for Minnesota, and for the employees, either," Kline said.
The political clock
Oberstar, with a reputation for exhaustive mastery of policy detail, has signaled that he will try to at least slow the federal government review of the merger plan, a strategy that one of his aides called "running out the clock."
The clock Oberstar has in mind is the one winding down on the Bush presidency, after which Oberstar and his labor allies hope a new administration might take a tougher look at the deal.
But recent merger history shows that to be a faint hope.
"I'll be blunt here," said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who has expressed his own concerns. "Under both the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, antitrust enforcement has not been very aggressive."
Oberstar and Senate Democrats, including Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar, have promised hearings on the merger to present their case of "adverse economic impact" to the Justice Department, which must conduct an antitrust review.
"The merger may ultimately go through with the Bush administration," McGrann said. "But we can surely expect that they're going to have to have all the I's dotted and all the T's crossed, and the punctuation correct on every sentence, because they've got Oberstar looking over their shoulder."
Staff Writer Conrad Wilson contributed to this report. Kevin Diaz • 202-408-2753