Politics highlight NAW meeting
By Staff -- Industrial Distribution, 3/1/1998
Washington, D.C.--More than 300 distribution executives, representing the "collective leadership'' of the industry, gathered at the Capital Hilton Hotel in Washington last month for a glimpse of the legislation that might affect them in the future. Inside sales reform, product liability, cooperative purchasing, tax reform and President Clinton's budget were all on the agenda at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors.Distributors learned that product liability and inside sales reform both could see substantial progress in 1998. As for tax reform, Representative Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.) urged distributors "to become invested in this issue because we'll see something by 2001. The debate will reach a crescendo in 2000, which is an election year, so it will be a major debate. We need to hear from you what you believe the affect will be. Now is the beginning of this debate, and we want you to be involved."
Dunn predicted that the debate will be between a national tax system versus a flat tax system, in which current major deductions like mortgage interest would be eliminated from the books.
The meeting started on a humorous note with the husband-wife team of James Carville and Mary Matalin, and reached a peak at the next day's luncheon when NAW honored Representative J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) with its Special Leadership Award for 1997. Watts, one of the most energizing speakers on the Hill, brought the house down by recalling how he emerged from a poor section of Oklahoma, and with his call for America to return to family values.
In his annual address, NAW chairman Mike McClelland, of Hardware Wholesalers, Inc., reminded his audience that "the world is no longer just a stage, it is a marketplace for the creative and technologically advanced.'' He also said that making the Internet "a mainstream transactional tool" is the biggest challenge distributors face in the future. His firm currently sells products through the Internet.
NAW installed Charlie Banks, of Ferguson Enterprises, as its next chairman.
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