NAFTA endgame - Bill Clinton's maneuverings to achieve passage of NAFTA in the House of Representatives

National Review, Nov 15, 1993 by Brit Hume

WHEN Representative Joseph Kennedy came to the White House October 21 to announce he would support the North American Free Trade Agreement, he was ushered into the press briefing room to say his piece. Earlier in the day, Senator Carol Moseley Braun had made a similar NAFTA declaration, but had to make her statement in the less exalted setting of the White House driveway. The same venue was provided a day earlier to her Illinois colleague, Paul Simon. Letting young Kennedy use the briefing platform, with the plaster-of-Paris White House logo hanging behind him, may seem a small courtesy on a rainy afternoon. But UPI's Helen Thomas, dean of the White House press corps, said it was the first time a Kennedy had spoken from that platform since the Kennedy Administration. Keep in mind that NAFTA is in trouble in the House, not the Senate. The Clinton Administration, after some earlier hesitancy, seems at last prepared to do what it has to to pass the trade agreement.

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The Administration still has a lot to do, but there are reasons to think the task may not be as difficult as both the White House and congressional Republicans have thought. Their mutual worry has been fed by mutual distrust. The President, facing a major defection of old-line Democrats under intense pressure from labor, needs about 110 Republican votes. Republicans, suspicious of the Clinton commitment to a treaty negotiated by George Bush and Carla Hills, say they may not be able to deliver unless Mr. Clinton can produce at least as many Democrats. Mr. Clinton is handicapped by the loss of both House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and Majority Whip David Bonior, who both oppose the agreement. That makes it harder not only to round up votes, but also to get an accurate count, and not just of Democrats. The White House is accustomed to relying on Bonior, who has contacts among moderate Republicans, for his head counts of Republicans as well as Democrats. On this, the Administration now has to depend on GOP Whip Newt Gingrich, a man they neither like nor trust. Gingrich, of course, feels the same way about the White House.

One might think the Republicans, eager to vindicate their former President, and ideologically disposed toward free trade, would be for NAFTA regardless, but it's rarely so simple in the House. Labor, with help from strange bedfellows ranging from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to Ralph Nader, has whipped up stiff opposition to the agreement, playing on the pessimism and insecurity people feel about the economy. The anti-NAFTA mood is most intense in blue-collar Democratic districts, but is not confined to those districts. So completely have labor and its allies dominated the NAFTA debate that there is strong opposition in many Republican-held districts as well. NAFTA is seen now as a tough yes vote for nearly everybody. Senior Clinton aide David Dreyer said the White House is expecting a vote-by-vote struggle down to the last day with the agreement winning by only the narrowest margin. "In the end, it will be like the budget," he says. "We'll be within one vote of losing by eighty." That may sound strange, but it's not uncommon on a major controversy for a President to be holding only as many votes as he needs to win, and only on the condition that he can win. Nobody wants to cast an unpopular vote in a losing cause. "The problem," says Dreyer, "is that nobody wants this. There's just no popular sentiment for it. There's nothing that can match the focused intensity of the opposition."

Gingrich has blamed that on the White House, and particularly on Mr. Clinton. "He has just not focused in the sort of narrow, intense, annoying way that you guys in the White House press corps have to report on whether you like it or not," he says. On October 19, Gingrich said the Clinton effort on NAFTA was "pathetic." Gingrich says the President has repeatedly alienated potential Republican support by derogatory references to the 1980s, when their party controlled the White House. "Every time he starts going on about the last 12 years, my guys say, 'We should vote for this guy?'"

The President was at it again October 20, at, of all things, a NAFTA event at the White House. "The people who are fighting this are bringing to this fight the resentments that they have over what happened in the 1980s. You heard me talk about it--how many decent people lost their jobs; how many times did we see people shut down and move to other countries." Asked about this, White House aides seemed surprised and a little amused that Mr. Clinton's rhetoric was causing so much heartburn in the opposition party. George Stephanopoulos said the President might tone it down, but would not "stop saying what he believes."

The tension over such matters obscures the larger fact that the President, for all the hoopla over health care, has placed increasing emphasis on the trade agreement. Indeed, the organizing theme of his domestic program-security for Americans in exchange for their risk-taking for the future--was dreamed up largely as a way to sell NAFTA, and to link it to the health-care program. It is a questionable, if profoundly liberal, notion-that people are more inclined to take risks and make changes in their lives when they feel secure than when they feel threatened.

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NAFTA endgame - Bill Clinton's maneuverings to achieve passage of NAFTA in the House of Representatives

National Review, Nov 15, 1993 by Brit Hume

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