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Interpreting NAFTA : The Science and Art of Political Analysis, by Frederick W. Mayer
With international agreement in the supplemental negotiations, NAFTA once again became largely a matter for U.S. domestic politics. It would become the biggest issue of the fall of 1993. Yet in Washington the debate started quietly. In August, official Washington becomes a ghost town. Everyone who can heads for the beaches of Maryland or Delaware. This year was no different, although the sense of exhaustion was perhaps even greater after the breakneck pace of the young Clinton administration and especially after the cliff-hanging drama of a narrow budget victory for the president.
If members of Congress were expecting a break when they left Washington for their home districts and states, however, they were soon disappointed. For months, a remarkably diverse collection of opponents had been targeting August as the month to kill NAFTA. They were ready. Across the country, union locals, chapters of Ross Perot's United We Stand, and an extraordinary network of grassroots environmental, human rights, and other groups packed town meetings, tied up phone lines to local Congressional offices, held rallies, and generally vented their fury at this thing called NAFTA.
As the politics of NAFTA moved outside the Washington Beltway—the freeway that circles the city and serves as a symbolic boundary between Washington “insiders” and “outsiders”—it also spilled out of the usual confined trade circles and into the public domain. In this arena, the opponents had the upper hand. Members of Congress home for the recess heard almost nothing from NAFTA's supporters and a furious earful from its opponents. The August recess was “three weeks of Nirvana,” recalled one of the opponents. For supporters, it was agony. By the end of the month, NAFTA appeared all but dead.
This chapter begins with a puzzle: Why, given the likely small effects of NAFTA—economic, environmental, and other—in the United States, did the agreement become such an enormous political issue? What accounts for the remarkable breadth of the opposition? How could Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Lane Kirkland find themselves on the same side of an issue? And, not least, what accounts for the extraordinary passion with which so many opposed an agreement that seemed likely to have so little immediate impact on their lives?
NAFTA's Effects
The public debate over NAFTA in the United States would revolve around several issues. First and foremost was the issue of jobs: Would NAFTA create or destroy jobs in the United States? Following closely in prominence were NAFTA's effects on the environment, public health and safety, and immigration. Other issues of concern were drug smuggling and human rights in Mexico. The public conversation on these issues would be only loosely connected to the likely real effects of the agreement.
Projecting the effects of an agreement as complex as NAFTA on phenomena as complex as jobs, the environment, immigration, drug smuggling, and Mexican human rights is extremely difficult. Numerous analyses, of varying quality, on all of these issues appeared throughout the effort to pass NAFTA. A sober critique of these studies, however, suggests that on balance, NAFTA's net effects on U.S. interests—whether jobs, environment, immigration, drugs, or human rights—was likely to be positive, although disagreement was reasonable. Regardless, almost every credible analysis concluded that whatever the direction of effect, the magnitude would likely be very small.
On the most politically important issue, the effect on jobs in the United States, the best estimates of NAFTA's impact predicted it would create over a ten year period somewhere between near zero and two hundred thousand new jobs, net. 1 (A study sponsored by the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations] predicted losses of five hundred fifty thousand jobs, but to get that number required an assumption about investment diversion that few economists thought credible.) These are very small numbers. To put them in perspective, the U.S. economy typically expands by two hundred thousand jobs in a good month. There were two basic reasons for the small projections. First, NAFTA would have only a slight effect on how open the United States was to Mexican goods. The United States, with a few notable exceptions, was already quite open to trade. Moreover, given the existence of the maquiladora program, corporations that wished to manufacture in Mexico for export to the United States were already quite free to do so. Second, Mexico's economy was very small, less than 5 percent of the U.S. economy. Even large changes in the Mexican economy would, therefore, have only small effects on the economy in the United States. Of course, the likely magnitude of the economic impacts on Mexico were not so small.
The issue of NAFTA's effect on the environment had three faces: the effect on border pollution, the possibility that Mexico would become a “pollution haven” for firms seeking to avoid U.S. regulations, and the effect on U.S. environmental laws. On the question of border pollution, it was hard to conclude that NAFTA would have anything but positive effects. To the extent that the very real problems of the border were manifestations of concentrated rapid industrialization coupled with lax environmental regulation, NAFTA would help matters by eliminating the incentive to locate only on the border, by providing the catalyst for greater environmental cooperation between the United States and Mexico, and eventually (and predictably) providing an infusion of funds to remedy some of the worst of the region's problems. 2 NAFTA's effects on the overall environment of Mexico were harder to project and were dependent on, among other things, what one assumed about the relationship of economic development to environmental protection and about the future regulatory intentions of the Mexican government. 3
There was also very little reason to believe that NAFTA would make Mexico a pollution haven. On the one hand, lower regulatory costs in Mexico already provided an incentive to relocate production, as several firms had already done. On the other hand, little evidence pointed to systematic relocation to Mexico for this reason. For few industries is regulatory cost more than a tiny fraction of the overall cost of doing business. 4 Most important, the likely marginal effect of NAFTA would be to reduce these incentives. Although NAFTA was intended to make investment in Mexico easier, the combination of Mexico's strong environmental laws and the existence of a watchdog international commission would likely narrow the gap in regulatory differences between Mexico and the United States.
On the question of whether NAFTA might erode U.S. environmental, health, and safety laws, it was highly unlikely that there would be significant effects. Because of environmental outcry on this issue, NAFTA contained language intended to protect against this possibility. Moreover, given the imbalances in political power, Mexico was not likely to challenge a U.S. environmental law. Corporations could use the threat of moving to Mexico as leverage to induce less stringent regulation, but NAFTA, as noted above, did little to make the threat of moving more credible.
NAFTA's likely impacts on immigration from Mexico to the United States were extremely difficult to project, as they depended on estimates of NAFTA's effects on the Mexican economy and particularly on the adjustment difficulties that Mexico might encounter. Most economic analyses suggested that NAFTA would contribute to growth in the Mexican economy over time, resulting in fewer incentives for Mexican workers to migrate. (Note that this is the implication of the strong anti-NAFTA analyses that foresaw jobs going to Mexico and wages being depressed in the United States.) On the other hand, NAFTA might cause significant dislocations in the Mexican economy in the more immediate future, as previously protected small businesses and, most importantly, farmers encountered foreign competition. 5 To a great extent, though, the estimated effects of NAFTA depended on whether or not one considered Mexican agricultural reform an independent initiative that would have proceeded without NAFTA, in which case the marginal contribution of NAFTA would be quite small. Whatever the direction of NAFTA's effects on migration, however, underlying economic and demographic factors in Mexico would continue to be much more important.
As the public debate heated up, NAFTA also stood accused of making it easier for the drug cartels to transport contraband across the border, thereby contributing to the U.S. drug problem. The reasoned case for this proposition rested on the presumption that a greater flow of goods from Mexico would make it more difficult for customs agents to carry out their duties. This argument presumed that current interdiction efforts were effective deterrents that would be significantly impaired by NAFTA. Customs officials countered that increased numbers of inspectors and greater cooperation with Mexican authorities would more than compensate for the dangers posed by increased flow of goods. (They did not argue that their current efforts were ineffective anyway.) Although the drug issue could not be completely dismissed, the likely effects of NAFTA on U.S. drug consumption were minimal.
On the issue of Mexican human rights, the key question was NAFTA's likely effect on the Mexican political system. Opponents charged that by rewarding the Salinas government the United States would further entrench a repressive political system. The United States was missing an opportunity to pressure Mexico to reform, they maintained. Some opponents simply stood on principle: “How can we have free trade with a country that isn't free?” asked Daniel Patrick Moynihan. NAFTA's supporters countered that rejecting NAFTA would empower the old guard in Mexico, the real enemies of political reform, and that economic reform would lay the groundwork for political change. Both arguments had some merit, but whatever NAFTA's real effects, they would almost certainly be much smaller that the effects of internal dynamics within Mexico, a point sometimes lost on both sides of the debate in the United States.
For all the issues that dominated the U.S. public debate about NAFTA, the likely effects were quite small relative to the effects of larger forces at work in the economy, the environment, and the society. Still, however small the real effects of NAFTA, the political apprehension of them was anything but. What NAFTA was to the experts and what NAFTA meant to the antagonists in the political struggle were two very different things. For the experts, evaluating NAFTA was a complicated matter, requiring distinctions between the marginal effects of NAFTA and underlying trends; understandings of complicated economic, environmental, and social systems; and processing of large amounts of information. For most participants in the political process, apprehending NAFTA was more a matter of deciding which story fit best. For the first part of 1993, the dominant story was told by NAFTA's opponents.
Organizing the Opposition
The opposition to NAFTA that boiled over in August did not arise spontaneously. It built on the 1991 efforts to deny fast track authority, on the protests lodged during the course of the negotiation, and on the opposition stirred by the presidential candidacies of Democrat Jerry Brown, Republican Pat Buchanan, and especially, independent candidate Ross Perot in 1992. But the campaign to stop NAFTA took on greater urgency in the spring of 1993, as opponents looked toward the vote in Congress that would most likely take place later in the year.
Opposition strategists recognized the challenge that faced them. If the contest over NAFTA turned out to be trade politics as usual they stood little chance. Their strength did not lie in the inside game of trade lobbyists and trade experts. To win, they would need to change the rules of the trade policy making game. They would need to mount an outside campaign, mobilizing members of unions, environmental organizations, citizen groups, Ross Perot's followers, conservative and religious groups, and others in the general public to pressure Washington from the grassroots.
The Unions
There was never any real doubt whether unions would oppose NAFTA, the question was how aggressive and how effective the opposition would be. Unions had blasted the “Bush NAFTA,” and they saw little chance that Clinton's side agreements would change it fundamentally. To the unions, NAFTA symbolized lost jobs and lower wages. It was designed to make it easier for big business to escape unions, as well as environmental and safety regulations, by moving production to Mexico. It was one more chapter of the antiunion, probusiness Reagan-Bush agenda that was making the rich richer and working Americans poorer. At the annual AFL-CIO meeting in Bal Harbour, Florida, in February 1993, the Executive Council stated that
the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by President Bush but not approved by Congress, would be a disaster for millions of working people in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It should be rejected and renegotiated to advance the overall public interest. As drafted, NAFTA is an agreement based solely on exploitation. It would destroy jobs and depress wages in the U.S. and Canada. 6
But union leaders were in a strategic quandary. Notwithstanding their antipathy to NAFTA, they had little incentive to attack the first Democratic president in twelve years, and every reason to give Clinton time to make good on his campaign promise to fix the agreement, or better yet, to abandon it altogether. Willingness to give Clinton time was not shared by more activist union officials, nor was it universal among the rank and file. The Teamsters, the textile and garment unions, the electrical workers union, the glass union, and others within the movement took a more aggressive stance. State and local union chapters pressed forward largely independent of the national effort with their anti-NAFTA campaign. In many states, unionists mounted campaigns against NAFTA that included rallies, phone calls, and personal visits during the Easter recess, when Congress members were back in the their districts. Still, the official rallying cry of the AFL-CIO in the spring of 1993 was “Not This NAFTA,” a motto that seemed to leave open the possibility that they would support it with the right side agreements. The consequence of the differences within the unions was a somewhat disjointed strategy.
The AFL-CIO continued its efforts to focus attention on the problems of the border as tangible evidence of what free trade with Mexico would mean. The union organized tours of the border for members of Congress and the press, intended both to educate members and to generate negative publicity regarding border problems. The trips involved visits to the colonias to talk with poor residents and to factory plants to talk with workers, as well as meetings with local activists. These trips had been going on since 1991, when a leadership group that included Dick Gephardt first went down to the border.
After Clinton's election, Gephardt decided he wanted to do a series of additional trips. “Gephardt was really impressed with the advantages of having a first-hand look at the practices of the companies in the maquiladoras and about how hard it was for U.S. companies to be able to compete with workers being paid $1 an hour,” recalled Ed Feigen, the union organizer of these trips. He led several groups to the border in 1993, including a group of new Congress members. In April, Representative Marcy Kaptur (Democrat, Ohio) led a group of women Representatives on a similar tour. Senator Paul Wellstone (Democrat, Minn.) led yet another group.
Union publications covered the trips for their members. For instance, the AFL-CIO News reported that “after a grueling tour of the festering toxic dumps and poverty-ridden worker villages south of the border,” the House members “agreed that Congress should dump the North American Free Trade Agreement as negotiated by the Bush administration.” Studies have shown, it continued, that “500,000 U.S. jobs had been lost to the maquiladoras during the 1980s and another half-million jobs would be wiped out in the 1990s under the flawed NAFTA.” 7
In early May, the AFL-CIO officially launched its “Not This NAFTA” campaign, using billboards, radio ads, posters, and other media. Nevertheless, at the highest levels, union officials continued to debate whether to launch an all-out campaign against the agreement. The ambiguity of this stance resulted in fewer resources being devoted to the campaign. Although many events were taking place locally around the country, at AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, the “Not this NAFTA” effort operated with only a tiny staff. At the United Auto Workers (UAW) offices in Washington, only two people were working on NAFTA. For others in the coalition against NAFTA, including many unions, the AFL-CIO's less than total commitment became a source of frustration.
The Citizen's Trade Campaign
More activist unions gravitated toward the Citizen's Trade Campaign (CTC), the coalition of grassroots organizations opposed to NAFTA. CTC succeeded the Citizen's Trade Watch coalition that had first formed during the fast track fight and had continued to monitor the course of the NAFTA negotiations. The CTC brought together a remarkably broad collection of organizations under one tent. The CTC described itself in on its letterhead as “a coalition of environmental, consumer, labor, family farm, religious, and civic organizations promoting environmental and social justice in trade policy.” The executive committee included John Audley of the Sierra Club; Brent Blackwelder of Friends of the Earth; Evelyn Dubrow of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union; Michael Dunn of the National Farmers Union; Mark Ritchie of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy; Lauren Rothfarb of the International Union of Electronic, Technical, Salaried Machine and Furniture Workers Union; Liz Smith of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union; and Lori Wallach of Public Citizen. Other members of the coalition included Jesse Jackson's National Rainbow Coalition, the United Methodists General Board of Church and Society, the Humane Society, Greenpeace, and Americans for Democratic Action.
At a March press conference announcing its campaign against NAFTA, Jim Jontz, a former Indiana Congressman serving as the campaign's chair, stated the common view of the groups: “This agreement is fundamentally flawed. It would serve the interests of multinational corporations and not average citizens.” 8 The CTC's position statement elaborated the point:
Coalition members are united in the position that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is fundamentally flawed, and therefore, unacceptable. It will encourage companies to move operations and factories to areas of cheap labor and lax environmental and worker safety regulation. It will result in a lower standard of living, disruption of our communities, and irreparable harm to our environment. NAFTA undermines the gains we have achieved over the years in food safety, labor standards and environmental protection. 9
The CTC also worked closely with the Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART), successor to the MODTLE (Mobilization on Development, Trade, Labor, and the Environment) coalition that had organized during the fast track fight. Like MODTLE, ART was organized by Pharis Harvey, head of the International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund (ILRERF). An ILRERF book of 1982 entitled Unions and Free Trade captured many of the beliefs about NAFTA shared by the entire grassroots opposition:
The North American Free Trade Agreement is not about the commerce of nations. This treaty that binds the United States, Canada, and Mexico in economic union is more about corporate profit than about trade. It is about letting private businesses reorganize the North American economy without the checks and balances once provided by unions, social movements, or governments. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would roll back a hundred years of controls and restrictions that were placed on private business in the interests of the majority of the people. 10
The members of CTC and ART were considerably less ambivalent than the leadership of the AFL-CIO about their position on NAFTA. They had opposed fast track, had protested the negotiations as they proceeded, and now stood ready to fight the agreement. Few members of the coalition held out hope that the supplemental agreements would fix what they believed to be NAFTA's fatal flaws, although as an internal coalition memo explained to members,
For some CTC member groups, being willing to discuss side agreements is a tactic that they find necessary in Washington in order to be at the table and be a credible part of the political debate over the NAFTA. In talking to the administration now, these groups are laying markers by which the finished agreement can later be judged. 11
The CTC's strategy was to build grassroots opposition to pressure members of Congress, particularly when they were home on recess. At a “grassroots conference” in Washington March 25-27, activists from around the country went through a program of education about NAFTA, training for organizing local communities, motivational talks, and strategic planning. The group met with several members of Congress, including Richard Gephardt. Ralph Nader gave a pep talk. There was some discussion about reaching out to United We Stand America, although many were uncomfortable about aligning with Ross Perot. A union leader who was also a member of United We Stand advised the group that they could get United We Stand troops without involving Ross Perot. He offered to put the group in touch with United We Stand state coordinators.
A first target was the April 1993 recess. In a letter to activists April 5, Jontz urged them to set up meetings with Representatives when they were back in their districts and to appear at town meetings to “remind members [of Congress] that this is an important issue to a growing number of citizens.” Jontz suggested that activists urge members to write to President Clinton outlining their concerns about NAFTA. “Many members are taking a ‘wait and see’ attitude,” he wrote, “but by asking them to weigh in at this point we can help set the ‘markers,’ by which the NAFTA should be judged.” 12 The intent was to get members on record with demands that would be unlikely to be met by the side agreements.
CTC next organized a “National Week of Action for Fair Trade,” May 1-9 (extended to include May Day). Events included rallies in New York City led by Jim Hightower, the colorful liberal Texas politician; in St. Louis led by Jesse Jackson; and in Seattle, demonstrating the new alliance of environmentalists and unions, led by Jane Perkins, president of Friends of the Earth, and George Korplus, president of the Machinists Union. In Colorado, local organizers set up a “tractorcade/truck convoy” between Colorado Springs and Denver. In Minnesota they held a car caravan and tractorcade. Throughout the country, organizers held rallies, conferences, chili dinners, and other events to publicize their opposition to NAFTA.
The CTC and the unions together began working closely with a core of Democratic members of Congress opposed to NAFTA. In March, several House members had joined David Bonior (Democrat, Mich.), the chief Democratic whip, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, in forming an anti-NAFTA caucus. Bonior quietly made available his whip offices for opposition strategy meetings. For the duration of the NAFTA fight, Bonior's offices would be the meeting ground for NAFTA's liberal opponents.
Ross Perot and United We Stand America
In the third presidential debate with George Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992, Ross Perot described his views on NAFTA.
Let's go to the center of the bull's eye—the core problem. And believe me, everybody on the factory floor all over this country knows it. You implement that NAFTA—the Mexican trade agreement where they pay people $1 an hour, have no health care, no retirement, no pollution controls, etc., etc., etc.—and you are going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.
The phrase “giant sucking sound” became the most memorable phrase of the campaign.
For Perot, though, NAFTA was more than lost jobs; it was emblematic of much that he thought was wrong with America. Perot's views on trade had been heavily influenced by Pat Choate, an author who had written a scathing attack on the politics of U.S. trade policy entitled Agents of Influence. Choate's thesis was that high-powered lobbyists bought by the multinationals and by foreign governments were corrupting American trade policy. Perot found the argument appealing. Big corporations, hired agents of the Mexican government, and insiders in the U.S. government had conspired to negotiate an agreement in secret that served their interests and hurt the American people. Perot saw NAFTA as an “agreement to lure businesses to Mexico,” recalled Choate. “Perot saw a bunch of sleazy people paid to argue that the world is flat or round for a buck.”
In 1993, Perot decided to make opposition to NAFTA his top issue and made Pat Choate his chief advisor. However deeply felt, Perot's personal views about NAFTA were not the only reason for this decision. After the presidential campaign, during which he had assembled a nationwide organization called United We Stand America, the challenge was to keep the organization afloat. “My idea was to use NAFTA as a pedagogical device on trade,” recalled Pat Choate. “Perot's people were using it as an organizing device. NAFTA was a great organizing device for all the opponents,” he noted.
Perot's strategic decision was not complicated by loyalty to Bill Clinton, and side agreements were not going to change his views. The only question was how active he and his organization, United We Stand America, would be in opposition to the agreement. The answer was very active. Perot and Choate planned an all-out campaign against NAFTA. They recognized that they had to attack from outside the usual trade circles. “We knew we could never win inside the Beltway. The only way to win it was outside the Beltway,” recalled Choate. And they saw that their best chance to defeat NAFTA was to hit it early. “February to June was the critical moment,” Choate said. “Once the president clicked it on and the PR machine clicked in we would be at a disadvantage . The whole objective was to kill the deal early.”
Choate tried to find ways to generate negative media coverage of NAFTA and Mexico. The idea was to come up with something new every two weeks, on the theory that was about all the trade reporters would handle until the issue heated up. The first issue had been handed to Choate in February when a supporter faxed him the advertisement for Amerimex, the outfit trying to recruit U.S. businesses to Mexico, and Choate passed it on to Richard Gephardt, knowing that the ad would make more news coming from him. Gephardt's release of the ad the day before the first meeting of trade ministers on the supplemental negotiations had created a distraction from the negotiations.
The next big splash also centered around an ad. In April, appearing at a Senate Banking Committee hearing organized by Donald Riegle (Democrat, Mich.), the most outspoken critic of NAFTA in the Senate, Perot produced a series of advertisements that had been running in World Trade Magazine, a magazine for American business people. The ads, purchased by the Mexican state of Yucatan, were intended to attract business to the region.“Here's a headline, here's an ad in one of them,” Perot told the committee, holding up an ad. “ ‘I can't keep my labor costs down, my turnover rates low and my standard of living high.’ That's my standard of living, this guy is talking about his standard of living, okay, not his workers' standard of living. ‘Yes you can, in Yucatan.’”
Senator Riegle interrupted: “Say that again. Let's hear that again, how was that?”
Perot continued, “ ‘Yes you can, in Yucatan.’ Yuck-a-tan, I guess I ought to say.
“Now, it gets better,” Perot promised. He held up a second advertisement and read the headline. “ ‘I can't find good, loyal workers’—this is a U.S. executive here scratching behind his ear—‘for a dollar an hour, within a thousand miles of here.’ You can't live on a dollar an hour in this country. ‘Yes you can, in Yucatan. We're only 460 miles.’” 13
For Perot, and for many others during the subsequent course of the NAFTA fight, the Yucatan ads said it all. At every opportunity, an appearance on NBC's Sunday morning “Meet the Press” program later that month, for instance, Perot produced the Amerimex and Yucatan ads as exhibits to demonstrate the essence of what he maintained NAFTA was about.
Notwithstanding their occasional success in getting media coverage, Perot and Choate felt that they were at a disadvantage in the mainstream press where the vast majority of producers and editors were NAFTA supporters. An important element of Perot's media strategy, therefore, centered on talk show appearances, particularly radio talk shows. The talk shows catered to a conservative public, many of whom were disaffected with government and mainstream media. Perot and Choate found the shows an excellent vehicle to reach the segment of the public that had responded to Perot's presidential candidacy. Choate built a radio studio in his offices on Capitol Hill. Beginning in February, every Friday he was the guest on the “Chuck Harder Show,” a popular nationally syndicated talk show. For Choate this was an opportunity to educate listeners about trade, to tell the story of foreign agents, corruption, bad deals, and lost jobs.
The talk shows seemed to Choate to strike a chord with listeners. “NAFTA became a Rorschach,” he recalled. “It was a symbolic issue as much as anything.” Listeners to the Harder show began calling other talk shows, including those featuring members of Congress on C-SPAN. Other listeners organized opposition groups in their communities. A nurse in Houston heard Choate claiming that NAFTA that would allow less qualified professionals to come into the United States. She organized a group of nurses against NAFTA.
Perot himself appeared numerous times on other talk shows, including the most prominent program on CNN, “Larry King Live.” Still, Perot was frustrated with his attempts to get his message across through the mass media. He decided, therefore, to adopt the tactic that had worked well for him in the presidential campaign: the paid “infomercial.” Perot purchased half an hour of air time from NBC for the end of May.
Pat Buchanan and the Republican Right
Further right on the political spectrum, Pat Buchanan, having returned to his role as television commentator and columnist after his bid for the presidency in 1992, resumed his harsh rhetoric about NAFTA. During the primary season in 1992, Buchanan had run in the Republican primaries on an “America first” platform that included opposition to NAFTA. Buchanan, the former Nixon speech writer, was never at a loss for colorful words to convey his message. On April 22nd, 1992, Buchanan made clear his worldview in a speech in Washington, D.C., to the Daughters of the American Revolution:
It is time Americans took their country back. Before we lose her forever, let us take America back from the global parasites of the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund], who siphon off America's wealth for Third World socialists and incompetents. And, let us take her back from the agents of influence who occupy this city and do the bidding of foreign powers.
Now that the Cold War is over, we need a new foreign policy, of Americans, by Americans, and for Americans. Time to set aside all this geo-babble about a New World Order, and begin restoring the Old American Republic. Time to set aside the temptation to empire, time to put America first.
Buchanan also tapped into a growing anxiety about immigrants. “Our own country is undergoing the greatest invasion in history, a mass immigration of millions of illegal aliens yearly from Mexico,” Buchanan asserted to an audience of conservative political activists that February. “This invasion is eroding our tax base, swamping social services, undermining the social cohesion of the Republic.” 14 For Buchanan, NAFTA was more than a threat to America's standard of living: it was a threat to the society.
Buchanan had backed away from criticism of NAFTA once Bush's renomination was assured, but with Clinton in office, Buchanan was free to resume his attack. On CNN's “Crossfire” in May 1993, Buchanan explained his opposition to NAFTA.
I used to be a 100-percent free trader in Ronald Reagan's White House, but you go around this country, and you see the average wage of working Americans is falling. There are more people working in government now than in manufacturing. From 1865 to, say, 1910, the two leading protectionists in this country were the two Republicans up on Mount Rushmore, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, and the standard of living of American workers rose higher in that period than any other period of our history, whereas it's been holding or falling in the last 20 years. Why not look at free trade as a reason? 15
As an indication of how complicated the politics of NAFTA was becoming, an amused Michael Kinsley, Buchanan's liberal counterpoint on the show, noted:
I've got Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island over here on the left with me supporting free market capitalism, and over there on the right with Pat, defending burdensome government regulation, is [Democratic] Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina. 16
In comparison to the unions, the grassroots environmentalists, or United We Stand America, Buchanan and others on the Republican right were not nearly as organized in the spring, although the talk show circuit provided an important forum for their views. Unless one was listening carefully, it was still easy to miss the rumblings from the right that would eventually pose problems for NAFTA.
The Supporters' Dilemma
The forces of support were much less organized than the opposition in early 1993. The main dilemma was that likely elements of a supportive coalition—the Clinton administration, the business community, and moderate environmental groups—were all engaged in the supplemental negotiations on labor and environment and, therefore, not in a position to advocate for NAFTA. The Mexican lobby was in place, as Perot noted, but Mexico could do little directly to influence the public debate on NAFTA. This predicament created a vacuum for the opposition to fill, and it would nearly spell the death of NAFTA.
The Business Community
Shortly after the conclusion of the NAFTA negotiations in 1992, Jim Robinson, the chair of the Business Roundtable's trade task force, was forced out as CEO of American Express, thereby losing his seat at the Roundtable. Kay Whitmore, CEO of Kodak, took over for Robinson as task force chair. Robinson and Whitmore called a meeting of top players in the United States and Mexico to discuss the upcoming efforts to pass NAFTA. Among those attending were Jim Jones, former Congressman from Oklahoma and then chair of the New York Stock Exchange; Rodman Rockefeller, head of the U.S.-Mexican Businessman's Association; Jerry Jaznowski of the National Association of Manufacturers; Juan Gallardo, head of Coordinadora de Organismos Empresariales de Comercio Exterior (COECE), the Mexican Business lobby; and Carlos Salinas, the president of Mexico.
To coordinate U.S. business efforts on NAFTA's behalf, the group agreed to create a new organization: USA*NAFTA. Whitmore and Robinson decided on a budget of $2 million and made the rounds of the Business Roundtable to collect the money. Sandy Masur, Whitmore's advisor on international trade, was charged with putting together the new organization and planning a strategy. For Masur, the problem was getting businesses to do something beyond adding their name to the USA*NAFTA membership list. The $2 million budget was too small to do more than basic public relations and lobbying. Without real commitments from CEOs, the campaign would go nowhere. But in the early spring, she recalled, “It was hard for business to focus on NAFTA.”
Many factors contributed to business's lethargy. First and foremost, the business community was concerned about the direction of the supplemental negotiations on labor and environment. To retain leverage in these talks, they could not firmly commit to supporting NAFTA. Second, the business community did not have as good a working relationship with the new Democratic president as they had had with his Republican predecessors. The Clinton administration compounded suspicions by urging business to take the lead while it appeared ambivalent about the agreement. As one trade insider put it, “for forty-five years on international trade issues, the president led and the business community provided support.” Third, business attention was focused elsewhere, on the tax bill and on the early stages of health care, issues of much more immediate financial concern. Finally, and more generally, few in the business community recognized the potency of the opposition forces that NAFTA was engendering and the nature of the political problem they were about to face. Trade had always been an inside game. It was hard to imagine it becoming the public issue that it would soon become.
Masur and a small group of trade lobbyists and consultants began meeting weekly to plan and coordinate strategy. The strategy looked much the same as the effort they had put together to pass fast track two years before: traditional lobbying of Congress members and staff by business representatives; public relations, primarily involving the generation of favorable editorials; and a modest “grassroots” effort to get local businesses to demonstrate their support to their members of Congress. The Washington strategy relied on the community of company lobbyists, the “Washington Reps,” who made the rounds on Capitol Hill to talk with members and staffers. The Washington Reps began meeting once a week to compare notes and to get a pep talk. The meetings had little energy.
Gail Harrison of the Wexler Group, a grassroots lobbying firm, was in charge of the grassroots effort. The original effort consisted of designating a state “captain” to organize business support in the state. As the spring wore on, however, Harrison and Sandy Masur realized that the approach was not working. Most captains had never run a grassroots campaign. They thought that if they set up one meeting with thirty people and the Congressperson, they had done their job. “We were looking to company people in the states to manage what was a bigger battle than they could handle,” recalled Masur. Moreover, state captains were not getting signals from their CEOs that NAFTA was a priority. Without the committed support of CEOs, the grassroots efforts fizzled.
The Mexican Lobby
The Mexicans had set up a NAFTA office in Washington during the fast track effort and assembled a team of U.S. lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations firms to advise them. The Mexican team included some of the best (and highest priced) Washington talent, including several former U.S. trade officials, among them former United States Trade Representative (USTR) Bill Brock. By the spring of 1993, the Mexicans had already spent more than $25 million on the effort, and by the time the NAFTA effort was over the tab would be well over $30 million.
For all the high-powered help they employed, the Mexican lobbyists were limited in the activities they could engage in. They recognized that the same message coming from a U.S. CEO would be more effective than if it was coming from them. Nonetheless, their lobbyists had access and could get and give information; their public relations firms could attempt to improve Mexico's image in the United States; and their technical staff could provide quick analyses to counter charges leveled by the opposition. These capabilities would later quietly serve to bolster efforts by business and the Clinton administration.
Inside the Administration
In the spring, the Clinton administration was not focused on making a case for NAFTA. At the USTR, Mickey Kantor and his staff were fully engaged in negotiating the supplemental agreements. Worse, early in the year, Kantor's message was a continuation of the campaign theme: Bush's NAFTA is flawed and needs to be fixed with supplemental agreements. This position, useful for the election campaign, prevented Kantor from making a case for NAFTA.
The problem was that passing NAFTA was the central concern nowhere else in the administration. At the newly created National Economic Council (NEC) in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, more pressing issues pushed NAFTA off the agenda. Bob Kyle, a deputy at the NEC and formerly chief trade council for the Finance Committee and a veteran of the fast track fight in 1991, began holding a once-a-week meeting of other deputies in the White House, but he, like everyone else at the NEC, was stretched too thin to do more than monitor the progress of the supplemental agreements.
NAFTA was also not a priority at the White House. The president had his hands full with other issues. Moreover, support for NAFTA was far from unanimous in the president's inner circle, as had also been the case during the election campaign. In one camp were internationalists like Lloyd Bentsen and National Economic Advisor Robert Rubin, who viewed NAFTA as an important part of the centrist Democratic agenda. On the other side, however, many of the president's top political advisors continued to harbor doubts; among them was George Stephanopoulos, the former Gephardt aide who served as White House communications director. They advised the president to at least keep open the option of backing out. The president seemed to support the principle of the agreement. In a foreign policy speech at American University in February, he used strong language crafted for him by NAFTA's advocates for the purpose of forestalling NAFTA's opponents in the administration and sending a strong public message of his commitment to NAFTA. But there was enough ambiguity in the message coming from the White House to encourage NAFTA opponents to believe that the president was not yet fully committed.
At the end of April, Jeff Faux, a Clinton confidant and president of the Economic Policy Institute, a union-funded Washington think tank, wrote a memo to his friends on the White House political team. The memo was a carefully constructed and well-argued bombshell that began, “The international trade people in the administration are steering the president off a political cliff.” Faux went on to make a compelling political case against NAFTA:
NAFTA makes no sense to most people and undercuts the imagery of a president concerned about jobs for Americans. Everything we know about politics over the last twenty years tells us that a Democratic president must have the populist advantage on jobs and growth issues to offset the discomfort that many ordinary people feel with a social agenda that to them seems to emphasize gay rights and political correctness.
Right now, no one is “responsible” for jobs lost because of investment that moves across the border. But the president is making NAFTA his program. And after it passes, Bill Clinton will be blamed for every factory that closes down, whether NAFTA was the cause or not. That is exactly what happened to Mulroney in Canada.
This will be a very tough fight with Democrats! It will divide the party and leave scars. If the president pushes this and wins, there will be Democratic districts where he will not be welcome.
Perot could do real damage on NAFTA. As a Democratic Congressman said to me last week: people in my district are beginning to say that he's giving away our tax money to the Russians and now he wants to give our jobs to the Mexicans. Imagine hearing that one a few million times on talk radio.
When the debate gets going, the issue of Mexican money buying access and influence in Washington will resurface. This could hand Perot his third issue: corruption in Washington.
You can't trust your allies on this. You can't control Salinas. And there is some evidence that some of the big business community will not go to the mat on this. These people do not like controversy.
The absence of a Republican resistance to NAFTA is deceptive. Some Republicans will peel off on the NAFTA vote now that Bush is gone. More important, at the local level, right wing populist Republicans (helped by the Christian right) will be shameless about exploiting NAFTA to portray the president as the friend of everyone but the average American. 17
Faux recommended having someone in the White House be responsible for “a plan to back out of NAFTA.” Faux's memo touched all the right buttons. It was read with great interest by its recipients.
The View from the Hill
Eventually, all the outside efforts would be focused on the Congress. In the spring of 1993, the situation did not look good for NAFTA's supporters, particularly in the House. Most House Democrats were opposed to the agreement; only a handful supported. Majority Leader Gephardt had not yet announced his opposition to NAFTA, but the betting was that he would eventually oppose. The chief whip, David Bonior, was holding two sets of weekly meetings for opponents, one of the anti-NAFTA House caucus, the other with the outside groups mobilizing against the agreement. Moreover, the majority of committee chairs were opposed to NAFTA.
Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, was supportive, but he was by now deeply wounded by the House post office scandal that would eventually cost him reelection. The business community and the White House seemed to be looking toward Bill Richardson (Democrat, N.M.), the energetic deputy whip, as their point man in the House, but Rostenkowski wanted to keep things in the Ways and Means Committee. Rostenkowski designated Bob Matsui, a soft-spoken but respected member from California, to lead the effort. Matsui's aide, Diane Sullivan, would become the center of the pro-NAFTA effort in the House. The designation created some tension between Richardson and Matsui, and between their staffs, both of whom felt better equipped to run the show.
On the Republican side of the aisle, leadership was nominally supportive but unwilling to commit until the side agreements were complete. Moreover, Minority Leader Bob Michel and Republican Whip Newt Gingrich were locked in battle with the president over the budget and other issues and in no mood to help him on NAFTA.
In the Senate, the situation was more favorable. In 1991, fast track had passed there with a more comfortable margin than in the House. Certain Senators were quite vocal in their opposition, notably Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and the two Michigan Senators, Carl Levin and Donald Riegle, but the opposition was not as organized as it was in the House. However, it was uncertain who would lead the effort to pass NAFTA in the Senate. Normally, the chair of the Finance Committee assumes this role. With Lloyd Bentsen's move to the administration, this position had passed to New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but Moynihan had voted against fast track and continued to be critical of NAFTA. He was not going to take the lead. Max Baucus was second ranking on Finance and chaired the Trade Subcommittee, but his efforts to influence the outcome of the side agreements kept him from committing his support.
Bill Bradley was only the fourth-ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, but he had no ambivalence about supporting NAFTA. Bradley believed deeply in its historic significance and was prepared to work hard for its passage. In March, Bradley, sensing the leadership vacuum, decided to set up a bipartisan whip group. From the outset maintaining bipartisanship was a central objective, since the one way NAFTA could be defeated in the Senate was if Republicans bolted. Bradley spoke with John Chafee of Rhode Island, a moderate Republican with whom he had a good relationship, about jointly chairing the effort. Chafee agreed, and he and Bradley quietly began talking with other Senators to feel out their positions. The author, then serving as Bradley's chief aide for foreign policy, worked with Chafee aide Amy Dunathan, to staff the working group.
Bradley was frustrated with the lack of strategy coming from either the administration or the business community. Both were leaving the field to the opponents, letting them frame the public debate. Bradley urged the administration to designate a point person to coordinate strategy and to begin making the public case for NAFTA. Bradley also met on a regular basis with the business strategists. “This isn't going to be trade politics as usual,” he told them. “You need to think of this as an election.” He urged USA*NAFTA to hire a campaign strategist, someone skilled in developing and testing messages. He felt that opponents were being more effective because they could use specific stories to paint a negative portrait—plant closings, toxic dumps, and the like—whereas supporters were relying on generalities about free trade. Bradley sent a letter to USA*NAFTA members asking for specifics about what they planned to do if NAFTA passed. Their responses would later provide important ammunition for the pro-NAFTA forces.
In late February, at a speech to a sparse breakfast audience of a few Congress members and staffers, Bradley laid out his message for NAFTA. As always, Bradley took a long view. He argued that the agreement would create jobs by making America more competitive with Europe and Asia in the international economy of the twenty-first century. Even more important, NAFTA was a historic opportunity to break from the history of suspicion and animosity that had for so long characterized U.S.-Mexican relations. NAFTA meant one more thing to Bradley: It was an expression of something fundamentally American, the ability to embrace people of a different culture and to be enriched by pluralism. Although few heard the speech, Bradley's talking points were distributed widely, first in raw form to the business strategy group and then in a more polished version in letters distributed to every member of Congress. As Bradley campaigned for NAFTA, with the president and others in the administration, with fellow members of Congress, with the media, and in dozens of talks to public groups, these were the themes to which Bradley returned.
Is NAFTA Dead?
On April 27, Washington was greeted by a front page headline in the Washington Post declaring that OMB (Office of Management and Budget) Director Leon Panetta had declared NAFTA “dead.” 18 A gloomy Panetta had talked with reporters the day before about his frustrations with progress on Clinton's entire agenda and let slip that NAFTA was dead for now in the Congress. The administration scrambled to repair the damage, but most insiders thought that Panetta was simply telling the truth about where things stood. Matsui's whip counts in the House, while very soft, were showing fewer than forty Democrats supportive, far from the hundred he thought they needed (and that the Republican leadership would later insist upon as the price for delivering the remaining votes).
In the month that followed Panetta's gloomy musings, the prospects for NAFTA grew even dimmer. Two days after the Panetta story, Citizen's Trade Campaign and its union allies launched a “National Week of Action for Fair Trade” at a rally on Capitol Hill. For the next week the campaign staged more than thirty events around the country to dramatize opposition to NAFTA. In the words of William Bywater, president of the International Union of Electronic Workers (IUE), “It is our goal to open the eyes of the American public so they understand that the real supporters of this trade agreement are rich corporations who will make massive profits by exploiting low wage Mexican workers and lax environmental regulation. The opponents of this agreement are working people whose families and communities will be devastated by plant closings and U.S. job loss.” He promised “to wage an all-out campaign to defeat this agreement.” 19
In mid May, leaks of the U.S. negotiating position on the side agreement prompted attacks from opponents on both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, the Citizen's Trade Campaign blasted the administration for not going far enough. On the right, conservatives attacked the administration for going too far. Then, as Jeff Faux's memo had predicted, the issue of foreign lobbyists came to the fore. An outfit called the Center for Public Integrity released a study entitled The Trading Game: Inside Lobbying for the North American Free Trade Agreement. “Mexico has mounted the most expensive, elaborate campaign ever conducted in the United States by a foreign government,” said Charles Lewis, the Center's director. “The decision-making process for this historic legislation has been distorted by the recent infusion of tens of millions of dollars.” The report documented that Mexico had hired thirty-three former U.S. government officials, including Bill Brock, the former USTR, and numerous people close to President Clinton. “Short of moving into the Lincoln bedroom,” said The Trading Game, “Mexico could not have positioned itself closer to Bill Clinton.” 20
Charles Lewis and his effort would likely have remained inside the Washington Beltway, however, were it not for Ross Perot and Pat Choate. Here was additional evidence and ammunition for their speeches, talk show appearances, and the infomercial that Perot had purchased for the end of May.
The prospect of the Perot infomercial alarmed the business strategists. They urged the administration to take on Perot. Yet the White House was wary of confronting Perot directly, recognizing that Perot supporters represented the swing constituency in the national electorate. The administration chose to respond quietly, with a no-cameras-allowed background briefing for reporters, given by Labor Secretary Bob Reich, Economic Advisor Laura Tyson, and Mickey Kantor, at which they largely focused on rebutting Perot's assertions about NAFTA's effects on jobs.
Perot's infomercial on NBC was a rambling exposition with several themes. First, NAFTA would cost jobs, Perot asserted. “Automobile workers in the United States earn $16 an hour plus benefits. Mexican automobile workers make one-ninth the salary of a U.S. automobile worker,” said Perot. “Benefits such as retirement, health care, and so on, which we take for granted in the U.S., in the automobile industry in Mexico are virtually nonexistent.” Corporations wanted NAFTA so they could move to Mexico. Moreover, Mexico was actively seeking to lure away American jobs. Perot held up the “Yes You Can, in Yucatan” ad as evidence.
Second, NAFTA was being pushed on the American people by paid foreign agents. Here Perot picked up on The Trading Game. “Sad to report, a former chief U.S. trade negotiator has been retained by the Mexican government, is being paid several hundred thousand dollars a year to direct this effort,” said Perot. “People in key positions on the 1992 presidential campaigns have been retained as Mexican lobbyists. Once again we've been out-traded and out-negotiated with a great deal of help from former American trade officials who are now working for foreign agents.”
Third, NAFTA was negotiated in secret to serve the special interests in Washington. “Our country went to extraordinary efforts to keep the details of the NAFTA negotiations from the American people. The negotiations were conducted in secret. Members of Congress had to go to a secret room to read the agreement as it was being negotiated.”
Finally, Perot emphasized the differences between Mexico and the United States. “How does Mexico treat its workers, compared to our country?” he asked. “The typical worker in Mexico lives in a one-room shack with no plumbing or electricity. His counterpart in the U.S. is a middle class citizen who can afford to send his children to college, who lives in a nice home. Many Mexican workers with U.S. companies cannot afford a low income house and must scavenge cardboard and trash to build their homes.” Perot held up photographs of impoverished and poorly housed Mexicans.
At the end of the half-hour, Perot urged viewers to write or phone their Representatives and Senators and say “No” to NAFTA. Many did. An orchestrated postcard campaign flooded Congressional offices with preprinted “NAFTA NO!” postcards. Mail in most offices ran twenty to one against the agreement.
The Summer of '93
The Perot infomercial marked the beginning of the public phase of the NAFTA battle. This was not going to be trade politics as usual—NAFTA was going to be a public issue. In the public arena, NAFTA's opponents temporarily held the upper hand. Public opinion, while on the surface equally divided on NAFTA, appeared to be susceptible to the anti-NAFTA message. With the administration on the sidelines because of the delay in completion of the side negotiations, negative images and messages dominated through the summer. Outside of Washington, opponents were much more active and visible than proponents. A few pro-NAFTA political strategists began to see that without a countervailing public campaign for NAFTA, the political pressure on Congress would be too great to overcome.
Public Opinion
Although NAFTA had long been a hot issue among activists, until the summer of 1993 it had not really become a major issue for the general public. That was now beginning to change. The opposition publicity efforts, the travails of the side negotiations, and news about Mexico through the summer of 1993 would raise the salience of NAFTA in public opinion. Strategists on both sides began attending more closely to public opinion, and pollsters began sampling it with more regularity and in greater depth.
At the beginning of the summer, the American public was evenly divided on NAFTA, although not yet particularly attuned to the issue. The April NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed 27 percent favored NAFTA and 25 percent opposed, with 44 percent undecided. In July the same poll found 31 percent in favor and 29 percent opposed, with 36 percent undecided. A poll conducted for the White House by Stan Greenberg found 39 percent favoring and 34 percent opposing it, with 27 percent undecided. These results appeared generally encouraging for NAFTA, but beneath this surface lurked some problems.
The Greenberg poll began and ended with the basic question about support for NAFTA. Between the two questions, the survey asked respondents to say whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about NAFTA, half favorable and half unfavorable. Not only did respondents agree more often with the negative messages (agreeing overwhelming that NAFTA would cost jobs, for instance), at the end of the poll they were significantly more negative about NAFTA than they had been before exposure to the messages. After hearing both pro and con messages, only 36 percent said they favored NAFTA while 48 percent opposed it. One other finding also boded poorly for NAFTA. Respondents had a very negative image of Mexico, considering it poor, dirty, and corrupt.
Illegal Drugs and Immigrants: The NAFTA Connection
The news about Mexico did little to help Mexico's image. On May 24, a front-page headline in the New York Times read “Free-Trade Treaty May Widen Traffic in Drugs, U.S. Says.” The article reported “Cocaine smugglers working with Colombian drug cartels are starting to set up factories, warehouses, and trucking companies in Mexico to exploit the flood of cross-border commerce expected under the North American Free Trade Agreement, United States intelligence and law-enforcement officials say.” 21 This was good copy. Papers across the country picked up the story.
The same day, the shooting of Guadalajara's Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo in an apparent drug shoot-out at that city's international airport made front page news. 22 The Mexican government claimed that Posadas was caught in the crossfire between rival drug dealers and that this was a case of mistaken identity. Within days, doubts began to surface about the account. The cardinal had been wearing clerical attire and had been shot repeatedly at close range. A survey of the Mexican public “found that 83 percent of those questioned did not believe the government's account of Posadas' slaying,” American papers reported. 23 The story provided another opportunity for newspapers to discuss the Mexican drug connection and to link the story to NAFTA.
The assassination came just as President Salinas was embarking on a long-planned speaking tour in the United States intended to project an image of modern Mexico. Salinas sought to make the best of the situation by promising to avenge the killings and to crack down on Mexican drug traffickers, but his two-day visit to the United States merely provided another hook for damaging stories about Mexico. As the Washington Post reported, “A diplomat here described Posadas's death as ‘an embarrassing moment for Salinas’ as he enters the final months of an intense campaign to win U.S. congressional approval for the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement. ‘This doesn't help,’ the diplomat said.” 24
Then, on June 3, less than a week later, U.S. drug agents discovered a nearly completed tunnel under the U.S.-Mexican border, apparently intended for drug smuggling. “It's pretty mind-boggling,” said Jack Hook of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office in San Diego. “Law enforcement is lucky that it was caught at this point. They could have gotten tons through there without us knowing anything about it.” 25 This was a great story, complete with visuals for television. The networks showed pictures of the nearly complete, lighted, air-conditioned tunnel. ABC News speculated that if authorities were lucky to have found this tunnel, there were probably other undetected tunnels. 26
In addition to drugs, a second issue captured the attention of the media and its consumers that summer: illegal immigration. A steady drumbeat of news stories kept immigration on the front burner. Most dramatic were a series of stories about Chinese aliens, who were being crammed into dangerous boats and landed on U.S. shores. Two boatloads of Chinese were arrested in California in early June, three more were intercepted in July, and a freighter carrying hundreds of aliens ran aground in New York. The stories created a hook for other stories about immigration, many of them noting that the real immigration problem was on the border with Mexico.
Particularly in California, mired in recession, it was easy for some to believe that America was being overrun by illegal immigrants. Representative Dana Rohrbacher (Republican, Calif.), an Orange County conservative, said immigration is becoming
a decisive political issue in California.People in California are feeling under attack and overrun, and a lot of people feel cheated. They feel as if they're paying for services and an educational system and all of a sudden, they look around and the people who've come here illegally and been here for a few months are siphoning thousands of dollars out of that system. 27
Calls for action to stem the imagined flood came from across the political spectrum. California Senator Dianne Feinstein, the liberal former mayor of San Francisco, a year away from a reelection campaign, wrote a searing opinion column in the Los Angeles Times. “Today, there are 1.3 million Californians out of work,” it began. “Families throughout our state face overcrowded schools and a scarcity of affordable homes. Meanwhile, there are an estimated 1.3 million undocumented immigrants in California.” 28 Drawing a causal connection did not take much imagination. Conservative Republican Duncan Hunter gathered thirty-seven signatures from the California House delegation on a letter calling for three thousand new border patrol agents. At the California statehouse in Sacramento, legislators called for the National Guard to patrol California's borders and considered such measures as denying welfare, health, and educational services to aliens.
A few voices opposed the rising sentiment against immigrants. When the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) proposed building a steel wall on the Arizona-Mexico border, the Arizona Republic worried about the symbolic message it would send.
Besides being an ugly eyesore that would undermine the strides being achieved on social, political, economic and environmental fronts between the two nations, the steel curtain is sure to have one demonstrable impact this nation can do without: that of reinforcing the racist stereotype of Mexican immigrants as criminals. 29
Still, so strong was the sense that something needed to be done that at the end of July President Clinton proposed a new, tougher immigration policy.
Although NAFTA's proponents attempted to argue that the agreement would help stem the flow of drugs and immigrants, NAFTA's opponents had the easier story to tell. Surely a more “open border” for trade was a more open border for other things as well. Economists were projecting that California would enjoy the largest economic gains in the nation from NAFTA. Yet in that state, popular sentiment ran strongly against NAFTA. Both of California's Democratic Senators announced their opposition, as did a clear majority of its House delegation.
Growing Opposition
With the side negotiations dragging on through June and July, and with Clinton's budget still hanging in the balance, the administration continued to leave the political field to NAFTA's opponents, and the opposition continued to grow. The union “Not This NAFTA” campaign continued. The opposition environmental groups, aware now that the side agreements would not go as far as they liked, stepped up their organizing efforts. The Perot campaign was gathering steam, as United We Stand chapters around the country organized speeches, rallies, letter-writing campaigns, and other activities. On the right, the trajectory of the side negotiations inspired louder assertions about loss of sovereignty.
New voices now joined this confederation. In testimony before the Congressional Black Caucus in June, William Lucy, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and President of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, gave voice to widely shared sentiments:
NAFTA just doesn't make sense for the African-American community. NAFTA will fail to deliver benefits to the African Americans for many of the same reasons that it is a bad deal for the overwhelming majority of all Americans. First, the African-American worker is more likely than his/her white counterpart to be employed in a non-managerial capacity in those industries most likely to be affected by NAFTA. And, second, the unemployed African American worker will find it more difficult to find a new job once his/her existing job is lost.
[NAFTA] would permit more drugs to come into the U.S. from Mexico than comes across at the present time. Sadly, we know that much of these drug shipments are headed into our inner cities where unemployment is high and opportunities for a better life are poor. 30
Lucy's views were widely shared by prominent African-American leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Ben Chavis, the executive director of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). In June, the Congressional Black Caucus took a formal stand in opposition to NAFTA.
Religious and human rights organizations added their voices to the chorus. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Mennonites, the Friends, the Mary Knoll Fathers and Brothers, Catholic lay organizations, and other religious groups all expressed concerns about NAFTA.
Reassessing the Pro-NAFTA Strategy
In May, USA*NAFTA had hired political strategist Francis O'Brien to help with them with their public relations campaign. O'Brien could see that things were not going well. As he later recalled,
there was a terrific misunderstanding of the issue, the public issue. All the trade people say it is a very closed undertaking. An arcane matter for the lawyers. They never leave Washington D.C. I felt that this was not the case. I didn't understand in May that this would be front page news in October, but I knew it would be more [than the trade people thought].
O'Brien hired Page Gardner, a young campaign strategist who had been in the Clinton campaign war room in Little Rock. Gardner shared O'Brien's view of the problem. “The business community didn't understand the operating environment they were in,” recalled Gardner. The “opposition was heartfelt. This was not political posturing on David Bonior's part.”
At an all day meeting of the USA*NAFTA brain trust in early July, O'Brien and Gardner insisted that they had to have a media campaign. One participant in the meeting remembered that O'Brien told the group, “you are doing everything right but you are still going to lose unless you reframe the debate.He pushed and pushed that we had to have a media campaign. [He said,] ‘This was a political war.’ We had to refocus the debate. We had to seize the message. We had to neutralize the opposition and shape the message.” There was no way to do what needed to be done on a $2 million budget. At the end of the day, the group decided to seek an additional $5 million from the Business Roundtable for advertising and to hire an advertiser skilled in campaign commercials.
The pro-NAFTA forces in the administration were also increasingly nervous. This was shaping up to be a much bigger issue than anyone had anticipated. In June, Bentsen, Rubin, and Reich met to discuss the situation. They worried that with Kantor tied up with the supplemental negotiations, the political situation was not receiving sufficient attention. They decided that the effort to pass NAFTA needed a overall strategist and a campaign-style war room, an idea that Bradley had urged on the administration since early in the year. Clinton agreed.
Still, the administration was not yet ready to move. Until the budget passed, the NAFTA side negotiations could not conclude. Until there were side agreements, the administration could not sell the agreement. As Mickey Kantor explained later,
The president understood from the very first that [NAFTA] was controversial within the Democratic party, and he needed every Democratic vote to get his economic package through. He could not engage the NAFTA situation until after his economic package passed. We made a decision in the administration [to] slow walk the negotiations over labor and environment until the situation was finished on the Hill on the economic package. It was the president's idea that we wait, and we did.
As the budget battle continued through July and into August, however, the window closed for finishing the side negotiations before Congress went on recess.
There was one other problem for NAFTA: Some in the administration viewed it as a competitor to the health care reform effort.
Health Care or NAFTA?
On Thursday, August 5, the House finally passed the budget bill by one vote. Not one Republican voted with the president. The next day in the Senate, a last-second change of heart by Bob Kerrey (Democrat, Neb.) left a tie, enabling Vice President Al Gore to cast the deciding vote. Again, not one Republican voted with the president. The mood at the White House was near euphoria. 31 The crisis over, it was now time to turn to the next item on the agenda. The question was what that item would be.
At the White House, the health reform task force had been getting more and more restless. All year, more immediately pressing events had forced delay. Now Hillary Clinton and task force chair Ira Magaziner thought it was finally their turn. The health care team was joined by most of the White House political operatives, who questioned the wisdom of doing NAFTA at all and who feared that a battle over NAFTA would detract from the more important effort to pass health care reform. On the Hill, David Bonior sensed that health care made NAFTA vulnerable. He gathered 102 signatures on a letter to the president urging him to delay NAFTA until after Congress had voted on health care reform. “The debate over NAFTA will be difficult and divisive,” the letter said. “It will detract from our efforts to build a broad coalition of support for health care reform.” 32
On the evening of August 11, cabinet officers and senior staff met with the president, the vice president, and the first lady to discuss priorities. Hillary Clinton and the health care team wanted six full weeks for launching the health care initiative. They had been waiting patiently in line. One participant recalled that Mrs. Clinton argued that “we were not elected to balance the budget or to pass NAFTA. We were elected to do health care. Why risk health care for NAFTA?”
Some of the president's political advisors continued to argue for abandoning NAFTA altogether. Top presidential advisor George Stephanopoulos made the political case against the agreement. NAFTA was bad politics. It would split the Democratic party when Clinton needed every bit of support he could muster for the health care effort. The president risked the credibility of the Presidency if he were to lose. As Howard Paster, director of Congressional relations, recalled, “Some were saying get out. ‘Why not just get out now?’ they asked. ‘Don't finish the side negotiations.’”
Vice President Gore, Secretary Bentsen, Secretary Warren Christopher, and National Security Advisor Tony Lake argued the other side. As presidential counselor David Gergen recalled:
It was a situation one could turn around. First, we have found that when the public is provided with arguments, support for protectionism goes down. That's what happened to Gephardt and Buchanan [in their presidential campaigns]. Second, opinion on foreign affairs is mushy. Go back to the Panama Canal Treaty. Jimmy Carter started with public opinion against the treaty and turned it around.
Gore argued strongly for going ahead, asserting “If you stand for something you don't give it up.”
Political advisor James Carville came into the meeting opposed to NAFTA, but the more he listened the more he felt that it made better political sense not to abandon it. If Clinton backed away from NAFTA, he would be perceived as caving in to political pressure, creating a credibility problem. Carville broke ranks with the other political advisors, arguing that the president should conclude the side agreements and throw himself into the NAFTA campaign.
In the end, the decision was to finish NAFTA and fight for it in the fall. But health care remained the top priority. NAFTA would get only two days of the president's time before the focus turned to health care. 33 Kantor reassured the health care team that the president could do both NAFTA and health care. NAFTA, he said, would be an inside-the-Beltway effort, not requiring the president to travel outside of Washington. Two days after the meeting, on August 13, Kantor reached a deal with Mexico and Canada on the labor and environment supplemental agreements.
From the perspective of NAFTA's Hill supporters, the middle of August was the worst possible time to finish the side negotiations, with members of Congress far outside the Beltway, back in their districts for the traditional recess. “We pleaded with them not to announce the side agreements in the middle of an August recess,” recalled Matsui aide Dianne Sullivan. “Because the thing that was so key was to be able to have all of your soldiers debriefed on the contents of the agreements, why they were good, that we achieved what we were looking to.” A “white paper” making the administration case for NAFTA was printed, but it had not yet been distributed. “The administration was afraid that with the budget vote pending and so close, a wavering member might see the NAFTA piece and panic,” recalled Nancy Leamond, the head of Congressional Relations at the USTR, soon to be at the center of events. “We never had a chance to distribute it before recess, to work the issue. There were no briefings, no ground work laid before recess.”
The president was headed for a much-needed vacation. Mickey Kantor was on his way to Europe for vacation. (A week later, in Geneva, he would break his back in a fall.) Bill Daley of Chicago, son of the late mayor Richard Daley and younger brother of the current Mayor Richie Daley, had been identified in the press as the president's choice to head the NAFTA campaign, but he had not yet accepted the job. As a key administration strategist later conceded, “we had no strategy for August. We knew we needed one, but”
The business community was no more prepared for August than the administration. For months, some members of the business strategy team had been urging that business have a grassroots strategy for the recess, but all the talk came to little. USA*NAFTA had negligible grassroots capacity, had not yet hired a media firm, and still was fumbling for a message. Moreover, USA*NAFTA chair Kay Whitmore was mired in troubles at Eastman Kodak. By mid August he had lost his job, which meant that by the rules of the Business Roundtable, the effective parent of USA*NAFTA, he could no longer serve as chair. Uncertainty over the business leadership complicated the effort to mount any campaign. With nothing in place, all the business advocates could do was watch and hope that the opposition wouldn't do too much damage. Many went on vacation.
August
Washington in August was the eye of a hurricane. Inside the Beltway, all was eerily calm. With Congress out on recess and the president on vacation, half of the rest of Washington was out of town too. It was hard to find a cab on Capitol Hill. But outside, the storm over NAFTA had begun to rage.
NAFTA's opponents had been targeting August since the spring. The recess played to their strength. “We weren't going to win this inside the Beltway,” recalled the AFL-CIO's Mark Anderson. “We had to use our strength: people. We were not going to outspend the government of Mexico or the business community. Our tactic was to bring this back to the districts and make it a matter of concern to the constituents back home.” Perot strategist Pat Choate echoed the sentiment, “We knew we could never win inside the Beltway. The only way to win it was outside the Beltway.” The administration felt helpless. “If Barbara Kennelly [Democrat, Conn.] went home,” recalled a White House strategist, “we couldn't get to her, but she was naturally with them [labor] at breakfasts, etc. back in the district. We didn't have a grassroots capacity.”
Also, there was a sense that NAFTA was on the ropes. With the side agreements completed, members of Congress could no longer take cover by saying that they wanted to wait to see them before making up their minds. For the first time, even the more jaded of the opposition strategists began to smell victory. Their knew that if the president ever threw the full weight of his office behind NAFTA, he would be very difficult to beat, but if they could raise the price high enough, they might just deter him. The time to kill NAFTA was at hand.
Around the country, unions, the CTC, opposition environmental groups (most notably the Sierra Club), chapters of Perot's United We Stand America, and other organizations planned media events and primed their membership for encounters with Representatives at town hall meetings, union breakfasts, and church potlucks. When the text of the supplementary agreements was leaked a week after they were completed, the opposition network quickly distributed a critique and talking points. As a result, citizens at town meetings had more ammunition than the members, who had not yet received the text or been briefed on it. Members of Congress met an angry citizenry armed with assertions to which the members had few ready answers.
The effort was only loosely coordinated from Washington; union leadership wanted nothing to do with Ross Perot, for instance. “I kept us away from the SOB,” recalled Mark Anderson. There was more cooperation out in the communities, and the result was some unusual coalitions. In San Francisco, the Teamsters Union and a group of grassroots religious, citizen, and environmental groups called the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras held an anti-NAFTA press conference at the headquarters of Greenpeace. 34 In Washington, Jesse Jackson and Ross Perot appeared together at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to denounce NAFTA. Perot told the audience that “the first jobs that will go to Mexico” will be those that otherwise might be funneled into inner-city economic development in this country. Jackson described NAFTA as “a slippery slope southward” for American jobs that would lead to the closing of U.S. factories. “NAFTA,” he said, “is a shafta, shifting our jobs out of the country.” 35 The next day, before a throng gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland drew his biggest applause for a spirited attack on NAFTA.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Pat Buchanan railed against NAFTA as a threat to American sovereignty:
NAFTA is about America's sovereignty, liberty and destiny. It is about whether we hand down to the next generation the same free and independent country handed down to us; or whether 21st-century America becomes but a subsidiary of the New International Economic Order.
Buchanan sounded a populist theme.
And all the power elite embrace NAFTA: The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times; Big Business, Big Media, the Big Banks; the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Buchanan ended with a flourish.
From a distance out in the harbor, NAFTA appears a fetching little vessel, flying a proud pennant of “Free Trade.” But it is a ship that carries in its cargo the virus of globalism, and the bacillus of statism. Populists and conservatives ought to tow it out beyond the 12-mile limit, with a long rope, and blow it out of the water. Sink NAFTA, and save the old republic. 36
Whether hand in hand or at arms length, the strange bedfellows in opposition to NAFTA drew attention. Ralph Nader explained to National Public Radio listeners that “the conservative can oppose it because U.S. sovereignty is being unduly compromised. Liberals can oppose it because it represents more control of global corporations over our economy. Perot types can oppose it because it represents a sense of loss of control over our society that many people are feeling.” 37
Perot's Surprise
At the end of August, Ross Perot launched another salvo. For months he and Pat Choate had secretly planned and written a book on NAFTA. Remarkably, there had been no leaks. Suddenly, Save Your Job, Save Our Country: Why NAFTA Must be Stopped—Now! appeared in bookstores. Washington was abuzz. Congressional aides rushed out to Trover Books, on Pennsylvania Avenue a couple blocks from the Capitol, to get their copies. When Trover sold out, photocopies quickly got around the Hill. More importantly, though, Perot's troops had copies of the book. People started appearing at town meetings with the book in hand, quoting from it as they asked their questions.
The Perot-Choate book had a simple thesis: NAFTA was a conspiracy by big business, big government, and foreign agents intent on enriching themselves at the expense of ordinary Americans. The book's chapter titles give a sense of the argument: “Out Traded—Again,” “A Secret Deal,” “A Giant Sucking Sound.” Page after page, the book leveled charges at NAFTA. “Mexico's strategy depends on taking jobs from the United States.” NAFTA will endanger “millions of jobs.” NAFTA would allow unsafe Mexican trucks on American highways. “Under NAFTA, smuggling drugs into the United States will become much easier.” “Florida's citrus industry will be devastated.” Moreover, the agreement had been negotiated in “wartime-like secrecy,” and it was the “ultimate insider deal.” An appendix listed “Former U.S. Government Officials Working for NAFTA's Passage.” 38 Phone and fax numbers of U.S. Senators and Representatives and handy “NAFTA Ballot Cards” ready to mail to Congress members were included. (A United We Stand America membership form was also conveniently appended as well.) To maximize the impact of the book, Perot made the rounds of the radio and television talk shows and bought time for another infomercial to be aired the last weekend of the month.
Perot's book triggered a frenzy of activity at the USTR. Under Rufus Yerxa's supervision, Chip Roh, Ken Freiberg (the deputy general counsel), and Bryan Samuel—the people who knew what was really in the NAFTA agreement—carefully culled through the Perot missive. Within a week they had produced a seventy-three-page, point-by-point rebuttal and distributed it around the Hill. As General Counsel Ira Shapiro recalled, “We took the Perot book very seriously. We made an intense effort to respond to the book. The book was a piece of trash but we didn't underestimate its potential appeal.” The administration rebuttal was a most effective critique for anyone not already persuaded by Perot. In the coming months it would provide useful ammunition for NAFTA's defenders.
Assessing the Damage
The opposition strategy seemed to be having its intended effect. Public opinion, for a long time equally divided on NAFTA, turned sharply negative. The NBC-Wall Street Journal poll taken September 10-13 found that the percentage favoring NAFTA had fallen from 31 percent in July to 25 percent, whereas the percentage of those opposing NAFTA had shot up from 29 percent to 36 percent, a statistically (and politically) significant difference. Other polls confirmed the finding. A CBS-New York Times poll taken September 16-19 showed 33 percent for the agreement and 40 percent against.
On the Hill, David Bonior was increasingly confident. He was now beginning to get close to enough commitments from Representatives to make NAFTA impossible. An AFL-CIO-compiled vote count dated August 20 showed 166 members as “No” and 63 as “Lean No,” a total of 229, already well over the 218 needed to defeat NAFTA. With 119 listed as “Undecided,” the opposition vote seemed sure to climb. Only 58 members were listed as “Yes” and 29 as “Lean Yes.” The numbers corresponded closely with Bonior's own estimates.
Most of those opposed were Democrats, and Bonior thought he might be able to get close to two hundred Democrats in the end, but he would also need conservative Republican votes. Bonior and his staff were getting assurances from California Republican Duncan Hunter, the leader of Republican opposition to NAFTA, that as many as fifty or even sixty Republicans might oppose the agreement. The Republican assurances, however, made Bonior and his staff nervous. The relationship between Hunter and Bonior was uneasy at best. Hunter had campaigned for Bonior's opponent in 1992, and the two men did not like each other. Bonior also kept at arm's length from Ross Perot (they never met during 1993), who was working closely with Hunter and the Republicans. As a result, the conservative Republican vote was a bit of wild card for Bonior and his staff. Still, there appeared to be enough of a cushion.
Hoping to deter the president from making a push for NAFTA, Bonior began to show the strength of his hand. Appearing on NBC's “Meet the Press,” Bonior stated, “The fact of the matter is that up to two-thirds and maybe 75 percent of the Democratic caucus in the House is opposed to this treaty.” 39 The press could do its math. Two-thirds of the Democrats' two hundred fifty-nine meant that NAFTA was in deep trouble.
Interpreting Grassroots Opposition: The Market for Meaning
This chapter began with the question of how to explain the unprecedented depth and breadth of opposition to NAFTA in the United States. How can we explain how NAFTA became the focus of such intense opposition for a coalition of such diversity that it could include labor unions and Pat Buchanan, Greenpeace and Ross Perot?
Through which analytical lens should we view this question? In previous chapters, this book has primarily relied on rational choice approaches, arguing in particular that multilevel models can explain apparently irrational behaviors. The opposition to NAFTA, however, would appear to pose a formidable challenge to even multilevel rational choice approaches. Given the small direct effects of NAFTA on the U.S. economy, on the environment, on immigration, on drug smuggling, and the like, and the minuscule impact of any particular individual's opposition, why an average citizen would join United We Stand America, carry a banner at a union rally, write his or her Representative, or even bother to inform him or herself about the issue is hard to understand through a rational choice lens. The scale of political mobilization is simply incompatible with the likely tiny real effects of NAFTA on the issues ostensibly motivating opponents. The domestic grassroots opposition to NAFTA was based less on what NAFTA was and more on what it symbolized.
The nature of the opposition to NAFTA bears upon an important theoretical issue in political science: the extent to which political phenomena can be explained by strategic interaction among rational actors. Contemporary political science is increasingly dominated by rational choice approaches, which have successfully enlarged the domain of phenomena (many apparently “irrational”) explicable by economic, game theoretic, or other formal rational choice models. Among such expansions, two notable thrusts are, first, the concept of ideological consumption as a way of reconciling observed collective action—including voting and political joining—with a logic of collective action in which it is rational for individuals to free ride and, second, the concept of entertainment consumption as a way of reconciling observed demand for policy information with a logic of rational ignorance in which it is rational not to attend to policy issues.
Rational choice theory predicts a demand for and a supply of both ideology and entertainment, in short, a market for symbols. The existence of such a market, therefore, is no threat to rational choice theory. However, rational choice cannot predict the form of the exchange: what symbols will be demanded, and therefore what will be supplied. An understanding of these choices requires a different theoretical lens that considers the form of the symbolism and the way in which symbolic constructs can motivate political action. The section will argue in particular for a theory of narrative politics, in which understandings of politics, and interests in them, are structured by the stories of politics told by and to communities of individuals.
Arguing for the importance of symbolic constructs is not incompatible with rational choice. The behavior of anti-NAFTA activists is consistent with the hypothesis that individuals maximize ideological and entertainment consumption and, in this case, behaved quite rationally given their interests and beliefs. However, to say that the facts do not contradict rational choice is not to say that rational choice adequately explains the facts. Rational choice models can explain much given certain interests and beliefs, but they cannot explain and are not designed to explain the sources of either. Why, in NAFTA, did some individuals care passionately about human rights in Mexico or environmental conditions on the border? Why did they believe that NAFTA would be devastating to these interests? Nor are rational choice theories well suited for fully explaining the mechanism through which constructed interests and beliefs actually translate into political action. Why, even if one cared deeply about Mexico's environment and believed that NAFTA would harm it, would one have an “interest” in acting when such action would have so little effect? On these questions rational choice is silent.
To answer them we need to understand how NAFTA was constructed and what it meant to partisans in the NAFTA battle. We need consider NAFTA not as the 2000-page legal document it was to the technical experts but as a symbol standing for much larger issues to union members, environmentalists, and followers of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan. That construction was established through the stories told about NAFTA, which not only defined what it meant, but also created an imperative to act.
Collective Action and Ideological Consumption in NAFTA
Rational choice theories—whether the actor is the individual, the group, or the nation—share basic assumptions. Actors are presumed to recognize the options available to them, to predict the likely consequences of those options, to evaluate those consequences in terms of interests, and to choose the option that maximizes expected value. Strong forms of rational choice insist that actors consider all available options, that they correctly predict the consequences of each, that they completely evaluate the impact of those consequences on their interests, and that they always choose the outcome with the highest expected value. Usually, such theories also posit a very limited set of interests, most commonly personal wealth or power. The great virtue of these models is that they allow us to map directly from observable conditions—economic circumstances, for instance—to predicted behaviors, without requiring us to consider such intervening factors as the market for information and the capacities of humans to process it.
The strong version of rational choice is vulnerable to both empirical and theoretical challenge, however, particularly in dealing with mass political phenomena. In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson explicated the problem faced by the collective in the procurement of public goods. 40 Individuals given the choice between acting or not acting have an incentive to free ride on the actions of others, since the actors must bear the full marginal costs of acting but enjoy only a fraction of the marginal benefits. The tendency to free ride becomes more acute as the size of the group increases. The theory nicely explains many collective action failures. But in some sense it overpredicts such failures. Notwithstanding a tendency toward free riding, individuals do not always free ride. People vote, although it appears illogical to do so; people give money to charity; and people join and participate in political advocacy organizations.
To resolve this apparent contradiction, rational choice theorists have broadened the scope of interests to include the possibility that individuals derive utility from altruism or from ideological consumption. 41 We vote not only because we care about the outcome but because we gain satisfaction from doing our civic duty. We participate in organizations not because we will gain if the policy goals are realized but because we gain by participating in the process of attempting to realize them. (Some incentives, of course, have nothing to do with altruism or ideology. Organizations often give their members such perks as breaks on car rentals, magazine subscriptions, and discounts on merchandise.)
The idea of ideological consumption applied to NAFTA provides a way of understanding how interested communities—environmentalists, human rights activists, and the like—overcame the logic of collective action to mobilize in opposition to NAFTA. If individuals concerned about the environment derived utility only from the expected incremental change in policy resulting from the decision to join an organization, write a letter, or attend a rally, the marginal benefits of such action would be so small that the rational choice would be not to act and to free ride on the actions of others. Instead, if individuals receive satisfaction from the act of joining, writing, or attending because of some form of ideological consumption—they feel good about themselves, for instance—then acting might be entirely rational, even when the individual correctly understands the expected effects of action on policy outcome and the effects of policy outcome on his or her policy interests. However, the question remains as to why individuals have particular ideological interests of this kind.
Rational Ignorance and the Market for “Entertainment” in NAFTA
The theoretical challenge posed by Anthony Downs in An Economic Theory of Democracy is similar in form but even more formidable than the logic of free riding. As Downs demonstrates, it is not often rational to be rational. More specifically, it is irrational for most individuals in a society to inform themselves enough about political issues to make the kind of judgments strong forms of rational choice require. By its own logic, rational choice theory is, therefore, self-limiting.
Downs demonstrates that when acquiring political information is costly and the marginal benefit of its acquisition is low there is no incentive to acquire it. The marginal benefit of learning more about a political candidate's views on a particular issue, for instance, depends on the probability that additional information would change one's vote, the probability that the changed vote would change the electoral outcome, and the probability a changed electoral outcome would result in a change of policy: in short, a vanishingly small number. Citizens may have greater influence on policy decision making between elections because of the smaller number of people who will attempt to influence policy, but this relatively greater incentive to acquire information is offset by the additional problem of acquiring information about the decision making processes in which the citizen might intervene. Taken together, these conditions imply, as Downs put it:
In general, it is irrational to be politically well-informed because the low returns from data simply do not justify their cost in time and other scarce resources. Therefore, many voters do not bother to discover their true views before voting, and most citizens are not well enough informed to influence directly the formulation of those policies that affect them. 42
The logic of rational ignorance can be extended to the entire rational choice process: the identification of options, mapping from option to outcome, and evaluating outcomes. To the extent that any of these steps are costly, individuals should, logically, not incur the costs for those policy matters on which their actions will have little appreciable effect. Thus even when acquiring information is virtually costless (available free and at the touch of a few keystrokes via the Internet, for example), one may opt to remain ignorant because processing the information remains costly.
One might predict on the basis of the theory that individuals with little political power would simply ignore the political process and hold no views on policy matters (in much the same way that they would, by the logic of collective action, not involve themselves). Empirically, however, people do acquire information above the levels one might predict based on a calculus of its marginal value. For Downs, all such information is acquired for its “entertainment” value.
Some citizens find exhilaration in arguing about politics or following campaigns; others pin social prestige at cocktail parties from appearing well-versed in current affairs. We classify information obtained for all such purposes as entertainment information, no matter how political its contents may seem. 43
The concepts of rational ignorance and of entertainment information can explain why there might not be congruence between the reality of NAFTA and the beliefs held about it. The problem of analyzing the likely effects of NAFTA on one's future job prospects, or on the environment, or on any other dimension of concern was extremely difficult. Consider assessing the marginal impact of NAFTA on the environment. To do this, one needs information about the status quo, about the terms of the agreement, about the nature of plant location decisions, and a host of other factors. For a citizen with little ability to influence the policy outcome, the marginal benefit of acquiring such information is absolutely dwarfed by the cost of acquiring and processing it. In short, it would be irrational not only to acquire such costly information but also to use it to derive beliefs about the relationship between NAFTA and desired policy outcomes.
Nevertheless, many citizens with little prospect of influencing the policy outcome did acquire information about NAFTA and formed strongly held beliefs about its likely effects. The questions are: Why did they acquire such information? and How did they form such beliefs? To the first question, the answer has a supply side and a demand side. On the supply side, a small number of parties provided relatively costless information to union members and Sierra Club members (and USA*NAFTA members, for that matter). On the demand side, the information was consumed because it was “entertainment” in Downs's terms, or more generally because it had value independent of its utility for furthering individuals' policy interests.
Beyond Entertainment: The Market for Symbols and the Politics of Meaning
Downs's concept of entertainment information works as a residual category when the subject of interest is political information, but the concept is insufficiently developed if we wish to understand what it is that is “entertaining” about politics. What made information about NAFTA so “entertaining” when other trade agreements of equal or greater policy import were apparently so dull? (For instance, the author once received the following comment on a student evaluation of his trade policy course: “I learned that trade policy is not funny.”) To answer this question, we need to understand more about what it is we really consume when we are entertained by politics. For that, we need to consider the importance of symbols and stories in serving a fundamental human interest: the desire to make sense of the world and one's place in it—the desire for meaning.
To make sense of the form of symbolic communication requires a sociological and social psychological perspective. In recent decades, this perspective has been largely ignored by political scientists, although there is now a renewed interest in the role of ideas, myths, and other socially constructed forms of ideation. 44 A theory of socially constructed knowledge that emphasizes the importance of dramatic narrative is most useful to the present discussion. 45
A first assumption of the theory is that humans apprehend the world through symbol systems. Humans are “symbol-using animals” writes the sociologist Kenneth Burke.
But can we bring ourselves to realize just what that formula implies, just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by “reality” has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems? Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so “down to earth” as the relative position of seas and continents? What is our “reality” for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? 46
This perspective implies a gap between reality and our apprehension of it.
Second, humans tend to organize symbols into narrative constructions, i.e., stories. Through stories we apprehend our world, we place ourselves in it, and we remember. Stories are central to identity formation of people and groups. Humans are story tellers and story consumers.
Third, our consumption interest in stories is a function of both the form of the story and the content. We consume stories for their own sake. We enjoy stories that are dramatic, that have sympathetic protagonists, rising and falling plot lines, and the possibility of heroism and villainy, triumph or disaster. Thomas Schelling, erstwhile economist, contemplates what interest is being met when we consume fiction:
Lassie died one night. Millions of viewers, not all of them children, grieved. At least, they shed tears. Except for the youngest, the mourners knew that Lassie didn't really exist. Whatever that means. Perhaps with their left hemispheres they could articulate that they had been watching a trained dog and that that dog was still alive, healthy and rich; meanwhile in their right hemispheres, or some such place (if these phenomena have a place), the real Lassie had died.
Did they enjoy the episode?
We know they would not have enjoyed the death of the dog that played Lassie. Did the adults and older children wish their children hadn't watched? Do the dry-eyed parents of a moist-eyed teenager wish their children hadn't watched? If he hadn't watched, what would have been his grief at breakfast, reading the news that Lassie was dead? And would he regret missing the final episode? 47
Schelling notes that stories such as Lassie “capture the mind” and ponders what that means.
The characteristic that interests me is the engrossment—not merely the surrender of attention but the participation, the sense of being in the story or part of it, caring, and wanting to know. 48
What is being consumed is the engrossment, the abandonment of self in the story.
Fourth, communities of people share a stock of socially constructed symbols, stories, and myths. 49 These stories not only entertain, they also define identity and interest. The stock of these stories taken together constitute what Burke calls a “folk psychology.” 50 They define a worldview, create a sense of communal identity, give meaning to experience, and resolve psychological conflicts.
Fifth, new stories, stories of NAFTA for example, will resonate in a community to the extent that they confirm existing worldviews, reinforce communal sense of identity, give meaning to new events, and limit the psychological dissonance of those events. Resonance depends on their fit with the folk psychology.
Sixth, stories can create interests as well as understandings. This is not news to advertisers. Of course, some advertising is intended to convey information to help consumers make rational choices: Medication X lasts longer than medication Y. But most advertising is about telling stories to capture the mind, to trigger certain associations, and thereby to shape demand. Take, for example, the demand for diamond engagement rings. What is it that a man purchases when he nervously approaches the counter at the jewelry store? Is it a densely compacted, precisely cut, extremely hard lump of carbon? Unlikely. More likely, he is purchasing not the stone, but what the stone signifies—love, commitment, affluence—just what the Ayer company hoped he would purchase when it created the demand for large diamond engagement rings with its “A Diamond Is Forever” advertising campaign for the DeBeers company in the late 1940s. 51
Stories do more than inform interests, they are also a vehicle for internalizing values, norms, and mores. We learn how to conduct ourselves in life, how to relate to others, what is right and wrong through stories. This is obvious in religious teaching, where the parable is the primary approach to teaching morals. It is also obvious in the stories we tell our children. The Little Engine That Could is more than entertainment; it is a way of teaching about the virtue of charity, the importance of persistence, and the perils of pride.
Seventh, public stories can create an imperative for social action by connecting events to personal and group identity. In the same way that we participate in the story of Lassie, public stories invite us to participate in them, to become engrossed, and in so doing to lose the distinction between private and public. The dramatic imperative of the story becomes a matter of personal identity. 52 To take arms against oppression is a civic duty, to march together against injustice an expression of who we are. We “couldn't live with ourselves” if we didn't act. In this way, symbolic communication can overcome the problem of collective action, by creating a private interest in the maintenance of identity.
A narrative theory of politics consistent with these assumptions would suggest that our understandings of politics are mediated by symbols, that we have a predilection for symbols organized into simple dramatic narratives, that we particularly like stories that confirm our worldviews, resolve psychological conflicts, and maintain our sense of personal and collective identity. The essence of this mode of politics, then, is the contest of possible meanings, the way in which different stories, dramatizations, and gestures orient us to political events. To analyze this politics requires careful attention to the content of rhetoric, gesture, and symbol. It requires attention to the symbolic meaning of texts.
The Meaning of NAFTA
The theory of the politics of meaning suggests that political events such as NAFTA are apprehended through simple symbol systems and that those symbols give meaning through dramatic interpretation. We understand in terms of simple stories that not only make sense of the world, but also locate us in it. To understand the political response to NAFTA, therefore, requires that we pay close attention to what people said it meant to them, to the story as they told it.
We can treat the rhetoric of the protagonists as text to be interpreted. The rhetoric, of course, was instrumental and may or may not reveal the speaker's true beliefs. But these texts reveal what the speaker believes to be effective with an audience. 53 For a skilled politician such as Pat Buchanan, we will assume that the rhetoric is not without effect. 54
What was the story of NAFTA for labor unions? Take as an example this letter written by a union worker opposing NAFTA and published in the UAW magazine Solidarity in July 1993.
I see the destruction of America's working class. The destruction is not only the loss of financial security and physical property gained through years of hard work, it is the destruction of the dreams, the expectations of each of us that our children will have a better life. Millions of Americans have already begun the descent down the ladder, and as pay levels of every class continue a downward spiral, there is nowhere else to go but further down. And those at the top are pushing the ones at the bottom right off the ladder. 55
The story is a tragedy, a tale of a lost golden age. In the beginning (before Reagan, at least), all was well. But the corporations got greedy. With their friends in power they used the weapons of free trade and deregulation to ship American jobs overseas, dismantle social regulation, and destroy unions. The victims are workers, unions, and the American dream. The villains are the faceless corporations, driven by greed, remorseless, relentless. Their accomplices are the friends of corporations in government, corrupted by the big money.
“NAFTA is killing us,” said more than one angry union spokesperson to the author during the NAFTA campaign. Note the present tense. NAFTA was not some marginal change of rules that might or might not be implemented next year. It was all that was happening now, all that had happened in the past, all that might happen in the future. It was shuttered factories in the Midwest. It was trickle-down economics, deregulation, and cheap foreign labor. It was two million jobs lost in the 1980s. It was cardboard shacks, toxic dumps, and babies with no brains. It was the corporate executive contemplating a move to Mexico in the “Yes You Can, Yucatan” ad. It was America gone wrong.
Logically, of course, NAFTA was not to blame for what had already happened or for underlying trends that would continue with or without the agreement. But symbolically, NAFTA stood for all that had happened to American workers in the 1980s and all they feared for the future.
What was the story of NAFTA for the grassroots environmental organizations? Take as example the rhetoric in a full-page advertisement entitled “8 Fatal Flaws of NAFTA: Environmental Catastrophe, Canada to Mexico” purchased by Public Citizen, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Earth Island Institute, the Humane Society of the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Community Nutrition Institute, Southwest Network on Environmental Racism, and seventeen other groups. The ad ran in both the Washington Post and the New York Times in September 1993.
Don't Call it “Free Trade”: it's Corporate Aid. The true purpose of NAFTA is to help large corporations increase their profits. NAFTA was a major part of George Bush's “trickle down economics” scheme.
NAFTA Prevents Public Participation. The corporate world is spending more than $5 million, and Mexico is spending more than $30 million, on public relations campaigns to obscure the truth.
NAFTA Suppresses Democracy.NAFTA will seriously stifle representative democracy by making local, state or national laws subject to an unelected NAFTA bureaucracy that citizens cannot control.
NAFTA Can Kill Environmental Laws.“Good-bye” dolphin protection.
Ravaging Natural Resources.NAFTA could devastate the resources of all three NAFTA countries. That is its intention: To help corporations seize resources, wherever they hide.
Creating Toxic Hell.Corporations can freely dump their toxic wastes without the interventions of an EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. We have seen the results in the toxic hell on the Mexican border, where the mess makes Love Canal look like Yellowstone Park. Under NAFTA, the situation will get worse.
Side Agreements Fiasco.The public is still kept from any true role. There are still not enough funds for clean-up. Corporations can still flee across borders to freely pollute.
NAFTA's Big Bucks Backers.IF NAFTA succeeds, multinational corporations stand to reap huge windfall profits. That is why the agreement was created in the first place. The lobbying is underway. Eastman Kodak and American Express have spearheaded a pro-NAFTA coalition of 2,000 of the largest corporations in the country, including such stellar environmentalists as Exxon, Dupont, General Electric, Dow Chemical and Union Carbide.
The story told here is, like the union story, a tragedy, but with different protagonists. In the beginning, the environment was clean, pure, uncorrupted. Citizen environmentalists sought to protect it, but international corporations and their accomplices in the (Reagan-Bush) government were bent on dismantling the protection and despoiling nature for profit. The villain is again corporations but somewhat more abstractly development itself, the accomplices the agents of business in government, and the victims now are the environment and democracy.
NAFTA stood for toxic waste and brain-damaged babies. It was dolphins drowned in tuna nets. It meant destruction and death. It was about greed, corruption, and irresponsibility. Logically, NAFTA could not be responsible for what had happened. But symbolically, it stood for all that had enraged the environmental community.
What was the story of NAFTA to Ross Perot? Consider this transcript from Larry King Live on CNN. Perot begins by holding up a picture.
Mr. Perot: There in the shadow of the plant there. There's dirt floor, cardboard shacks, no plumbing, no electricity.
Mr. King: This where Mexicans live who work in American plants?
Mr. Perot: In the American plants now that are in Mexico. If we could go to the second picture. That's a close-up of one of the houses. See, these people have none of the standard of living that, say, and automobile worker in Detroit would have, lives a middle class life. Go to the third picture if you will. Here's a man building a cardboard shack. Those are—
Mr. King: But what does that have to do—what does that say about NAFTA?
Mr. Perot: That says these are the working conditions under which the people live because they make so little.
Mr. King: But that's now. Wouldn't NAFTA improve that?
Mr. Perot: No. Now is the maquiladora program that has been going on for years and the whole reason people go to Mexico is for the low cost labor. If you can cut your labor cost to one-seventh of U.S. labor, that's an overwhelming reason to go.
Mr. King: But if you can do that anyway—
Mr. Perot: No, but—now wait just a minute. We're $4 trillion in debt; we're going a billion dollars in debt every other day. We've got everybody west of the Mississippi working all year long just to pay interest on the debt. If we implode the middle class in our country—now here's why we're so much against it. We're destroying good, decent, hard-working people. They will not be paying taxes any more. We won't have a chance to balance a budget and their lives will be devastated, Larry. That's why it's so wrong. They will have to give up their homes. You see? People haven't thought through how this interrelates. Corporate America likes this deal, Wall Street likes this deal.
Mr. King: And they have bought both parties?
Mr. Perot: No, no, no, I'm not saying that. But these are the people they're associated with and these are the people they talk to and inside the Beltway a who's who of the lobbying industry loves this deal because it's making them rich. 56
Perot's story was yet another tragedy, but with a slightly different cast and a sharper edge. In the beginning (before trade deficits and the global economy), America was healthy and strong. But the short-sighted corporations, corrupt government, and foreign agents conspired to weaken America and make us vulnerable to international competitors. NAFTA was about the evisceration of America, a sucking from the south that was leeching the lifeblood from the American economy. The victims are Americans: good, honest, hardworking. The villains, co-conspirators, are big international corporations, big government, and agents of Mexico (metaphorically Mexico itself).
NAFTA was “a sucking sound” of jobs bleeding out of America. It was “Yes You Can, Yucatan.” It was disgusting cesspools and cardboard shacks. It was former government officials gone bad, corrupt, traitorous. It was secrecy and conspiracy. Logically, the United States and Mexico would share a border with or without NAFTA. Metaphorically, NAFTA was about contamination by the poverty, filth, and corruption of Mexico.
What was NAFTA to Pat Buchanan? Consider as text Buchanan's August 1993 editorial against the agreement.
NAFTA is about America's sovereignty, liberty and destiny. It is about whether we hand down to the next generation the same free and independent country handed down to us; or whether 21st-century America becomes but a subsidiary of the New International Economic Order.And all the power elite embrace NAFTA: The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times; Big Business, Big Media, the Big Banks; the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.[NAFTA is] a ship that carries in its cargo the virus of globalism, and the bacillus of statism. 57
The Buchanan story was again a tragedy. America was once healthy, free, strong, independent. Foreign contamination, spread by the international elite, was entangling us, sapping our strength, eviscerating our culture, corrupting our health. The victim here is America itself, the villains the corrupt international elite, big business, and big government.
What is obvious by now is the remarkably similar form of all the stories told by players across a wide political spectrum. All are variants of populism, a staple of American political culture, a perennial tale of bad big government and big business against the little people. Considered as variants of the central populist mythology, it should not be so surprising to hear virtually the same story from both ends of the political spectrum. Tom Watson, for example, a dynamic populist leader of the late nineteenth century, began a liberal on the question of race and ended a virulent racist, and never abandoned his populism. 58
Meaning and Motivation: The Dramatic Imperative
If the meaning of NAFTA to members of unions and opposition environmental groups, and to followers of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, was defined by the heated rhetoric, then it is a good deal easier to explain grassroots political mobilization. A belief that NAFTA would destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, devastate the environment, undermine democracy, or threaten American society certainly is more compelling than a belief that NAFTA would have only modest effects. Opposition political leaders, by exaggerating the likely effects of NAFTA as they constructed it for their followers, changed the incentives for action.
This interpretation of the role of symbolic construction begins to explain how symbolic construction operates to overcome the natural tendency toward collective inaction. It is not, however, completely satisfactory. Even if individuals believed the worst about NAFTA, they still faced a temptation to free ride when deciding whether or not to take action. That a failure to act collectively will have devastating consequences does not ensure that the collective will act. In order to explain collective action, we need to posit that individuals benefit not only from the goals of action, but also from the action itself.
The theory of symbolic politics developed earlier suggests two related interpretations. First, taking action against NAFTA was not so much an act in pursuit of some policy interest as it was an act of identity assertion. If one identifies oneself as an environmentalist and believes that NAFTA will devastate the environment, then one is compelled to act in order to maintain that identification. If one is a unionist and believes that NAFTA will destroy jobs, then opposing NAFTA is an expression of solidarity. Not to act in the face of these beliefs would threaten one's sense of identity.
A second closely related way of interpreting action has to do with the relationship between narrative and action. To the extent that stories of NAFTA were engrossing, in the sense of participation in the dramatic narrative, those stories both served to mediate between private and public identity and to create a dramatic imperative for action. If NAFTA was a story about the destruction of the working class by the forces of big business, and one identified with the victims, opposition to NAFTA would become an act of heroism, and failure to act one of villainy. If NAFTA engaged its audiences as potentially tragic narratives about despoliation of the environment, corruption of democracy, or treasonous betrayal of America, then opposition would become the right thing to do.
A Note on Public Opinion
It is difficult to establish just how these narrative framings affected attitudes about NAFTA, either among followers of particular leaders or among the general public. The evidence, however, suggests that the framings did make some difference in public opinion. During the period in which public messages about NAFTA were largely dominated by its opponents, public attitudes turned sharply worse. Even more suggestively, the dimensions that underlay this negative attitude corresponded reasonably well to the ways in which opponents sought to frame NAFTA. At the beginning of September 1993, a large segment of the American public apparently imagined NAFTA as a conspiracy that aimed to enrich corporate America by allowing it to exploit cheap labor and lax environmental standards in Mexico, that risked American jobs and the environment, and that opened America to the twin dangers of illegal drugs and illegal immigrants.
Conclusions
This commentary has argued that to interpret the grassroots politics of opposition to NAFTA requires a theory of symbolic politics. Although the tenets of constructivist theory differ markedly from rational choice (and institutional process) approaches, they are not incompatible. Indeed, by its own self-limiting logic, rational choice predicts a market for symbols when the costs of information acquisition and processing are high and the potential benefits of using symbols to reinforce identities or worldviews are also high.
A symbolic lens applied to the domestic politics of NAFTA can explain why NAFTA evoked such a disproportionate political response. As apprehended by union members, grassroots environmentalists, disaffected citizens supporting Ross Perot, conservative followers of Pat Buchanan, and members of the general public, NAFTA had come to stand for stories of greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, and foreign interests in league against workers, family farmers, communities, and the environment. NAFTA was cast as the villain in a drama whose symbolic imperative was opposition. Opposition to NAFTA wasn't a calculated choice to maximize one's interests, it was a matter of honor, a matter of moral imperative, and an affirmation of identity.
Endnotes
Note 1: Perhaps the most balanced reviews of the numerous analyses are U.S. International Trade Commission, Economy-Wide Modeling of the Implications of a FTA with Mexico and a NAFTA with Canada and Mexico, 1992, and United States Congressional Budget Office, A Budgetary and Economic Analysis of the North American Free Trade Agreement, 1993. Back.
Note 2: This argument is developed more fully in Frederick W. Mayer, “The NAFTA, Multinationals and Social Regulation.” Back.
Note 3: Proponents pointed to a study by two Princeton economists, which concluded that more economic development generally leads to lower pollution levels. Gene M. Grossman and Alan B. Krueger, Environmental Impacts of a North American Free Trade Agreement, Working Paper 3914 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1991). Back.
Note 4: See H. Jeffrey Leonard, Pollution and the Struggle for the World Product (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Back.
Note 5: For a balanced assessment of NAFTA's effects on migration see Philip Martin, Trade and Migration: NAFTA and Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: Institutional Economics, 1993). Back.
Note 6: Statement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council on The North American Free Trade Agreement, 17 February 1993. Back.
Note 7: John R. Oravec, “Legislators Assail NAFTA in Border Tour,” AFL-CIO News, 15 March 1993, 1. Back.
Note 8: Lisa Richwine, “Coalition Launches Grassroots Campaign to Defeat NAFTA,” States News Service, 26 March 1993. Back.
Note 9: Citizen's Trade Campaign, “Citizen's Trade Campaign Policy Statement on NAFTA,” 13 April 1993, press release. Back.
Note 10: Kim Moody and Mary McGinn, Unions and Free Trade: Solidarity vs. Competition (Detroit: Labor Notes, 1992), 1. Back.
Note 11: Andrea Durbin and Atlanta McIlwraith, “Summary of Organizers Strategy Meeting,” 7 April 1993, memorandum. Back.
Note 12: Letter from Jim Jontz to “Activists,” 5 April 1993. Back.
Note 13: “Hearing of the Senate Banking Committee,” Federal News Service, 22 April 1993. Back.
Note 14: “Remarks by Pat Buchanan, Republican Presidential Candidate, to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC,” Federal News Service, 20 February 1992. Back.
Note 15: Cable News Network, “Crossfire,” 6 May 1993. Back.
Note 16: Cable News Network, “Crossfire,” 6 May 1993. Back.
Note 17: Memorandum from Jeff Faux to Joan Baggett et al, 30 April 1993. Back.
Note 18: David S. Broder, “Panetta: President in Trouble on Hill; Agenda at Risk, Trade Pact ‘Dead,’” Washington Post, 27 April 1993, A1. Back.
Note 19: “IUE Kicks Off Anti-NAFTA Grassroots Campaign During ‘Fair Trade’ Week,” U.S. Newswire, 29 April 1993. Back.
Note 20: Center for Public Integrity, The Trading Game: Inside Lobbying for the North American Free Trade Agreement, 1993, 23. Back.
Note 21: Tim Weiner with Tim Golden, “Free-Trade Treaty May Widen Traffic in Drugs, U.S. Says,” New York Times, 24 May 1993, A1. Back.
Note 22: “The Death of a Mexican Cardinal,” Los Angeles Times, 26 May 1993, B6. Back.
Note 23: Dudley Althaus, “Salinas' Credibility Threatened; Poll Shows Doubts of Slaying Account,” Houston Chronicle, 30 May 1993, A1. Back.
Note 24: Tod Robberson, “Drug Crime Spreading in Mexico; Salinas Presses Hunt for Cardinal's Killers,” Washington Post, 26 May 1993, A1. Back.
Note 25: “Drug Agents Find ‘Mind-Boggling’ Tunnel Under U.S.–Mexico Border,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 3 June 1993, A4. Back.
Note 26: “ABC Nightly News,” 3 June 1993. Back.
Note 27: William Hamilton, “Harvest of Blame; Californians Turn on Illegal Immigrants,” Washington Post, 4 June 1993, A1. Back.
Note 28: Dianne Feinstein, “Perspective on Illegal Immigration; We Can Get a Grip on Our Borders; the President Must Make Tough Enforcement a Policy Priority. The Burden on California Is Overwhelming,” Los Angeles Times, 16 June 1993, B7. Back.
Note 29: “Plugging the Border; Here We Go Again,” Arizona Republic, 7 June 1993, A10. Back.
Note 30: “AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Tells Blacks in Congress That Trade Pact Will Hurt African-American Workers and Communities,” PR Newswire, 18 June 1993. Back.
Note 31: See Bob Woodward, The Agenda, for a gripping account of the budget battle. Back.
Note 32: Letter to President Bill Clinton from Representative David Bonior et al., 27 July 1993. Back.
Note 33: Indeed, the first week back from vacation in September was to be devoted to neither NAFTA nor health care, but to Gore's “Reinventing Government” initiative. Back.
Note 34: Eric Brazil, “Teamsters: Trial Run Shows NAFTA Hurts US, Mexico,” San Francisco Examiner, 26 August 1993, 3. Back.
Note 35: Associated Press, “Perot and Jesse Jackson Join Forces to Oppose Trade Pact,” Los Angeles Times, 27 August 1993, A4. Back.
Note 36: Pat Buchanan, “GOP's NAFTA Divide,” Washington Times, 23 August 1993, E1. Back.
Note 37: “Morning Edition,” National Public Radio, 31 August 1993. Back.
Note 38: Ross Perot with Pat Choate, Save Your Job, 41, 33, 6, 11, ii, 119–124. Back.
Note 39: NBC News, “Meet the Press,” 29 August 1993. Back.
Note 40: Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action. Back.
Note 41: See Terry M. Moe, Organization of Interests, and Joseph P. Kalt, Economics and Politics of Oil Price Regulation. Back.
Note 42: Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, 259. Back.
Note 44: See for example, Peter M. Haas, “Introduction”; Judith Goldstein, Ideas, Interests and American Trade Policy; and Alexander Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation.” Back.
Note 45: Major works in this school include George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act; Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures; Victor W. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors; Kenneth Burke, On Symbols and Society; and Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning. Back.
Note 46: Kenneth Burke, On Symbols and Society, 58. Back.
Note 47: Thomas Schelling, “The Mind as a Consuming Organ,” in Jon Elster, ed., The Multiple Self, 179. Back.
Note 49: See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture, and Dan Nimmo and JamesE. Combs, Subliminal Politics. Back.
Note 50: Kenneth Burke, On Symbols and Society. Back.
Note 51: For a fascinating account of the creation of demand for diamond engagement rings, see Edward J. Epstein, The Rise and Fall of Diamonds. Back.
Note 52: See especially Victor W. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Back.
Note 53: The author's own experience with some of the protagonists in the NAFTA story is more consistent with the notion that the speakers believe what they say than the contrary. Indeed, at some level, the rhetoric may be more revealing of the basic thought patterns than the more elaborated versions devised for more sophisticated audiences. Back.
Note 54: For an example of an analysis making similar assumptions, see William H. Riker, “Heresthetic and Rhetoric in the Spatial Model,” in James E. Alt and Kenneth A. Shepsle, eds., Perspectives, 46–65. Back.
Note 55: John Alan Belcher, letter, Solidarity, July 1993, 18. Back.
Note 56: “Larry King Live,” CNN, 7 September 1993. Back.
Note 57: Pat Buchanan, “GOP's NAFTA Divide,” The Washington Times, 23 August 1993, E1. Back.
Note 58: C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson. Back.
Interpreting NAFTA : The Science and Art of Political Analysis
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