Interpreting NAFTA : The Science and Art of Political Analysis, by Frederick W. Mayer

 

8. Diagnosis and Strategy: The Campaign for NAFTA

As Washington returned to work in September, strategists at the White House, in the business community, and on Capitol Hill surveyed the situation. What they saw was not encouraging. August had been a disaster. Members of Congress had been pummeled by angry opponents back in their home districts. They had heard nothing from NAFTA's supporters. Public opinion was now running against the agreement. The vote counts looked terrible. If the vote were held then, NAFTA would lose.

The strategists recognized that this was not trade politics as usual. To solve their problem in Congress, they would need more than lobbying pressure, they would need to change the political context outside of Congress. There was little time to waste. From a near standstill, the administration, the business community, and a host of other allies sprang into action. Over the next two months they would conduct the most extensive campaign ever waged for a trade agreement, complete with grassroots organizing, paid television commercials, and the spectacle of a nationally televised debate between Vice President Al Gore and Ross Perot. NAFTA's opponents, of course, did not stand still, but rather redoubled their efforts. The resulting battle made great news, and as NAFTA became the most covered issue of the fall, the stakes rose ever higher.

This chapter recounts the tumultuous battle of the fall of 1993, focusing particularly on the campaign for NAFTA. It seeks to answer three questions: What was the nature of the political problem confronting NAFTA's supporters as the campaign began? How did their diagnosis of the problem translate into strategy? and How did strategy contribute to NAFTA's ultimate victory?

 

Planning the Campaign for NAFTA

Advocacy for NAFTA had been plagued for most of the year by the lack of a coherent strategy. The Clinton administration had been preoccupied with other matters, the business community unequipped to take the lead, and NAFTA's advocates on the Hill limited in what they could do alone. In August, President Clinton had announced the appointment of Bill Daley, youngest son of former Chicago mayor Richard Daley and brother of the current mayor, Richie Daley, to head up the administration's NAFTA effort. Now, at the beginning of September, with Daley on board and the White House finally paying attention to NAFTA, with new leadership in the business community, and with the Hill whip groups in place, the campaign for NAFTA could begin in earnest.

The Strategists

The administration team came together quickly in early September. Bill Daley had been brought on to head a new NAFTA task force with as much fanfare as could be mustered at the time. President Clinton issued a statement saying that Daley's appointment “should be viewed as a signal of my personal commitment.” The press quickly dubbed Daley the “NAFTA czar.” As deputies, Daley brought in Rahm Emmanuel from the White House political operation and Lloyd Bentsen's aide Kurt Campbell from the Treasury Department. After a couple weeks camped out in Mickey Kantor's office at the USTR (Office of the United States Trade Representative), Daley's staff began to assemble in temporary quarters in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House.

Also joining Daley was Bill Frenzel, a former Republican Congressman well-versed in trade from his days on the Ways and Means Committee. Frenzel's appointment had been urged by House of Representatives Whip Newt Gingrich, who wanted a Republican to work with Daley. “Republicans were nervous that the inside stuff would go over their heads or pass them over,” recalled Frenzel later. “They wanted an in-house friend.”

Daley's shop worked closely with Howard Paster, head of White House Congressional Relations and his deputy Susan Brophy, both now freed from the budget battle to focus on NAFTA, and with Mickey Kantor and his Chief of Staff Tom Nides, General Counsel Ira Shapiro, and Assistant USTR for Congressional Relations Nancy Leamond. For the next two and a half months, this group would be consumed with the effort to pass NAFTA.

Before the business community would really commit to a serious campaign, it needed reassurance that the administration was equally committed. In August, David Rockefeller, scion of the Rockefeller family and a long-time advocate of free trade with Mexico, organized a meeting between the leadership of the business community and key players in the Clinton administration. With Rockefeller were John Ong, new chair of the Business Roundtable; Hank Greenberg, CEO of the insurance company American International Group (AIG); Kay Whitmore, outgoing CEO of Eastman Kodak; and Larry Bossidy, CEO of Allied Signal and soon-to-be chair of USA*NAFTA. The administration was represented by National Economic Advisor Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, White House chief of staff Mack McLarty, and USTR Mickey Kantor.

As one observer recalls, “There was real skepticism on both sides of the table.” The business leaders came in suspicious that Clinton was going to take a walk; the administration was not impressed with the business effort. The discussion was frank. Both sides laid out what the other needed to do, and each told the other that nothing short of total commitment would be sufficient. The administration show of strength did its job. The business leaders left convinced that the White House was prepared to fight for NAFTA.

In early September, leadership of USA*NAFTA formally passed to Larry Bossidy when Kay Whitmore was ousted from the top spot at Eastman Kodak. The change energized the business effort. Whitmore had been a low-key leader, distracted by his troubles at Kodak. “Bossidy,” recalled one member of the business strategy team, made “a light-year's difference. He is a focused, take no prisoners, take charge guy.” With the switch at the top, too, the day-to-day leadership of USA*NAFTA was transferred from Whitmore aide Sandy Masur to Ken Cole, director of legislative affairs for Allied Signal. Joining Cole in the inner circle of business strategists were Francis O'Brien and Paige Gardner of the Fratelli Group, Business Roundtable lawyer Chuck Levy, and Gail Harrison of the Wexler Group.

Other business groups joined the effort, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Emergency Committee for Action on Trade (ECAT). Paralleling the USA*NAFTA effort, viewed by Republicans as too dominated by Democratic strategists and too close to the White House, a smaller Republican business lobbying effort took form. Nick Calio, former head of Congressional Relations in the Bush White House, coordinated a group of Republican lobbyists.

In the House, the pro-NAFTA effort was divided along partisan lines. On the Democratic side, Bill Richardson and Bob Matsui continued to share responsibilities for the pro-NAFTA efforts, with Matsui aide Diane Sullivan being the key liaison with the White House and business strategy efforts. For the Republicans, Minority Leader Bob Michel and his chief whip Newt Gingrich were the lead players, with Michel aide Billy Pitts serving as chief liaison with Bill Frenzel and Nick Calio. In the Senate, Bill Bradley and John Chafee jointly chaired an informal whip group staffed by the author and Chafee aide Amy Dunathan.

Assessing the Situation

For all the NAFTA strategists, a first task was to assess the situation on the Hill after the August recess. Daley, Paster, Brophy, Leamond, and other strategists made the rounds on the Hill, conferring in the House with Bob Matsui, Bill Richardson, and Dan Rostenkowski and in the Senate with Bill Bradley. USA*NAFTA did the same. What they learned was that, although the Senate looked OK, the votes simply weren't there in the House.

Through the summer the administration and the business community had been reasonably confident of winning. The USTR vote count of June 30 showed 196 in the “yes” and “lean yes” columns and 169 in the “no” and “lean no” columns, with 71 undecided. USA*NAFTA's numbers were about the same, Matsui's a bit more pessimistic. The expectation had been that completion of the side agreements would enable many undecided members to announce their support. Instead, exactly the opposite happened. In September the numbers plummeted. USA*NAFTA's numbers of “yes” and “lean yes” went from 186 in August to only 161 in mid-September, and then to 139 by the end of the month. Its numbers of “no” and “lean no” jumped from 168 to 191 to 203. “We were in worse shape than we imagined,” recalled Susan Brophy. “We were shocked at the number of people who announced their opposition around Labor Day. We looked at the numbers, kept looking at the spreadsheet. It wasn't impossible, but we had so little maneuverability.”

To further complicate matters, the Republican House leadership intended to force the White House to deliver as many Democratic votes as possible. Republicans were in no mood to risk political damage to deliver a victory to Bill Clinton. They were feeling political pressure from Ross Perot, whose supporters had been the margin of victory in many of their elections. Minority Leader Michel and Whip Gingrich insisted on 100 Democrats. To keep the pressure on, they refused to share whip lists with the White House. “The Republican votes were kept quiet,” recalled Nick Calio. “We were going to make sure they provided us as many votes as possible. We didn't want to give them any passes.”

In September, getting 100 Democratic votes looked nearly impossible. By Matsui's count, no more than 60 Democrats were in the “yes” or “lean yes” column. To get to 100 would require winning the support of every member listed in the undecided column. Furthermore, the momentum was in the wrong direction. Indeed, the opponents appeared close to getting the necessary 218 locked up. “My fear was always that they would be able to stand there with 218 bodies and it would be numerically impossible,” recalled Bill Daley.

In the Senate, the vote looked to be less of a problem. The Bradley and Chafee head count in September showed 47 “yes” or “lean yes,” with 20 undecided. But in the Senate, there was a significant procedural obstacle. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman of the all-important Finance Committee, was not tipping his hand about where he stood. His staff warned that he might well oppose NAFTA. Fritz Hollings, chairman of the Commerce Committee, which would also have to act on the bill, was squarely opposed. Under fast track rules, either Senator, if he wanted, could hold the bill in committee for up to fifteen legislative days after the House acted, which might make it impossible to bring the bill to a vote in 1993 if the House did not act quickly enough.

NAFTA's strategists recognized that the ultimate problem was not really on the Hill. It was with the tremendous pressure Congress members were feeling from outside political forces. The opposition had been very effective during the recess. “People came back to Washington saying they had been pretty well beaten up on this,” said Representative David L. Hobson (Republican, Ohio). ₁ Mail in every Congressional office ran strongly against the agreement. The labor unions, for many Democrats their largest campaign contributor, were angrily opposed. Members of the large freshman class, many of whom had run on an anti-NAFTA platform the year before, were particularly vulnerable. The forty-member Black Caucus had taken a formal stand against NAFTA. Other Democrats had problems with strong agricultural constituencies, especially in Florida, Louisiana, and California, where sugar, citrus, and vegetable growers were likely to face competition from Mexican imports.

Moreover, general public opinion appeared to have swung solidly against NAFTA. The September NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed that now only 25 percent of the American public favored NAFTA whereas 36 percent opposed it. ₂ The opposition message that NAFTA was a job loser appeared to have done the most damage, as the Greenberg survey in the summer warned that it might (see chapter 7). Fully 74 percent of the American public agreed with the proposition “American jobs will move to Mexico,” whereas only 20 percent disagreed. And “jobs” appeared to be the most important determinant of stance on NAFTA. Of those who opposed NAFTA, a startling 66 percent volunteered “lost jobs” when asked why, no other answer being offered more than 6 percent of the time. Of those opposed to NAFTA, 79 percent disagreed with the statement “Some jobs would be lost in the U.S., but even more jobs would be created.” Interestingly, NAFTA supporters held almost opposite views, with 77 percent agreeing that more jobs would be created than lost.

Opinions about NAFTA did have some silver linings, however. When asked what might happen if NAFTA were not passed, 34 percent of Americans thought that immigration from Mexico would go up and only 3 percent thought it would go down (the rest saying it would not be affected); 54 percent agreed that the United States “would have to give more foreign aid and loans to Mexico in order to support their economy”; and 53 percent thought that “Japan and Europe will take advantage of economic opportunities in Mexico, and we would lose the chance to export our goods to Mexico.” Perhaps most hopeful was the finding that 69 percent of Americans would support NAFTA, and only 21 percent oppose it, if it “resulted in some U.S. industries being hurt and some jobs being lost, but more new jobs were created than were lost.”

An Initial Strategy

First, supporters of NAFTA had to stop the bleeding, i.e., halt the flow of commitments to the opposition. “The whole thrust of our message after Labor Day was, ‘Don't make a decision. Give us time,’” recalled Bill Daley. “I thought if we could get to October 1, and we could get action by committees started that it would be hard to stop.” Administration officials and business lobbyists took the message to the Hill: “Wait. Don't get locked in. Keep your powder dry.” The bleeding slowed.

Howard Paster and Speaker of the House Tom Foley agreed to set a date for the House vote. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell had announced his intention to adjourn the Senate before Thanksgiving. That meant that the House vote would need to be in November. Bill Daley urged that the vote be as late as possible, to give him as much time as possible, but the president was going to Seattle for a meeting of APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) member heads of state on November 18. Howard Paster did not want the vote while the president was away. “The only issue of any significance I lost all year was the economic stimulus bill,” he explained. “The president was in Vancouver for the timber summit, and then meeting with [Russian Prime Minister Boris] Yeltsin. The president is the best lobbyist in town. If he had been here, we would have won. We had to vote before he left.” Paster and Foley agreed on Wednesday, November 17, for the vote.

The administration strategists planned a two-pronged approach. “We had an inside strategy and an outside strategy,” recalled Daley. The inside strategy would focus solely on undecided members in the House. “We took it as a given that if we got it out of the House, the Senate would be all right,” Daley recalled. Howard Paster and Susan Brophy in the White House and Nancy Leamond at the USTR took the lead in organizing the Hill effort. The president was their best lobbyist, but his time would be limited at first. In his stead, however, all cabinet officers would be available to talk with members. Every contact would be logged, providing the strategists with increasingly elaborate profiles of every undecided member's concerns. Staffers at the Departments of State, Treasury, and Agriculture, and, of course, those at the USTR and in Daley's war room, geared up to answer questions and provide information.

The administration's outside campaign was designed to help members of Congress with their political problem. “We were developing a cover to let members vote the way they substantively and intellectually wanted to vote,” recalled Bill Daley. With the president's time limited, the cabinet officers would again need to step in, appearing on the television talk shows and writing opinion columns for the major newspapers. Much of the effort, however, went into working with the business community in its efforts to mobilize support for NAFTA.

Until September, the business community had not really focused on NAFTA. Now, reassured of the administration's commitment, USA*NAFTA's Ken Cole set out to mount an effective business campaign. To Cole, as to the White House strategists, the task looked formidable. “We were digging out of an enormous hole here,” recalled Cole. “My thinking was, we'll put our best effort and try as hard as we can, but at the time I didn't think it would work.” In Cole's mind, the first task was to “change the conventional wisdom in Washington from ‘dead on arrival’ to ‘watch out, they have their act together.’” To do that, he needed to do three things: “make NAFTA a first tier issue in Washington offices, start winning the grassroots back home, and compete on the airwaves around the country.”

Cole later explained, “NAFTA was in every Washington office a third-tier issue. First-tier issues are issues that have an immediate company significance. Second-tier issues are issues that affect the industry. But third-tier issues are issues where you have a functional person monitoring it but aren't doing anything.” Cole and his boss Larry Bossidy set out to change that. At a meeting of the Business Roundtable in early September, Bossidy gave a rousing speech to the hundred CEOs gathered there. Bossidy asked them to make NAFTA their top priority. He asked them for their money and for their personal time and followed up his request with phone calls.

The business grassroots effort had accomplished little to date. “Every time members would go back home we would lose a dozen members,” recalled Cole. “They were beating us in the grassroots.” Business couldn't compete everywhere, but it didn't have to. The challenge was to match the opposition in the key swing districts. USA*NAFTA hired two sets of field organizers, one for Democrats and one for Republicans. The Dewey Square Group, an outfit run by the field coordinators for the Clinton and Dukakis campaigns, and Bond-Donatelli, Republicans experienced in campaign mass-mail techniques, brought new capacity to generate pro-NAFTA mail and phone calls.

But Cole and the other business strategists recognized that the problem went deeper than generating lobbying visits, or phone calls and letters from constituents: The problem was with opinion about NAFTA. And to change that, they felt a paid media campaign was needed. The battle to convince CEOs that they needed to think about public messages had not been easy. Finally in August, Francis O'Brien had convinced the Business Roundtable to foot the bill for a $5 million advertising campaign. USA*NAFTA selected election commercial producers Grunwald, Eskew and Donilon, the firm that had done Clinton's presidential campaign commercials.

 

The Campaign for NAFTA

From slow beginnings the campaign for NAFTA moved into high gear. The administration worked closely with the business community and other outside groups, including notably the mainstream environmental organizations, to mount a direct lobbying, grassroots lobbying, and mass media effort, all targeted, directly and indirectly, at the critical swing votes in the U.S. House of Representatives. By the end of October, the full weight of the campaign would press on those members. Now, in September, the campaign needed an event to announce what was coming.

A Presidential Kickoff

Given only two days of the president's time, squeezed between the reinventing government initiative and health care reform, the NAFTA strategists searched for a big event to kickoff the campaign. One idea was to find a way to highlight the fact that every living U.S. president—Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton—supported NAFTA. Opportunity knocked. A breakthrough in the Middle East peace talks meant that there would be a signing ceremony at the White House on September 13. President Carter would certainly be there. Why not hold a ceremony to sign the NAFTA side agreements at the White House the next day and invite Bush, Ford, and Carter? (Reagan was judged to be too ill, Nixon too controversial.)

On September 14, in the East Room of the White House, four presidents stood side-by-side for the first time in American history. The atmosphere was electric. For Bush, in particular, the moment was poignant, his first return to the White House since leaving office. Each president spoke. Ford emphasized NAFTA's economic benefits and warned that without it immigration would increase. Bush focused on the foreign policy implications of the agreement. Carter, speaking without notes, made the biggest stir. “We have a demagogue who has unlimited financial resources and who is extremely careless with the truth, who is preying on the fears and the uncertainties of the American public,” he said, not naming Ross Perot. “And this must be met.” The room erupted in applause.

Clinton gave a ringing speech that ended any doubt of his commitment and sounded out the themes on which he would campaign.

I want to say to my fellow Americans, when you live in a time of change, the only way to recover your security and to broaden your horizons is to adapt to the change, to embrace it, to move forward. In a fundamental sense, this debate about NAFTA is a debate about whether we will embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow or try to resist these changes, hoping we can preserve the economic structures of yesterday.

The NAFTA strategists were exhilarated by the event. “It raised the issue to a higher level,” recalled Bill Daley. “We were trying to raise the importance of NAFTA. Never had three former presidents been in the White House. We were getting people to think about it as more than a petty political fight with Ross Perot and the unions.” As Mickey Kantor recalls, the event did three things. “One is bipartisanship. Two, it had support from people the American people admire. Three, it let you control the center of the debate and let the left and right go off on their own and become a fringe argument.” For Cole, Carter's remarks were particularly important. “All of a sudden it was legitimate to criticize Perot. Carter changed the whole dynamic.” Finally, the event conclusively demonstrated the president's commitment. “I loved that event,” recalled David Gergen. “At that point we were in it to win.”

The Administration Campaign for NAFTA

The day after the excitement of four presidents at the White House, the administration campaign seemed to fizzle. The president traveled to Louisiana to talk about the benefits of NAFTA for that state. It rained. Few people came to the scheduled events. The press gave only limited coverage. Worse, several weeks would pass before the next scheduled presidential time to promote NAFTA. Nevertheless, the campaign for NAFTA began to gather speed in terms of lobbying on the Hill and attempting to influence public opinion.

Lobbying

Every day, Howard Paster, Susan Brophy, and Nancy Leamond met to go over the latest whip lists, identify swing members, discuss the nature of their concerns, and deploy the administration's assets. The NAFTA team began inviting Representatives to the White House to meet with the president. At first, the meetings were in groups: Hill leaders, undecided Democrats, undecided Republicans. Rahm Emmanuel, Daley's deputy detailed over from the White House, fought aggressively for more presidential time. As the campaign gathered steam, Emmanuel succeeded, and the size of the groups began to shrink. Eventually, the president would meet one-on-one with undecided members. In mid October, he began to take a call list with him at night when he retired to the residence.

In these meetings, Clinton would give his pitch for NAFTA: It was good for jobs, good for the environment, important for American leadership in the world, a test of whether of America would embrace change or retreat from it—much the same pitch that he gave in public speeches. Vice President Gore would add his remarks. Together, the two of them made a formidable presentation. Few members were prepared to debate the substance. Some expressed concerns about jobs or the environment, but more often they talked about problems specific to their district. Most commonly, they told the president that what they really needed was “political cover.”

A significant part of the lobbying effort involved providing information to address concerns expressed by undecided members of Congress or requested by the Hill whip groups. The purpose was not only to reassure members on points of information, it was also to arm them for interactions with their constituents. Often, the administration would provide “talking points” on the subject, such as NAFTA's effects on immigration. Daley and Paster also had virtually unlimited call on cabinet officers. A member who had expressed a concern about drug smuggling would receive a phone call from Attorney General Janet Reno. If that conversation revealed that the member seemed receptive to the arguments about the foreign policy ramifications of rejecting NAFTA, the member could expect a call from Secretary of State Warren Christopher. With every contact, the White House updated its member profiles.

The relationship between the White House and Republicans on the Hill was more complicated. Given the partisan nature of the summer budget fights, there was a pervasive atmosphere of distrust. Bill Frenzel worked hard to dispel this, but much of the lobbying of Republicans was left in the hands of Republicans outside the White House. Nick Calio coordinated calls from former President Bush and from such other influential Republicans as Jim Baker and Carla Hills.

The Public Message

Although it had been slow in developing, the administration's public message on NAFTA gradually emerged. The message reflected a distillation from many sources and from experience, although it bore a strong resemblance to the message Bill Bradley had been articulating since the beginning of the year. Bradley's message reframed the jobs issue as a matter of long-term competitiveness and recast the debate as both a matter of U.S. foreign policy and as a referendum on America's future. In essence, the administration message now also had three parts, although the themes varied and not everyone stayed on message:

First, NAFTA is good for American jobs because it will allow more U.S. exports to Mexico and help the United States to compete with Europe and Japan. Here the goal was to neutralize the jobs issue, not necessarily to win it. Specific examples of products that the United States could sell to Mexico and jobs that would be created as a consequence would counteract the specific examples offered by opponents of jobs lost to Mexico and make concrete the usually abstract arguments for free trade. Redefining “us” and “them” from the United States versus Mexico to the United States versus the world provided a way to think about the long-term benefits of NAFTA and to disentangle NAFTA from anxieties about competition from Europe and Asia.

Second, NAFTA is part of the solution to environmental, immigration, drug, and other problems with Mexico, not part of those problems. In essence, this was a foreign policy argument. It sought not to change attitudes about Mexico but to put those negatives in a context that made NAFTA the hero rather than the villain. Often, this message was delivered in the negative: If NAFTA is not passed, these problems will only get worse. In addition, by making this a matter of U.S. national interest, the message sought to raise the debate above the level of who would win and lose at home.

Third, the choice is between hope and fear, between going forward and going backward, between embracing change or shrinking from it, between competing or retreating. As much as anything, this message was intended to wrap NAFTA in essentially American values and to cast opposition to NAFTA in negative terms, an approach made easier by the increasingly negative image of Ross Perot and others opposed to the agreement.

Delivering these messages presented a challenge, however. With the president largely unavailable for public appearances after the September 14 kickoff, the administration team had to rely at first on appearances by cabinet secretaries on the Sunday talk shows as well as on opinion articles in leading newspapers. To a great extent, the administration had to rely on others to deliver the message.

The Business Campaign for NAFTA

With an energetic new leadership and encouraged by the commitment coming from the White House, the business community mounted a three-pronged attack. First was a massive, coordinated direct lobbying effort at a level unprecedented for a trade issue. Second was a public relations campaign that including for the first time television commercials for a trade issue. Third, was a grassroots effort of a kind business groups had never before attempted.

Lobbying

Usually business lobbying is a largely uncoordinated affair, as individual companies or trade associations lobby for specific items of concern to them. This had been the case during the negotiation of NAFTA. But with the agreement finished and no possibility of amending it in Congress, business interests had nothing specific for which to lobby. Virtually the entire business community, therefore, could unite around the single objective of passing NAFTA. The campaign was also unusual in another regard. It was conducted in close coordination with a Democratic White House.

Larry Bossidy and Ken Cole set out to get the personal involvement of CEOs. They both knew that in Washington, unless the CEO personally calls, members of Congress judge the issue to be of low importance. Bossidy worked the business community, every day phoning CEOs he knew and asking them to make personal calls. The CEOs were receptive. As Ken Cole recalls, CEOs got involved for three reasons:

First, fundamentally, they though it was the right policy, the right thing to do. Second, they were offended by Perot. He wanted to present [NAFTA] as inappropriate policy, created behind closed doors for the benefit of a few and to the detriment of the American work force. They were categorically angry at Perot. Third, President Clinton was persuasive. Do not underestimate the importance of the president of the United States asking CEOs for their help.

Cole aimed to mobilize the “heavy-hitters,” the top business lobbyists in Washington. “We wanted to change the cocktail circuit chatter, to show that NAFTA was the number one issue for every company [the lobbyists] represented, that we had a strategy, that there was a financial commitment, that we were going to compete in every forum,” he recalled. An elite group of Washington lobbyists began meeting every Monday at AlliedSignal's Washington headquarters to plot strategy. Almost always, Bill Daley or another administration official was on hand to describe what the administration was doing. Another, larger weekly meeting was held at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A group of lobbyists organized by Bob Barrie, General Electric's Washington “rep,” met weekly with Bob Matsui and aide Dianne Sullivan to coordinate efforts targeted at the House. More quietly, a group of forty Republican lobbyists organized by Nick Calio met regularly with House Minority Leader Bob Michel and aide Billy Pitts.

Together, the direct lobbying conveyed a clear message to members of Congress: “NAFTA is important to business.” But Cole and the other business strategists understood that CEOs and inside heavy hitters alone were not enough. Unless they could demonstrate ability to change the grassroots politics of NAFTA, they would not change votes on Capitol Hill.

The Media Campaign

Although television talk shows and newspaper opinion pages provided a limited forum for business to reach the public, the heart of the business media strategy was a paid media campaign with election-type television commercials. The goal was to reframe the debate. As Paige Gardner recalled, “People did not know how to be for [NAFTA]. We had to give them tools to talk about it. We had to construct a way to be for it. There was not a conceptual framework that resonated with constituents.”

Ken Cole, Francis O'Brien, and Page Gardner worked with the advertising firm Grunwald, Eskew and Donilon to produce the commercials. Normally, television commercials reflect careful research involving testing of various messages with focus groups. In this case, however, the only research available was the earlier Greenberg poll, a quick survey by Mike Donilon, and the publicly available surveys such as the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll. The media team had to rely largely on instinct, testing the ads on themselves in Ken Cole's office.

In total, there would be eight commercials. The first, quickly put together and aired in early September, focused on jobs. Its purpose, as much as anything, was to get people's attention. Perhaps the most important commercials involved Lee Iococca, the former CEO of Chrysler who had served as a very effective pitchman not only for his company but also for the renovation of the Statue of Liberty. In the eyes of the business strategists, Iococca was perfect. He had very high name recognition and “unbelievable positives,” recalled Page Gardner. When he agreed to do the commercials in late September, that alone was news. Iococca had a clear idea of what he wanted to do. He insisted on his own scriptwriter and his own camera crew. The result were commercials with the familiar look and feel of the ads he had made for Chrysler over the years.

Iococca stressed competition with Japan and Europe: “The Japanese and Europeans think NAFTA is a bad deal. Why? Because it's good for us and bad for them. It puts them on the outside looking in on the biggest market in the world. It's a no brainer. If we say ‘yes’ to NAFTA, we say yes to jobs.” Another version of the ad had Iococca making the points even more strongly. “And believe me, if we say ‘no’ to NAFTA, the champagne corks will be popping all over Japan and Europe, and we'll be crying in our beer. 'Cause if we don't take the deal, they will.”

Other USA*NAFTA commercials took different tacks. One compared the cast of characters in favor of NAFTA with those against it: Every living president and every living Nobel Prize-winning economist was for NAFTA; Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Jesse Jackson, and Jerry Brown were against it. Another began with the image of a chain link gate closing, while a voice said, “Some people want to put a fence around America. It's called protectionism. The last time we tried it, we had a Depression.” The commercial showed an image of hungry children in rags.

Because USA*NAFTA had a limited budget for purchasing television air time, the commercials were carefully targeted. Once a week, a small group of strategists would meet in Ken Cole's office to decide on the media buy for the week. In deciding where to run ads, the group weighed information from the Hill whips, from the lobbyists, and from their own lists. They also considered requests coming in from the grassroots efforts. “There is no reason to put up media without active grassroots,” recalled Cole. “We were running a national campaign directed locally.”

Much of the effort was to influence opinion leaders and to create the impression that there were more ads running than there actually were. Every ad ran in Washington. Some ads ran on CNN, targeted expressly at opinion leaders. One ad featuring Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates ran only in Denver, but videotapes of it were distributed to staffers on the Hill. The ad was terrible television, but “I only cared that people talked about the ad,” recalled Francis O'Brien. “The offices up there [on the Hill] are made up of young people. The whole point was in creating conversations.” Most media buys, however, were targeted at the undecided members. “We didn't have to convince two hundred million people,” recalled Page Gardner. “We had ‘X’ number of people to convince. We never lost our focus on that. We were really targeting resources at the swing votes.”

Business Grows Grassroots

In contrast to the grassroots techniques often employed by public interest organizations, business efforts to influence legislation generally involve traditional, behind-the-scenes lobbying by top business officials and professional lobbyists. For NAFTA, however, business decided that it needed a genuine grassroots effort, one that would demonstrate to members of Congress that more than a few CEOs cared about the outcome of the NAFTA battle.

USA*NAFTA's pair of grassroots lobbying firms began organizing a grassroots campaign. For the Democrats, the Dewey Square group put together a network in fifty districts. For the Republicans, Bond-Donatelli focused on around thirty districts. Both efforts targeted people who might be influential with members. “We would identify people who could make a difference and went and sold NAFTA to them. At the end of the decision process, when the member is sitting with his staff, he's going to ask, ‘What does X say,’” recalled Ken Cole. The organizers also sought to generate favorable mail for NAFTA to match the torrent of negative mail members had been receiving. In late September, USA*NAFTA distributed 1.2 million four-part postcards, one part for the Representative, two for the Senators, and one to return to USA*NAFTA. By mid October, significant numbers of pro-NAFTA postcards began appearing in key members' offices on Capitol Hill.

Whenever possible, company CEOs were urged to participate in the grassroots efforts. Bossidy's message to CEOs was not just to make personal calls, but to work in their communities. Recalled Ken Cole,

He told them three things: “First, educate your own employees. Second, get your people active in the communities where you have facilities. You don't have to explain how to do this. These people are members of the Rotary Club, the Lions Club; they run the Little League. They can change the conventional wisdom in that town. Third, target the member's district office. Get the [member's] district manager out to your plant. District managers are good filters for the member.”

The grassroots effort was contagious. Companies started running their own radio commercials and buying billboard space. Some companies developed extensive educational materials for their employees. One company in South Carolina installed phone lines so that workers could call their district office during their break to urge NAFTA's passage. In Washington, Cole encouraged the grassroots efforts by disseminating information through an increasingly extensive fax network. The network served as a vehicle for disseminating the latest rebuttal of Ross Perot, the scripts of upcoming television ads, the weekly message. The materials helped arm people for local radio and provided the basis for letters to the editor in the local paper. The network also provided a way to publicize creative efforts around the country.

Part of the business grassroots campaign was coordinated with White House personnel. Kurt Campbell of Bill Daley's office worked with USA*NAFTA to organize trips to Washington for CEOs and other business executives. Groups of these business leaders would typically meet with administration officials at the White House and then go to the Hill to talk with members of Congress. To highlight business support for NAFTA, the administration and the business community put together a “products fair” on the White House lawn, at which were displayed hundreds of products from around the country that were sold to Mexico. The assembled business leaders heard from President Clinton and Lee Iococca. In addition, administration officials spoke to business groups in Washington and around the country.

On the Hill

Crucial to the whole campaign were the whip groups on Capitol Hill. Although they lacked the resources of the administration or the business community, members of Congress and their staffs were in a better position to gather information about the positions and concerns of their colleagues and to communicate directly with them. Because members are more candid with other members, the inside vote counts were more reliable. Moreover, information that came with a “Dear Colleague” letter from one member to another was much more likely to be read.

The hottest action was in the House. There, the offices of Democrats Bob Matsui and Bill Richardson and Republicans Bob Michel, Newt Gingrich, and Jim Kolbe became the nerve center of the campaign. Staffers in these offices now went into overdrive, desperately trying to manage the stunning volume of information coming at them, assessing the ever changing political landscape, and attempting to direct resources where they were needed. Although, as a matter of courtesy to other members, even the Democrats kept their actual whip lists confidential, both Democrats and Republicans used the lists to direct the lobbying resources of the White House, the business community, and other outside groups.

In the Senate, things were a bit quieter. Moynihan's continued ambivalence about supporting NAFTA and Baucus's interest in pushing for additional concessions from the administration meant that Bill Bradley remained the de facto Democratic whip. The author, working with Chafee aide Amy Dunathan, maintained the whip lists, communicated with the White House and the business community, and distributed information to members. Bradley's Senate strategy was designed with the House in mind. The goal was to persuade Democrats who might have influence with Representatives to announce their support. Bradley spent hours talking with Carol Moseley-Braun, the newly elected African-American Senator from Illinois. Moseley-Braun's announcement of support on October 21, the day after that of Paul Simon, the senior Senator from Illinois, all but guaranteed that NAFTA would prevail in the Senate and eased the pressure on some Representatives.

But Bradley was not content with indirection. He took the unusual step of organizing Senators to lobby the House directly. In meetings in his “hideaway” in the Capitol, Matsui and Richardson shared their lists with Bradley and a small group of other Democratic Senators supporting NAFTA. In October, members of the House began receiving notes and phone calls from these Senators, as well as visits from Bradley himself.

Other Efforts for NAFTA

Other groups and individuals also come forward to promote the trade agreement, representing much of the nation's economic and political elite. Some of this was at the urging of the administration or business leadership, but much was spontaneous, as NAFTA became something of a litmus test.

The mainstream environmental organizations that had worked closely with the administration during the side negotiations were particularly important. On September 15, at a Capitol Hill press conference organized by Max Baucus and attended by Al Gore, six major groups—the National Wildlife Federation, the World Wildlife Fund, the Audubon Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Conservation International—announced their support. Said the World Wildlife Fund's Katherine Fuller: “The environment in North America, the global environment, for that matter, will be better off with NAFTA than without it.” The National Wildlife Federation's Jay Hair commented that “the environmental community in the United States is split over support for NAFTA, but it is not split down the middle. The nation's leading environmental organizations, which represent the overwhelming majority of the nation's grassroots environmental network, those who join with me and us here today, support its passage.” ₃ These groups would lobby environmentally sensitive members of Congress, explaining the merits of the agreement; provide information and arguments to Hill staffers; and rebut NAFTA's environmental critics in the media. But most importantly, the simple fact of their support effectively eliminated environment as a political problem for NAFTA.

Former presidents Carter and Bush remained active in the campaign. Carter visited with and telephoned dozens of Democratic members of Congress to reiterate the points that he had made in his White House talk in September. Bush called dozens of wavering Republicans, urging members not to let partisanship stand in the way of what he considered sound policy. Bush's USTR, Carla Hills, also made numerous calls, usually when members had technical questions and wanted reassurance.

Other national opinion leaders weighed in with op-ed articles and letters to the editor. Republicans such as former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Jim Baker, and former Baker aide Bob Zoellick, were joined by Democrats such as former USTR and Democratic Party Chairman Bob Strauss as well as current cabinet secretaries Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Reich, and Ron Brown. Other party figures such as Lee Hamilton and Bill Bradley also wrote opinion articles for leading newspapers. MIT economist Rudiger Dornbush organized a large group of economists to endorse NAFTA, including all of America's Nobel Prize winners. Finally, the editorial boards of the majority of America's major newspapers wrote favorable editorials. Although news coverage of NAFTA continued to be mixed, and most papers made some attempt to balance opinion articles, the editorial pages were predominantly positive toward NAFTA.

 

The Opposition Campaigns

As the fall began, the anti-NAFTA campaigns were in full swing. The successes of August and early September gave members of the coalition increased confidence that NAFTA could be defeated. They were winning the battle in the grassroots and gaining votes. However, problems lurked. The extraordinary diversity of the opposition coalition made coordination difficult. The unions wanted nothing to do with Ross Perot. Liberal environmental groups found it embarrassing to be on the same side as Pat Buchanan. On the Hill, Democrat David Bonior and Republican Duncan Hunter, the chief anti-NAFTA vote counters, were not even on speaking terms. The result was that the campaigns against NAFTA lacked the coherence of tactic and message that increasingly characterized the pro-NAFTA effort. Time had begun to work against the opposition.

Unions

By the end of August, Mark Anderson, in charge of the AFL-CIO effort, thought he had a chance to win. A union vote count listed 166 Representatives as “no” and another 63 as “lean no,” a total of 229, already over the 218 needed to defeat NAFTA. With another 119 members listed as “undecided,” the opposition total seemed almost certain to climb. Yet, for Anderson, there was also a sense of urgency. “We felt that the longer people stayed in the undecided column the more money power and the power of the president would erode it,” recalled Anderson. Reliance on Republican votes also made Anderson nervous. “We could win if we had conservative Republicans,” he recalled. “But I was never too comfortable with that.”

The AFL-CIO campaign got a slow start. Although individual unions had been working on NAFTA's defeat for some time, the AFL-CIO had not begun an all-out effort until after the side negotiations were complete. Until August, Mark Anderson was working only part-time on NAFTA. Not until October 4 was the campaign formally launched, at the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco. In his keynote address to the convention, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland denounced the “unholy matrimony” between the United States and Mexico and promised vigorous campaign to defeat it. Kirkland received thunderous applause, in stark contrast to the stony silence that later met President Clinton when he attempted to explain his reasons for supporting NAFTA.

The union delegates watched a six-minute video on NAFTA. The agreement, it explained to the convention, is

a relic of the Reagan-Bush era that would benefit wealthy corporations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In the end NAFTA is about one thing: cheap labor and the opportunity of the wealthy few to exploit it.

With stirring music in the background, the video described the movement to stop NAFTA. Workers at town meetings, labor leaders appearing on television to set the record straight, Labor Day marches around the country, a national petition drive, and a major media campaign. Union members were called to action:

Congress's vote on NAFTA will determine the future for all working Americans. In the end, this issue will not be decided by Washington insiders, it will be decided by men and women who work hard, serve their communities, and vote on election day. And when we are heard, NAFTA will be defeated.

After the convention, Anderson and his staff finally set up a Washington war room to provide resources, information, and encouragement to the campaigners around the country. But the campaign was highly decentralized. “I didn't know more than a fraction of what went on, particularly as the campaign developed,” recalled Anderson. “As time went on, the level of spontaneity was growing. This was a bottom up campaign, a rank-and-file driven exercise.” The result was much creativity. In Cincinnati, union members carried coffins in a Halloween parade. Unions held “No NAFTA!” pig roasts. Unionists linked hands “across America” to demonstrate their solidarity in opposition.

Decentralization, however, also created some problems, among them consistency of strategy. For the top leadership, winning was important, but not everything. “We were trying to defeat it but also to set the stage for the future,” recalled Anderson. Top AFL-CIO officials avoided threatening members of Congress. But in the field, local union organizers were often not so restrained. In California, state AFL-CIO officials pressed first-term Congresswoman Anna Eshoo. “They laid down the gauntlet and said essentially to me this is total divorce,” she said. “You don't vote with us, we are not with you.” ₄ As the recipient of the largest union campaign contributions of any freshman in Congress, Eshoo felt intensely pressured. Said Rick Sawyer, a top AFL-CIO official in her district, “I would expect a lot of that money to dry up. She needs it.” ₅ In Ohio, first-term Congressman David Mann also received a warning. “Unless David can start representing the people who put him in office in a better manner, he'd probably have opposition,” said Cincinnati AFL-CIO official Dan Radford. ₆ The strong tactics put pressure on Democrats in Congress, but they also annoyed their targets.

To supplement the grassroots efforts, the AFL-CIO planned a media campaign with both unpaid and paid components. The heart of the unpaid media strategy was the program to bring journalists to the Mexican border, a continuation of the effort that had been going on for some time. As the vote got closer, the war room coordinated a nationwide campaign of plant gate demonstrations, around one hundred fifty in all. The demonstrations attracted some local coverage. Union officials made themselves available for television interviews and continued to write opinion articles in newspapers.

Originally, the AFL-CIO had planned only a modest paid media strategy: billboards on the sides of buses, print ads in major papers, and a few radio spots. “We had no notion it would get so big,” recalled Anderson. When USA*NAFTA went on the air with its first television commercial in September, however, the union decided it needed to respond in kind. It hired its own advertising firm and budgeted $3 million for television commercials. The union's major commercial was a thirty-second spot entitled “Bad Deal.” The ad focused on jobs:

In Washington, big corporations and lobbyists are spending millions making false claims about the NAFTA trade deal. But people going to factories, to farms, to offices know NAFTA means jobs going South. Economists say we could lose up to 500,000 jobs. NAFTA: It's a bad deal for America, and Americans know it.

The Citizen's Trade Campaign

The second army of opposition was the community of nonprofit public interest groups, coordinated through the Citizen's Trade Campaign (CTC). Lori Wallach of Public Citizen directed the strategy. Different groups brought different strengths to the coalition. The Sierra Club's extensive membership provided a grassroots organizing capacity. Other groups, Public Citizen among them, were more adept at working the media for news coverage. Although lobbying was not the coalition's strong suit, the CTC also testified at Congressional hearings, wrote letters to members, and provided information to their staffs. They had no money for television commercials.

On September 13, the CTC announced the beginning of its fall campaign to defeat NAFTA. The group now included three hundred environmental, community, human rights, and other grassroots organizations claiming membership of more than five million members. But the announcement received almost no press coverage. The little attention the group got came in the form of articles noting that environmentalists were split on NAFTA.

Because the CTC had little funding for a national campaign, its media efforts were largely confined to placing opinion articles in newspapers and attracting coverage of its views. The group did, however, twice purchase full pages in the New York Times and the Washington Post to run an ad entitled “NAFTA's Eight Fatal Flaws” (the themes of this ad were described in detail in chapter 7). The stridency of the ad's message about NAFTA's effects on the environment, national sovereignty, and democracy was so great, however, that it immediately drew a strong rebuttal from the National Wildlife Federation. The ad also caused some tension within the coalition, many of whose members believed that the rhetoric was overblown.

Perot's Fall Campaign

As the fall began, Ross Perot's anti-NAFTA campaign had considerable momentum. He had unlimited funds, a national organization, and an ability to command public attention unmatched by anyone other than the president. Time magazine estimated that United We Stand America's membership topped two million, making it the largest citizen-action group in American history. Yet as the fall progressed Perot's ability to influence events would begin to wane.

The main thrust of Perot's fall campaign was a series of rallies around the country. The campaign began September 18 on the steps of the Michigan state capital in Lansing. There, flanked by Senator Don Riegle (Democrat, Mich.) and Representatives Marcy Kaptur (Democrat, Ohio) and Helen Bentley (Republican, Md.), Perot addressed a crowd estimated by the Washington Post at 3500. Notably absent was Michigan Representative David Bonior, who refused to appear with Perot.

The crowd roared its approval of Perot's message. “Do you think it's right for your job to go to Mexico?” he asked. “No!” they shouted back. Perot dismissed the support of former presidents for the pact. “They don't think you have any sense. Those are the very presidents who enacted all these trade agreements with Japan, Asia and everybody else that cost us 2 million jobs.” ₇ A local Lansing paper described Perot as the “human equivalent of an air raid siren.” ₈

Every weekend throughout the fall, Perot would address rallies of this kind. “Perot was holding five or six rallies a weekend,” recalled Pat Choate. “He was going full bore. He was totally committed.” Perot's staff advanced the rally. “Local politicians, both Republicans and Democrats would be part of the event,” Choate recalled. “Usually, local chapters of the AFL were coordinating with local Perot supporters” to set up the event. Perot would then do local radio interviews two days before, fly in on his own Gulfstream jet, address the crowd, and fly out again to the next location.

Always, Perot found an enthusiastic audience as he spoke to the converted in high school gyms and town halls. But for all his effectiveness in the hall, Perot's impact outside was diluted by the media coverage the rallies received. Local newspapers and television usually covered the event, but the articles and reports typically treated them as spectacles, and the journalists usually felt compelled to balance whatever Perot had to say with some criticism of him. Typical of this coverage was the treatment of a rally in Rosemont, Illinois, by the Chicago Sun-Times. Under the headline, “Perot Criticized for Trade Stand,” the story began

Ross Perot brings his campaign against the North American Free Trade Agreement here today while under fire for hypocrisy because a Perot family business supports the treaty. Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Cal.), a strong backer of the controversial trade pact, wrote Perot a letter Friday saying, “You can't have it both ways. You cannot use the merits of NAFTA to privately support your investments, while publicly denouncing NAFTA to further your political agenda.” ₉

To add injury to insult, the location of the event was incorrectly reported. The headline for the next day's story read “Perot Crowd Disappoints Organizers.” ₁₀ Even when the local coverage was more favorable, after the Lansing kickoff the national media began to ignore the Perot rallies. In Washington, they were old news.

The Rosemont coverage reflected a more general problem for Perot: His press coverage was turning increasingly negative. Several factors appear to have been at work. First, the publication of Save Your Job, Save Our Country had provided a useful target for NAFTA's supporters. A detailed 73-page, point-by-point rebuttal put out by the USTR in early September provided ammunition for politicians prepared to take on Perot. Second, former president Carter's reference to Perot as a “demagogue” opened the floodgates of criticism. Virtually no article about Perot was published without some strong denunciation of him by NAFTA supporters. Third, Perot was having a difficult time getting his message across through the national media. Not only was the media largely ignoring his rallies, but also the networks were rejecting his requests to purchase time for his thirty-minute “infomercials.” Meanwhile, Perot chose not to make short television commercials. His standing in public opinion polls began to fall. A CNN-Time poll conducted in early October showed Perot's approval rating falling below 50 percent for the first time all year. ₁₁

Between weekend rallies Perot made the rounds on Capitol Hill, talking exclusively to Republicans. “Perot didn't go in to see any Democrats,” recalled Pat Choate. “We kept him away because we knew the White House would use this as a party loyalty issue.” Perot's visits to Republicans were coordinated by California Republican Duncan Hunter. Most Republicans gave Perot a respectful hearing, in part because Perot voters made the difference in their last campaigns, but this was not familiar terrain for him. As Choate recalls, “The Hill was all new territory for Perot. He had never met most of the members before. But the meetings went well. Perot was able to establish personal relations with these guys.” But Perot's presence on the Hill was not welcomed by all Republicans. Senator Thad Cochran (Republican, Miss.) attacked Perot as a “shrill demagogue” and warned that “he's not interested in helping Republicans. Getting too close to him is like getting on the back of a tiger.” ₁₂

The Conservative Right

Largely hidden from the national media, a network of conservatives opposed to NAFTA intensified their efforts after the signing of the side agreements. Through newsletters and talk shows, Pat Buchanan, South Carolina textile magnate Roger Millican, former Utah Republican Senator Paul Laxalt, future Senatorial candidate and Iran-Contra hearings star Oliver North, and other conservatives spread the message that NAFTA was a threat to American sovereignty and that it would increase immigration and the flow of drugs coming from Mexico. Until the fall, right-wing opposition among Republicans did not seem a serious threat, but NAFTA's supporters were shocked by an announcement from freshman Representative James Talent (Republican, Mo.), originally counted as a supporter of NAFTA, that he was opposing NAFTA because of its effects on American sovereignty.

But conservatives were far from united in their opposition. Pat Robertson, president of the increasingly influential Christian Coalition, and popular talk show host Rush Limbaugh both announced support for NAFTA, as did the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, the two most prominent conservative think tanks. The Cato Institute even issued a rebuttal of the sovereignty argument, concluding that “charges that NAFTA poses an unprecedented threat to American sovereignty are specious and unsupported by the facts.” ₁₃ A letter from Ronald Reagan to conservative Republicans further reassured them.

Opposition on the Hill

In the House, the headquarters for the Democratic opposition was the suite of offices David Bonior commanded as chief majority whip, where the anti-NAFTA whip group of Representatives and their staffs as well as the coalition of liberal outside groups met regularly. Now the effort intensified. The strategy was to lock up the vote quickly by getting members to take a public position against NAFTA. The closer the vote count came to a majority against the agreement, the more likely it was the administration might back away from the fight. Bonior still hoped that the administration might focus most of its attention on health care and would not put the full resources of the presidency on the line for NAFTA. Bonior focused on liberal Democrats with strong union and environmental ties, as well as on freshmen members and the Congressional Black Caucus.

On the Republican side, the opposition was much less well-organized. Whereas the Democratic leadership was largely opposed to NAFTA, the Republican leadership supported it. As a consequence, it fell to Duncan Hunter, chair of the Republican Research Committee, a minor leadership position, to organize the opposition. Hunter helped Ross Perot set up meetings and distributed articles by Pat Buchanan and other opponents, but he never really put together a whip organization and had at best a very soft vote count. Hunter and Bonior did not share their whip lists; indeed, as mentioned earlier, they were not on speaking terms.

In the Senate, there was little organized opposition. Michigan Senators Donald Riegle and Carl Levin and South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings spoke out against NAFTA, held hearings at which NAFTA opponents could testify, and distributed anti-NAFTA articles, but they recognized that the real game was in the House and never really mounted a serious anti-NAFTA effort in the Senate.

 

Last Chance to Exit

By the end of October, NAFTA still trailed badly on all scorecards. Bill Richardson's Democratic whip count for October 26, for instance, showed only 49 in the “yes” column and 18 in “lean yes,” a total of 67, well short of the 100 that NAFTA supporters believed they needed. To win they would have to convert virtually every one of the 37 Democrats still listed as undecided, a daunting prospect. But the pro-NAFTA campaign had stabilized the vote counts. The media campaigns were in full swing and seemed to be changing public opinion. Members were reporting that pro-NAFTA mail was picking up. And Ross Perot was increasingly marginalized.

The anti-NAFTA forces could sense that time was now working against them. They had close to a firm majority but getting the last few commitments was proving maddeningly difficult. The media seemed increasingly stacked against them, as newspaper editorial after editorial supported NAFTA. Articles about the opposition now seemed always to include the phrase “strange bedfellows” and to focus on their internal divisions. Although the union commercials had started running, the campaign was not nearly as sophisticated or as extensive as the business effort. Still, the vote count seemed to include a comfortable cushion. If the opposition held onto their votes, it was hard to see how NAFTA could win. Bonior now publicly asserted that the opponents were “up to 208. We have an additional 31 or 32 leaning our way. The best case that they can put on it—solid votes for and leaning for—is about 150. We're picking up a few each day, and we expect we'll have the number that we need some time within the next week.” ₁₄ In the administration, the numbers seemed high, but no one was sure enough to dispute Bonior publicly.

Into this mix, another potential obstacle to NAFTA caught both sides largely by surprise. Following American habit, few in the United States paid attention to the fact that Canada was holding a national election. However, the Canadian election spelled potential trouble for NAFTA. Since her installation as Brian Mulroney's successor in mid summer, Prime Minister Kim Campbell's political stock had fallen precipitously. The beneficiary was Jean Chretien and his Liberal Party, which by mid October looked to be the sure winners of the election. Although NAFTA was not the central issue in the campaign in the way that the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) had been in the previous national election, Chretien had staked out a position critical of NAFTA, promising to renegotiate the treaty to better protect Canada from misuse of U.S. trade remedy laws and to ensure labor and environmental protection.

The Liberal triumph in the election October 25 exceeded even the most extreme predictions. Chretien and his party won a clear majority of seats in the House of Commons, 179 out of 295, up from 79. Campbell and the Conservatives were crushed, falling from 153 seats to 2, the most dramatic defeat of a ruling party in Canadian history.

In Washington, the question of the moment was what the election might mean for NAFTA. Bonior claimed that NAFTA was doomed and that the administration should seize the moment to back out. At a Hill press conference he emphasized the political hazards of association with NAFTA:

The people of Canada sent a clear and a powerful message yesterday: this NAFTA won't work, it's fatally flawed and it's time to go back to the drawing board. As a result of this election, the party that negotiated this NAFTA has nearly ceased to exist. They won two seats where they used to hold over 150 seats in the parliament. By this time next year, the three presidents who negotiated the original NAFTA will all be private citizens. ₁₅

Bonior's message found a receptive audience with some of the president's political advisors, who wondered whether the Canadian election didn't provide the administration with a last chance to exit without suffering a defeat in Congress. For twenty-four hours, the White House was in turmoil, trying to assess what, if anything, the election really meant about Canada's intentions. Administration officials, however, quickly ascertained that Chretien had no real interest in renegotiating the agreement and that the magnitude of the landslide actually reduced the political pressure on him to do so. The idea of backing out was quickly squelched. The next morning President Clinton spoke with the new Canadian Prime Minister. Afterward he told reporters the Canadian election “will have no impact at all. I see no reason to renegotiate the agreement or any grounds or basis for it, and I think we should just go ahead.” ₁₆

Now, there appeared to be no obstacle to a vote. But first, the administration had to put together a bill.

 

Putting the Pieces Together

Nearly forgotten in the midst of the political fray was the more mundane problem of putting together the implementing bill and getting it to a vote in Congress. Although the fast track powers basically ensured that the vote in Congress would be up or down on the agreement as negotiated, the bill would need to specify just what changes in U.S. law would be required to implement the agreement. Moreover, U.S. trade law also allowed the inclusion of other provisions that might be “necessary and appropriate.” These provisions would almost certainly need to include a labor adjustment package, a mechanism to fund border environmental cleanup, and some means to pay for all of this. Putting the bill together was a true insiders' game, orchestrated by the professional staffs in the administration and on the Hill, particularly Marsha Miller, chief trade counsel for the Finance Committee, and Bruce Wilson, Miller's counterpart with Ways and Means. Although few took part in these inner workings, those on the inside knew this would not be an easy matter.

First, however, the administration had to make sure a vote would take place. The earliest the bill could actually be introduced was around November 1. To get a vote in the House on November 17 and in the Senate before Thanksgiving would require moving faster than the fast track required, not an easy matter.

Fast track rules gave House committees with jurisdiction up to forty-five working days before it compelled them to discharge the bill to the floor. The House then had up to fifteen days before it needed to act. Speaker Foley could cut short the fifteen-day period, but he could not compel a determined chair to act faster than the rules required. If the House was to vote on November 17, therefore, the implementing bill would need to be kept out of committees where the chair was likely to be uncooperative. That meant crafting it to avoid the Labor and Public Works Committee chaired by staunch NAFTA opponent William Ford (Democrat, Mich.).

The administration hoped that the Senate would vote almost immediately after the House, but fast track rules did not compel Senate committees to act on the bill until fifteen working days after the House vote and the full Senate to act for another fifteen days. Majority Leader George Mitchell would not only need cooperation from committee chairs, he would also need consent from the full Senate to proceed this fast. The implementing bill could be tailored so that it did not need to go through Riegle's Banking Committee, but there was no way to avoid Moynihan's Finance Committee or Hollings's Commerce Committee. If either wanted, he could hold things up. Mitchell discussed the situation with senior Democrats who favored NAFTA. He was determined to adjourn the Senate before Thanksgiving, but he was prepared to bring the Senate back and keep it in continuous session for the rest of the year if Hollings or other opponents held up the NAFTA bill. Mitchell then talked with Moynihan and Hollings. Moynihan had never had any intention to delay a vote. Hollings, convinced that NAFTA had the votes in the Senate and that Mitchell meant what he said, agreed not to delay. ₁₇ Now, Congress just needed a bill.

Beginning in mid October, the Clinton administration had been working with the key Congressional committees to draft an implementing bill. Although fast track turned the normal legislative process on its head, allowing the president to present Congress with an unamendable bill, historically Congress had gone through a “mock mark-up” process to draft the bill that the president would eventually support. The plan was to follow this process once more. The problem was that several key provisions of the implementing bill were still being debated, and time was running short.

Labor Adjustment

From the beginning, even NAFTA's strongest supporters acknowledged that a free trade agreement with Mexico would cost some workers their jobs. President Bush had assured Congress in 1991 that a worker assistance and retraining program would accompany NAFTA, and in 1992 he had proposed a comprehensive, $2 billion per year program. When Clinton took office, the expectation was that he would do even more. His new Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, a champion of retraining and lifetime learning, hoped to make a comprehensive overhaul of the hodgepodge of existing programs.

Testifying before the House Ways and Means committee in March 1993, Mickey Kantor promised “a comprehensive program to deal with those who lose their jobs whether the cause is this trade agreement, defense cutbacks, or corporate downsizing. We know that NAFTA will be judged in part by the effectiveness of that program, as it should be.” ₁₈ Reich's team at the Labor Department set out to design a comprehensive new set of training programs. Reich avoided mentioning a price tag, but numbers on the order of $3 billion a year floated around Washington. Reich promised a proposal in time to go along with NAFTA.

As the summer progressed, however, and the Labor Department still had not briefed the Hill on its intentions, NAFTA's advocates began to get nervous. To pass a comprehensive worker retraining bill would be no simple task under any circumstances. Many powerful members of Congress had their own ideas about what the bill should look like and wanted to be consulted. They would not take kindly to being handed a “take it or leave it” offer on an unamendable trade bill.

Not until early September did Labor Department officials begin to brief the Hill about their intentions. They intended to propose a comprehensive program for which workers who lost their jobs for any reason, not just NAFTA, would be eligible. All existing programs would be folded into the new program, including Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), the largest and most popular of the existing trade-related programs. To pay for the additional costs of the program, they hoped to increase employer contributions. They were unclear about whether they expected the program to actually be on the NAFTA implementing bill or to travel through Congress alongside it.

The proposal immediately ran into difficulties. Republicans balked at raising taxes to pay for worker retraining. Democrats worried about eliminating the popular TAA program. Most importantly, Hill strategists insisted that worker retraining had to be part of the NAFTA implementing bill. The vote had to be “bundled” if the labor legislation was to help NAFTA. But a comprehensive program could not avoid the Labor committees, and that meant dealing with Representative William Ford (Democrat, Mich.), a staunch NAFTA opponent. The first week in September, Reich paid a visit to Ford to finally discuss whether he would let NAFTA out of committee if it included a strong labor-retraining component. Ford flatly refused. As late as September 21, in an appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, Reich was still advocating a comprehensive program, but the die was cast. At a meeting of the National Economic Council (NEC) shortly thereafter, the comprehensive proposal was shot down and the Labor Department charged with coming up with a less ambitious program.

Two weeks later, Larry Katz, a Harvard economics professor serving as the Labor Department's chief economist, was back on the Hill. The comprehensive program would wait. In the interim, the Labor Department proposed simply to expand an existing program whose features were closer to what the department hoped to do later, an approach that would not require any new authorizing legislation and only a small supplemental appropriation, less than $100 million.

On the Hill, NAFTA's advocates immediately recognized that the new proposal was all wrong from a political standpoint. Without legislation authorizing a new program to help displaced workers, members in need of this kind of political cover would not have anything to point to. A request for a new discretionary appropriation would provoke a fight over whether it was large enough, and that would likely bid up the cost. Strategy called for a new entitlement program, the cost of which need not be specified as it would automatically expand as needed. Entitlement programs also had the advantage of falling within the jurisdictions of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.

Calls went out to officials at the Labor Department and elsewhere in the administration, urging a different approach. At Labor, Andrew Samet, a former legislative director under Senator Moynihan, immediately grasped the situation. Samet explained the problem to Secretary Reich. Within two days, the Labor Department had settled on a new proposal, a NAFTA-specific expansion of TAA, an entitlement program. In the end, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the ten-year cost of the program to be only $90 million, a far cry from the $2-3 billion annual figure initially envisioned. The Labor Department still hoped to introduce the comprehensive overhaul at a later date, but it would never happen.

Inventing a “NADBank”

The implementing bill would also need to include funds for cleaning up the environment along the U.S.-Mexican border, a commitment first made in 1991 by President Bush as part of the Action Plan. But what form the plan might take, how much it would cost, and how it would be funded remained unclear.

Richard Gephardt had insisted that cleanup would take at least $30 billion and urged a cross-border tax to pay for it. As long as Gephardt's support of NAFTA remained a possibility, the administration had been careful not to rule anything out, but by mid summer it was clear that financial constraints in both Mexico and the United States required the two governments to think creatively about leveraging smaller amounts of money.

Creating this program, unlike worker retraining, would require international negotiations, with Mexico and with international lending agencies. The Treasury Department took lead responsibility. The original intent was to complete these talks at the same time the side negotiations concluded, but that proved impossible. Not until early September did Treasury officials begin briefing the Hill on the outlines of the plan they were negotiating. The United States and Mexico proposed to create a Border Environmental Finance Facility (BEFF), which might lend $2 billion or more for environmental cleanup projects. ₁₉ The BEFF could be financed with very small outlays from the U.S. and Mexican governments.

This plan was sufficient to win the support of the mainstream environmental groups on September 15. It did not, however, satisfy a coalition of environmental and Mexican-American groups or, importantly, their champion, Representative Esteban Torres (Democrat, Calif.). Torres's undecided status gave him considerable leverage. His support might bring along others in the Hispanic Caucus; his opposition would be costly. Torres had introduced a bill to create a North American Development Bank (NADBank). The NADBank would be larger and capable of financing a broader array of development projects along the border.

Given the importance of every vote, the administration decided that it needed to satisfy Torres's demands and went back to the Mexicans to negotiate for more. Finally, on October 27, days before the implementing bill was to be introduced, the administration announced agreement to create a NADBank along the lines of the Torres bill. The bank would underwrite $8 billion over ten years for environmental projects. To finance the bank, each government would put up $225 million, supplemented with funds from the World Bank, the Inter-America Development Bank, and private lenders.

Torres announced his support of NAFTA. “This is not an easy decision for me. I have spent most of my professional career fighting for economic and social justice for all workers, the poor and disenfranchised,” said Torres, a former assembly-line welder and UAW official. ₂₀ Torres was joined by several Latino groups, including the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest, but not by any other members of Congress that day. Privately, administration officials were disappointed. They had hoped to get as many as seven votes from the deal. “One bank, one vote,” they quipped. Nonetheless, the NADBank further solidified environmental support for NAFTA and gave the administration more ammunition for selling the agreement. Said Secretary Bentsen, “Pass NAFTA and we make progress on cleaning up that environment. Fail to pass it and it's business and polluting as usual.” ₂₁

Paying for Free Trade

Congressional budget rules required that the NAFTA implementing bill be “paid for,” i.e., the costs of lost tariff revenues, working retraining, border cleanup, and administration of the agreement be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget or by new revenues. The effort to find a way to fund NAFTA got off to a very slow start. The Office and Management and Budget (OMB) could pay little attention until after the budget vote in early August. Even then, uncertainty about the worker retraining and border cleanup items made estimating how much money would be needed difficult and further slowed the effort. One thing, however, was clear: Little money was to be found after the summer budget fight. The funding problem contributed to the decision to scale back worker retraining and to limit the amount of new money going into border cleanup, so that by mid October the amount needed to fund NAFTA looked to be only in the range of $2-3 billion over five years. Still, the administration struggled to find the money.

On Tuesday, October 19, Mickey Kantor revealed the administration's plan during the mock markup in the Ways and Means Committee. The administration intended to ask Congress to double fees on trucks, railroad cars, and sea and air passengers crossing the borders. “This was the best option we could find in a range of very bad options,” a defensive Kantor told the Committee. ₂₂ The negative response was immediate. Transportation interest groups sprang into action. More ominously, twenty-seven House Republicans, all of whom were counted as likely “yes” votes on NAFTA, fired off a letter to President Clinton threatening to oppose NAFTA rather than raise taxes to pay for it. Within hours, Clinton was telling reporters that the administration was rethinking how to pay for NAFTA.

In the Senate two days later, the Finance Committee was continuing its own mock markup, having deferred consideration of the funding package the day before. The members waited that morning for Budget Director Leon Panetta to appear and make the administration proposal. After some time, a message came from Panetta; he apologized to the Committee, but he would be unable to make an administration proposal that day. A disgusted Moynihan abruptly adjourned the session, setting no date for its resumption. In the anteroom, the administration team huddled with Marsha Miller, Chief Trade Council for the Finance Committee, dumbfounded by what had just happened and uncertain about what it meant.

Over the weekend, the administration frantically tried to resolve the funding impasse. On Monday evening, Panetta sent a letter to Chairman Moynihan outlining a new proposal. The administration had scaled back the transportation fees. Most of the money would come from speeding up the electronic deposit of tax payments from businesses and banks, a change that would put the money in the Treasury a day quicker, and which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) generously scored as worth $1.4 billion. The administration pressed Moynihan to resume the Senate markup. Moynihan agreed, and on Thursday, October 28, the Finance Committee completed its work.

Now, however, there was no time at all for a conference committee to reconcile the minor differences that had crept into the two bills, the procedure employed for every previous trade bill. The USTR staff scrambled to iron out the differences, consulting with the Hill trade staffs as needed. At the USTR, General Counsel Ira Shapiro, Ken Freiberg, and the rest of the team worked around the clock to get the bill together. The workload was crushing. The USTR lawyers were putting together sections previously drafted by other agencies, drafting new language, redrafting as inconsistencies were discovered, checking the text with members of Congress and their staffs, madly racing to meet the November 1 deadline, but still not getting closure on critical issues such as funding. As Shapiro recalls,

The last week in October was incredible. We had promised that the implementing bill was going to the Hill on November 1. I said to Mickey, “This is not going to be there on Nov. 1.” He said, “It's got to be there.” I said, “What it's got to be is perfect.” There were a million things to do.

In the end, the bill was not transmitted to the Hill until the evening of November 3, precisely two weeks before the House was scheduled to vote.

 

Full Court Press

In the last two weeks, the politics of NAFTA reached a fevered pitch. To be an undecided member of the House was to be in a maelstrom, postcards flooding your mailroom, phone lines tied up continuously, lobbyists lining up outside the door. NAFTA had became a media obsession, culminating in the extraordinary spectacle of a vice president of the United States debating a wealthy ex-presidential candidate on a cable television talk show. Out of the limelight, on the inside, politics turned retail, as the administration worked a strategy for each undecided member.

The Deluge

President Clinton now threw himself totally into the NAFTA fight. There was no more question about priorities. The prestige of his presidency was on the line.

Clinton played the cheerleader for NAFTA's troops. On November 1, he spoke at the Chamber of Commerce, directly to hundreds of business representatives, and indirectly via satellite to hundreds of groups around the country. Clinton, clearly warming to his subject, departed from his prepared text to give an impassioned speech about the importance of passing NAFTA. He understood the concerns of Americans about jobs, but “I would never knowingly do anything that would cost an American a job,” he said. A new theme took prominence. “If we walk away from this and Mexico decides to pursue its development strategy, what must it do?” asked the president. “It must make this deal with Europe or with Japan.” Clinton acknowledged that the meaning of NAFTA had changed for its proponents, saying “When we started, NAFTA had a significance for those who were fighting against it, all out of proportion to the impact it could have.It has now acquired a symbolic significance for those of us who are for it, too.” Then he urged the business leaders to redouble their efforts. “I know I am preaching to the saved,” the president said. “But you all have to be missionaries.”

The next day, the president was at another pep rally for NAFTA, this time a remarkable gathering of prominent Americans in the East Room of the White House. Former president Jimmy Carter was back, joined by former secretaries of state Jim Baker and Henry Kissinger, former USTR Carla Hills, former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, a collection of Nobel Prize-winning economists, Lee Iococca and other leaders of the business community, and of course, undecided Representatives.

The talks emphasized foreign policy. Baker gave the most compelling speech, one that seemed to define the meaning of NAFTA for the gathering:

How we decide this issue and how we vote on NAFTA is really going to reveal a lot about what this nation is going to be in the future. Even more importantly, I think it's going to tell us what sort of people we are. I think this agreement marks a defining moment in American history, a moment that ranks with America's entry on to the world stage in the 1940s, first to defeat Fascism and then to lead the great alliance of democracies that fought and won the Cold War. Then, as now, America faced a new era, an era full of opportunities, but also full of risks and perils. Then, as now, America had to choose between engagement on the one hand and isolationism on the other. And fifty years ago, the United States of America chose to lead.

The group was clearly moved by Baker's speech.

Carter and Clinton called the group to action. Carter said he had made twelve phone calls that morning, and challenged them to do the same. Clinton urged them to “make three calls, make twelve calls, make two dozen calls. For goodness sakes, make however many you can. But remember this is a test of our confidence. Every one of you can give confidence to someone else by the life you have lived, the experiences you have had, the things that you know.” For the next two weeks, wavering members of Congress, many of them freshman, would receive calls from former presidents, Nobel Prize winners, and powerful CEOs. It was a heady experience.

But most importantly, perhaps, they would receive phone calls and invitations to the White House from the president of the United States. Clinton was now meeting one-on-one with members, giving his pitch for NAFTA, sounding out their concerns, gently twisting their arms. “I'm going to get an artificial socket for my arm,” joked Representative David Mann (Democrat, Ohio) after his meeting with Clinton on the November 8. ₂₃ Recalled Mickey Kantor later,

The President spent an enormous amount of time individually with members. Even those who finally ended up voting against him walked away shaking their heads in amazement with what he knew and his commitment to it, how clearly he understood the rationale for it, and how it fit in with where he wanted to take the country.

In Congress, Bill Bradley was now devoting much of his day to the push for NAFTA. Every day, he would take the shuttle from his Senate office, stride through the Capitol, and take the train to the House office buildings, to call on wavering Representatives. He carried a card in his pocket listing undecided members and their concerns, information gathered in part in meetings he was holding in his Senate hideaway office with Matsui and Richardson. Bradley's presence in the House caused a minor stir. The last time he had done this was in 1986, when he played such a pivotal role in the tax reform effort. Said Susan Brophy later, “Bradley in the House was very effective. A lot of people really respect Bradley. People talked about the fact that he did it. Also, Bradley really knew the arguments.”

NAFTA's opponents did not have the firepower to match its supporters. Letters opposing NAFTA continued to pour in, although in targeted districts, letters of support now more than matched letters of opposition. Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Lane Kirkland, and many others opposed to NAFTA redoubled their efforts, but they had nothing comparable to the setting of a state dinner in the White House in which to make their pitch. An increasingly shrill tone entered their denunciation of NAFTA as they struggled to be heard above the cacophony of voices. The secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Labor Council of the AFL-CIO wrote to Democrat Nancy Pelosi: “Even though you are considered a safe district, we will not forget.” ₂₄

On November 7, President Clinton made a rare appearance on NBC's Sunday morning program “Meet the Press.” Clinton made his usual pitch for NAFTA but went on to complain about the unions' “roughshod, muscle-bound tactics.” Clinton's comments enraged union leaders. Teamsters president Ron Carey called on the president to apologize:

The president's use of the words “muscle-bound” and “roughshod” were an insult to every working man and woman in America. If he had used similar code words to attack civil rights groups, women's groups, or environmental organizations who oppose NAFTA, he would be strongly condemned by every member of Congress. ₂₅

The fracas made a great story: the president fighting with his core constituency. It would be pushed off the headlines, however, by the biggest drama of the season: a nationally televised, live “debate” between Vice President Gore and Ross Perot.

The Gore-Perot “Debate”

The idea came from Jack Quinn, Vice President Gore's chief of staff. What if Gore challenged Perot to a debate? Gore jumped at the suggestion. He had been debating NAFTA for months with members of Congress and others. He felt he knew the facts inside and out, and he felt Perot was vulnerable. He was sure he could best him. Gore called CNN talk show host Larry King to see if he would moderate a debate. King agreed. The vice president then took the idea to the president on the morning of November 4, when Clinton gave Gore the go-ahead.

Later that day, the president was in Lexington, Kentucky, for a NAFTA event. A reporter asked him a question about Ross Perot. Clinton responded that the vice president had challenged Perot to a debate. “Let's see if he takes it,” Clinton said. Bill Daley, Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, and White House Communications Director Michael Waldman, standing next to the president, looked at each other in surprise. None of them knew anything about it.

Ross Perot was on Capitol Hill making the rounds of Republican Representatives when the wire services reported Gore's challenge. “Of course you accept,” recalled Pat Choate of Perot's reaction. At a hastily convened press conference, Perot told reporters, “They've issued the challenge and I've accepted it.”

Few in the pro-NAFTA camp thought debating Perot was a good idea. At the White House, Howard Paster recalled, “I was aghast. Why are we giving Perot this platform? I frankly thought it was demeaning to the vice president to be debating Ross Perot.” Many insiders didn't think it was necessary. Mickey Kantor's chief of staff Tom Nides thought “Perot was fading into the woodwork.If you take Perot on, you only build him up.” USA*NAFTA's Ken Cole recalled, “I thought the Gore debate was a mistake. I wouldn't have recommended it. I thought we were winning.”

The conventional wisdom in Washington was that Gore's challenge reflected NAFTA's desperate situation. Gore had a reputation as a wooden speaker. The contest against Perot, the master of the sound bite, seemed a mismatch. Republican political consultant Ed Rollins opined that

Ross Perot will kill them.You have now given a guy who's been blanked by the TV networks, has been complaining that there's a conspiracy to keep him off the air—you've now made him the most significant player in this whole debate one more time. They'll have a tremendous viewership, and I promise you, Ross Perot in these arenas is as tough as anybody. ₂₆

But on reflection, some of the president's political advisors recognized the potential advantages of the debate. “I thought it was a good idea,” Gergen recalled. “I also thought it was worth taking a risk.” Perot's popularity had been falling all year long. In March, 42 percent of the American public had a favorable impression of Perot and only 30 percent had a negative impression. By mid September his numbers had slipped to 36 percent positive and 35 percent negative. A poll released a week before Gore issued the challenge showed only 30 percent positive and 42 percent negative. Perhaps there wasn't such a risk to raising Perot's salience if Gore could just hold his own.

On Tuesday, November 9, eight days before the House vote, the vice president of the United States debated former presidential candidate and private citizen Ross Perot on “Larry King Live,” a cable television talk show. If any citizens tuned in for a reasoned discussion of NAFTA, they were quickly disappointed. Almost immediately, the encounter became a contest of competing images and sound bites.

Perot held up a photograph of cardboard shacks.

Livestock in this country, and animals, have a better life than good, decent, hardworking Mexicans working for major U.S. companies. Now, here's a good, decent man working his heart out, making his cardboard shack. And the cardboard came from boxes that were used to ship the goods down there.

NAFTA will make this worse, Perot implied.

Gore was prepared. He had studied Perot's performance on “Meet the Press” in August when Perot got flustered when pressed by reporters for specifics, ₂₇ and he wanted to challenge Perot's credibility. Perot did not like being challenged. Gore thought he had a strategy to rattle Perot. “I brought some pictures too,” Gore said.

This is a picture of Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley. They look like pretty good fellas. They sounded reasonable at the time. A lot of people believed them. The Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Protection Bill. [Looking at Perot] He wants to raise tariffs on Mexico. They raised tariffs, and it was one of the principal causes—many economists say the principal cause—of the Great Depression in this country and around the world. Now, [to Perot] I framed this so you can put it on your wall if you want to.

A surprised Perot could only mumble. “Thanks. Thanks.” Gore pressed the attack, emphasizing who was supporting NAFTA:

Every living former president of the United States, in both parties. The two-termers and the one-termers. Every former secretary of state, every former secretary of defense, secretary of treasury. Every living Nobel Prize winner in economics, conservatives, liberals, every one in between. They'd never agreed on anything. And distinguished Americans from Colin Powell to Tip O'Neil to Rush Limbaugh.

And then the list got closer to home as Gore continued,

Ross Perot, Jr., the head of his business, Mort Meyerson, Orville Swindle, the head of United We Stand, the last time, and Ross Perot, Sr., supported it until he started running for president and attempting to bring out the politics of fear.

Perot countered with:

Now, a good deal will sell itself, folks, just plain talk. Four former presidents came out for it and couldn't sell it. All the secretaries of state came out for it and couldn't sell it. We had satellite going across two hundred auditoriums across the country. That didn't sell it. Got Lee Iococca for it. That didn't sell it. Thirty million dollars coming out of Mexico, and that is rotten and that is wrong, and that didn't sell it. Thirty, thirty-five million dollars coming out of corporate America to try to get out of this country, go south of the border and hire that cheap labor, and that didn't sell it. This dog just didn't hunt. ₂₈

But Perot was now on the defensive and having a hard time making a coherent case against NAFTA.

Gore pointed to an investment that Perot and his son had in a Texas international transport park, which would stand to gain from NAFTA. Perot, clearly irritated by the reference to his personal stake in NAFTA, gave a confusing response. Gore seemed to imply that Perot was hiding his involvement in the park. Finally, Perot snapped at Gore, “Would you even know the truth if you saw it?” Gore had gotten under Perot's skin, and Perot was sounding more and more shrill.

The pro-NAFTA forces were ecstatic with the debate. Said USA*NAFTA's Ken Cole, “When I saw the debate, I knew we were going to win. This is ours. They were going to start running [away from Perot].” Howard Paster and Newt Gingrich spoke during the debate to exult over what was happening. Another Congressman called Paster to surrender. Afterward, Perot knew it hadn't gone well. Explained Pat Choate later, “Perot has mastered a lot of formats. Town hall, talk show, but he hadn't been on ‘Crossfire.’ He will never be unprepared again.”

A quick poll taken during and immediately after the debate showed that of those watching, 47 percent thought Gore had won, 33 percent thought Perot had won. ₂₉ But since only a fraction of the electorate actually watched, what mattered more was the popular verdict that Gore had won. Insiders in Washington all scored the debate a knockout for the vice president. The media swiftly reached the same conclusion. The next day's coverage was dominated by assertions that Gore had trounced Perot. On ABC's “Nightline” two days later, Ted Koppel announced the topic as “How the White House Ambushed Perot.” He reported a Nightline poll conducted that day showed 46 percent of the American public thought Gore had won, and only 13 percent thought Perot had won. Political advisor Paul Begala said, “The fact that Mr. Perot has emerged as the discredited embodiment of opposition to NAFTA certainly helps the pro-NAFTA cause.” ₃₀ “This gave some political cover that people could use as an excuse in their district,” recalled Susan Brophy. “[They could say] I was undecided and listened to the debate and the vice president won.”

Euphoria in the pro-NAFTA camp was matched by despair and more than a measure of embarrassment in the anti-NAFTA camp. Andrea Durbin, a grassroots organizer for Friends of the Earth, recalled being “very embarrassed with Perot.” The labor unions were sick that Perot had been made their champion. The real damage, however, was done among the Republicans Perot had been courting. Suddenly, they had much less to fear from Ross Perot. An aide to Duncan Hunter said “the Perot-Gore debate was a disaster.”

Public Opinion

Ross Perot's increasingly negative image corresponded with a marked improvement in NAFTA's popular standing. In September, the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll had found that only 25 percent of the American public favored NAFTA whereas 36 percent opposed it. By the third week in October, NAFTA's numbers had improved slightly, to 29 percent favoring and 33 percent opposed, as the pro-NAFTA public relations effort began to offset the opposition. In the last couple weeks of the campaign, though, there were unmistakable signs that public opinion was shifting even more strongly in NAFTA's favor. The NBC-Wall Street Journal poll taken November 14 and 15, and released the day before the House vote, picked up the change. A plurality now favored NAFTA, 36 percent to 31 percent.

The pro-NAFTA public relations strategy seemed to have worked. The jobs issue had been largely neutralized. Now only 49 percent of the American public agreed with the statement “American jobs will move to Mexico,” down from 74 percent in September. And 42 percent now disagreed. Even more significant, 50 percent now agreed and only 38 percent disagreed that “some jobs will be lost in the U.S., but even more jobs will be created,” a reversal of the September numbers. The foreign policy arguments appeared also to have had an effect. A remarkable 85 percent of those polled believed that if NAFTA was defeated it would affect “President Clinton's standing as a world leader dealing with other countries.” Ross Perot's numbers fell even further. Now only 28 percent of Americans had a positive view of him, while 47 percent had a negative view. ₃₁

Retail Politics

While public attention was on Gore and Perot, the inside game was now retail politics. The number of undecided members continued to shrink. The White House whip count for Wednesday, November 10, the day after the debate and a week before the vote, now showed 61 Democrats for NAFTA and 131 opposed. Only 64 members had not yet announced a position. Of these, 24 were leaning yes, 20 leaning no, and 22 undecided. NAFTA was still behind, but the undecideds were now mostly breaking for NAFTA.

The administration redoubled its lobbying efforts. Clinton met one-on-one with undecided members and made phone calls late into the night. Business lobbyists clogged the corridors of the House. Bradley's Senate whip group went over the House list and divided the undecideds among themselves. Bradley spent hours in the House, talking at length with members such as Anna Eshoo and others.

A few members tried to make deals for unrelated items. In one of his visits to the House, Bradley discovered that Floyd Flake (Democrat, N.Y.), who had already announced his opposition to NAFTA, might be willing to change his mind if he could get some help on an urban program of interest to him. Flake met with President Clinton, got what he wanted, and announced his support on the White House steps. Other members wanted promises of political support. The president promised some that Hillary Clinton would campaign for them in the next election. But the biggest block of remaining undecided legislators were from Florida and Louisiana. Ten Democrats and roughly an equal number of Republicans were holding out for changes in the terms of NAFTA on three agricultural issues: sugar, citrus fruits, and winter vegetables (notably tomatoes).

U.S. sugar producers had never been happy with NAFTA's sugar provisions. In response to their complaints, Mickey Kantor had all but promised to take care of the sugar “problem” during his confirmation hearings in January. Now, as the vote neared, he would need to make good on that pledge. The United States reopened talks on the terms of the sugar agreement in late October and also began talking about citrus and winter vegetables. Said Louisiana sugar producer Charles Melancon, “Without sugar's problem fixed, I think we can kill NAFTA.” ₃₂ Most observers agreed. Louisiana Democrats William Jefferson and Billy Tauzin were claiming 15-17 votes in House depended on the sugar deal. Publicly, the Mexicans said they would not renegotiate, but they could see the political necessity. “It was a hard call,” said one advisor to the Mexican government. “But we looked at the votes.”

On November 3, Mexico and the United States reached tentative agreement on modest changes in the sugar, citrus, and vegetable deals. The sugar changes included corn sweeteners in the calculation of Mexican sugar consumption, thus making it less likely that Mexico could become a net exporter of sugar and thus eligible to export more sugar to the United States. The citrus and winter vegetable deals allowed the United States to provide price supports for domestic growers should imports cause prices to fall.

Two Louisiana Representatives joined Louisiana's Democratic Senators John Breaux and J. Bennett Johnston at a press conference to announce their support. But the Florida delegation remained unmoved. The administration then lobbied the Florida trade associations. On November 4, Florida Citrus Mutual, a growers group, dropped its opposition. On the 12th, the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association and the Gulf Citrus Growers Association followed suit. The Florida delegation started to break for NAFTA. Democrat Harry Johnson announced his support. Republican Tom Lewis called a delegation meeting for the 16th, the day before the vote.

Mickey Kantor later attributed great importance to the deals. “[Because of] the willingness of the Mexican government to make some changes on the sugar and the vegetable issues, we picked up probably 26 votes out of that.” But it was not clear how many of these members would actually have voted against the agreement.

Opponents claimed that NAFTA was for sale. “No votes were changing until the pork started flowing,” said Perot. ₃₃ His advisor Choate later described their strategy:

The problem for Members was how to vote for it without committing political suicide. They were looking for a way to do it. Some needed sugar or citrus deals. The [administration] strategy was to use trade associations to give [members] cover. On the Perot talk shows, we called it flat bribery. We tried to poison the tactic.

Administration officials disputed the charge. Mickey Kantor later asserted, “Frankly, substantively, it [the deals] didn't cost the U.S. one penny. That's what's so silly. We didn't give away anything. What we did is strengthen the agreement in terms of our industries.” Said the USTR's Chip Roh, “We have never paid so little [for a trade agreement].”

 

The Vote

With the House votes scheduled for Wednesday, November 17, the NAFTA strategists were still nervous going into the last weekend. Things were breaking their way, but all fall, whenever members went home for a weekend, NAFTA had lost votes. This was going to be another long weekend-Veterans Day weekend-and they held their breath. David Bonior sounded confident. “We have about 222 votes going into this weekend and we think we are going to hold our votes,” he told reporters. ₃₄

But this time, the weekend was different. Many members went home to announce their decision to support NAFTA. On Monday evening, the House whip count looked much better. Of the Democrats, 87 were now “yes,” 6 more were “lean yes,” and 13 more were undecided. With the sugar, fruit, and vegetable deals working their way through the Florida delegation, Howard Paster and Bill Daley could now see 100 Democratic votes. Moreover, for the first time they had seen the real Republican numbers. Gingrich had more than enough votes to put NAFTA over the top.

The next day, Tuesday, the insiders knew the game was over. Florida Republican Tom Lewis held a press conference to announce his support for NAFTA, along with that of others in the delegation. While the lobbyists lined the halls of Congress (literally-it was difficult to walk through the corridors) the NAFTA strategists were over in the Senate, meeting with the author in Senator Bradley's office. “OK, what do you want us to do over here?” they asked. “Nothing,” they were told. “We've got the votes.” The fiftieth Senator publicly announced his support for NAFTA the next day.

The vote itself was anticlimactic for the insiders, but for the outside world it still appeared to hang in the balance. The formal House debate raged most of the day. There was little middle ground. But when the vote began that evening, the only question was when the one-hundredth Democrat would vote for NAFTA. The Republicans held back, and then when they saw the vote, the yes votes flooded in. The final tally, 234 to 200, surpassed all public expectations and even most private ones. One hundred and two Democrats had joined with 132 Republicans in favor.

NAFTA was not yet law, of course. The Senate would not act for four more days, but by then the president was in Seattle basking in the glow of victory and a strong surge of public confidence in his administration. With him were most of the administration officials who had worked so hard to pass NAFTA. Bill Daley was back in Chicago. Only a skeletal staff remained to monitor the Senate vote. The author double-checked his vote counts. On Saturday, November 20, the Senate voted 61 to 38 for NAFTA and the implementing legislation went to the president for his signature. On January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement entered into force.

 

Interpreting the Victory: Political Diagnosis and Political Strategy

This chapter began with three questions: What was the nature of the political problem facing NAFTA in the fall of 1993? What strategies did that problem demand? How did the strategies adopted by NAFTA's supporters affect the outcome of the vote in Congress?

The first question is diagnostic. At one level the problem was located in Congress, where NAFTA clearly faced an uphill battle. Yet an exclusive focus on the game within Congress is clearly insufficient, although the interests of members and rules by which they played certainly mattered. Congress does not operate in a political vacuum; it is by design highly responsive to pressures from outside. For NAFTA, the biggest political problem was in the outside environment. Part of the outside pressure came from the usual trade interests, but this was not trade politics as usual. Instead most of the pressure came from normally inattentive publics, some organized into advocacy groups. To diagnose this problem requires a theory of Congressional decision making that considers simultaneously processes within Congress and those in the general public—some rational choice, some institutional, and some symbolic—and that can explicate the relationship among them. To evaluate that relationship, the commentary develops a theoretical approach that draws on a multilevel rational choice approach developed by Arnold and modifies it to account for the limits of rational choice and the operation of symbolic politics for explaining voter attitudes.

The second question is prescriptive. The dimensions of appropriate strategy depend on the diagnosis of the problem. NAFTA's political problem demanded a multifaceted strategy, one that took into account the need to manage Congressional processes, to deal with traditional pressure groups, and most importantly to transform the interaction among members and voters.

The third question is evaluative. Although the evidence is somewhat inconclusive, NAFTA's advocates, after a slow start, appear to have done reasonably well in diagnosing the problem they faced and in devising appropriate strategies. Furthermore, these strategies likely made the difference between defeat and victory for NAFTA.

 

Theories of Congressional Action

To understand the nature of the problem faced by NAFTA's advocates as they entered the fall campaign requires a theory about Congressional voting, about how characteristics of Congress and the external political environment determine how Congress acts.

One possibility is to focus exclusively on the game within Congress, perhaps as a rational choice process among members playing by the elaborate rules that govern that institution. These factors were elements of the problem faced by NAFTA supporters—strategists needed to maneuver a bill through committees to get it to a vote—but this was ultimately not that hard a problem under the fast track rules. Moreover, a consensus of observers on both sides of the issue agreed that NAFTA would easily win a vote were it not for outside political pressures. Clearly, then, much of the problem lay in the way in which outside pressures affected members.

As discussed in Chapter 4, the dominant trade politics literature focuses on the role of concentrated commercial interests in influencing the actions of Congress. Scholars in the tradition of E.E. Schattschneider have identified the pervasive asymmetry between concentrated economic interests of producers and the diffuse economic interests of consumers. Historically, producers have sought and obtained protection for their interests, with the net effect being economically inefficient high levels of protection. But this was not NAFTA's problem in the fall of 1993.

First, concentrated protectionist interests were more than offset by concentrated free trade interests. A quick scan of the forces aligned for and against NAFTA reveals just how one-sided this lineup was. Against NAFTA were producers of a few agricultural commodities, some glass manufacturers, some small garment firms, a subset of the textile industry, ceramic tile makers, and a smattering of other smaller firms. For NAFTA were the Big Three automakers, the nation's biggest banks and insurance companies, the major pharmaceutical companies, big agribusiness, and all of the major business associations. The vast weight of concentrated economic interest was focused not just on “resisting protectionism” but in dismantling it. ₃₅ Second, to the extent that powerful concentrated losers, who had strong incentives to change the agreement or block it altogether, had allies in Congress willing to fight for them, the rules of fast track prevented them from doing either. If concentrated economic interests were the only political forces that mattered, this would have been no contest.

But this was not trade politics as usual. The strongest opposition was coming not from trade interests but from more general advocacy groups and, to a remarkable extent for a trade agreement, from the general public. To understand this problem, therefore, requires a theory that connects members of Congress to nontraditional advocacy groups, and ultimately most importantly, to the voters.

Connecting Voters to Congress: Arnold's Logic of Congressional Action

The question of the extent to which members of Congress concern themselves with the preferences of their constituents has occupied many scholars of Congress. ₃₆ Logically we would expect members to be most concerned with voter preferences when those preferences are likely to affect their prospects for reelection. Most of the time, however, the majority of voters are unaware of the issues, let alone how their member votes. Nevertheless, strong anecdotal evidence indicates that members do concern themselves with voters, even when current voter interest is small. ₃₇

It is possible to view both legislators and voters through a rational choice lens. In The Logic of Congressional Action, Douglas Arnold offers an elegant framework for connecting voter preferences to legislative decisions. His approach is quite similar to the multilevel negotiation framework developed in previous chapters of this book: Rational choices on one level of politics—in this case, the electorate—constrain the actions of actors on another level—here, members of Congress. Arnold's logic is quite straightforward:

1. Citizens establish policy preferences by evaluating both policy proposals and policy effects.

2. Citizens choose among congressional candidates by evaluating both the candidates' policy positions and their connections with policy effects.

3. Legislators choose among policy proposals by estimating citizens' potential policy preferences and by estimating the likelihood that citizens might incorporate these policy preferences into their choices among candidates in subsequent congressional elections.

4. Coalition leaders adopt strategies for enacting their policy proposals by anticipating legislators' electoral calculations, which in turn requires that they estimate both citizens' potential policy preferences and the likelihood that citizens might incorporate these policy preferences into their choices among congressional candidates. ₃₈

In Arnold's formulation, members care primarily about reelection. Only when the political consequences balance are members free to vote their policy preferences. They are extremely attentive to the preferences of their constituents, but the public's opinion at the moment of decision does not matter so much as the views of the “potential public” in the next election. Even when only a small circle of “attentive” publics seem to care, members need to worry that elements of the normally “inattentive” public could be stirred to action. ₃₉

Arnold's model assumes a tight connection between the actual effects of policy on voters' outcome preferences and their policy preferences. Each citizen “performs a miniature cost-benefit analysis for a policy proposal, incorporating all costs and benefits that might affect his or her own personal welfare.” ₄₀ Arnold acknowledges that most citizens don't pay enough attention to notice policy proposals as they come along, particularly when the likely costs or benefits are quite low. He proposes, therefore, the idea of an instigator. Instigators alert potentially affected publics to the effects of a policy proposal even when the stakes are low. As an example, he suggests Ralph Nader.

Ralph Nader helps to identify the effects of proposed bills and regulations on consumers' interests.Nader's contribution was not to organize consumers—a nearly impossible task—but rather to label legislative votes as pro- or anti-consumer. The media then disseminated these messages, challengers helped citizens reach the proper political conclusions, and suddenly a formerly inattentive public was alive. ₄₁

Taken together, the portrait of a self-interested electorate and of instigators eager to help the public recognize its latent interests suggests that members need to ask themselves two questions as they decide to vote:

First, if I were on the other side, could I figure out how to incite inattentive publics against legislators like me who voted on the wrong side? Second, are there, in fact, potential instigators who might mobilize inattentive publics against me? ₄₂

This way of thinking provides a very useful framing for the problem of legislators in the case of NAFTA. Members were quite worried about normally inattentive publics and about the possibility that instigators might incite them. Indeed, much of the guesswork about this possibility had been taken out the problem by the fact that during the August recess, when members were lobbied heavily by anti-NAFTA constituents, they experienced something of the way in which the issue might be used against them in their next campaign.

However, a model that relies purely on self-interested calculation on all levels presents problems. First, the portrait of how voters establish their policy positions does not conform either to the logic of rational ignorance or to observation. Even with instigators to identify categories of cost and benefits, actually conducting a cost-benefit analysis for most policy issues—certainly for something as complex as NAFTA—is itself prohibitively costly for most citizens (and for most legislators—more on this later). As Downs has shown, citizens have very little incentive to acquire information or to conduct the analysis needed to estimate the effects of most policies on their interests. As the previous chapter demonstrated, in these circumstances, the market, if it forms, will not be for policy information, but for symbols. To the extent that a third party, Ralph Nader for instance, helps citizens map from interests to policy preferences, the way in which he does so bears little resemblance to the logic of a cost-benefit analysis. Nader does not simply reveal the costs and benefits of a policy to consumers, he tells the public (or at least that segment with whom he has credibility) what a policy means. Nader is not just an “instigator,” he is an “interpreter.”

Second, it is unlikely that members of Congress perform the kind of calculated assessment of public opinion that Arnold describes. As he puts it the task is straightforward, although complex.

To reach a decision, then, a legislator needs to (1) identify all the attentive and inattentive publics who might care about a policy issue, (2) estimate the direction and intensity of their preferences and potential preferences, (3) estimate the probability that the potential preferences will be transformed into real preferences, (4) weight all these preferences according to the size of the various attentive and inattentive publics, and (5) give special weight to the preferences of the legislator's consistent supporters. ₄₃

Members are assumed to have a clear picture of where attentive publics stand, so the question is one of predicting whether (normally) inattentive publics will develop policy preferences. For Arnold, this task is made easier by the close connection between the actual effects of policy and the stance taken by constituents. Indeed, the political problem can almost be reduced to an economic assessment of costs and benefits, with the caveat that one needs to survey the landscape for potential instigators.

There are two problems with this model of how politicians evaluate the potential preferences of citizens. The first is theoretical and relates to the source of those preferences. If citizens' preferences are not solely, or even primarily, a function of the real outcomes of policy, but are rather related to the way in which policy is interpreted by and for them, then the method for anticipating potential opinion cannot be a calculus of the incidence of costs and benefits. The second objection is empirical. Little indicates that members of Congress assume that their constituents engage in miniature cost-benefit analyses and might discern the impact of policies on their interests. Members certainly worry about how an issue will be used to oppose them, but they fear how the issue might be framed by potential interpreters with an interest in spinning the story against them, not that their constituents will discover how their own interests are affected.

Arnold's two key questions for a legislator might be reformulated as: First, if I were on the other side, could I figure out ways of interpreting my vote that could hurt me in the next campaign? Second, are there interpreters out there (including most obviously my opponent) interested and capable of framing the issue to my disadvantage?

Answering these questions is more an act of imagination than of calculation, which introduces the possibility that members of Congress may be deluded in their apprehension of either current or potential public opinion. The proposition that politicians' estimates and projections of public opinion can be manipulated is supported by the obvious effort policy entrepreneurs make to do just that, for example when they flood Congressional offices with prepaid postcards, orchestrate phone calls, or publicize the results of carefully slanted polls.

Finally, there is the issue of the extent to which political calculations determine how legislators vote. For Arnold, only when the politics is a wash do members vote their own preferences. What precisely constitutes a wash is another question, given the uncertainty of political calculations, but there is considerable evidence that members do not simply vote to maximize their chances for reelection. The large number of members who have recently resigned from Congress should be sufficient to demonstrate the point. Ideology and altruism do play roles in legislative decision making. ₄₄

Amending the Logic: A Multilevel, Multimode Theory of Congressional Action

The preceding discussion has demonstrated both the strengths and the shortcomings of a theory of Congressional decision making based solely on interests. A modification of the theory is needed to account for the limited demand for policy information and for the use of symbolic shortcuts in the electorate, to allow for the possibility that members of Congress may misperceive public opinion given the difficulty of estimating it and the opportunity for manipulations of the signals on which they rely, and to acknowledge a larger role for members' policy preferences in determining how they vote.

As in the negotiator model applied in previous chapters, members of Congress have two arguments in their utility function, one for political consequences and one for policy preferences. Political calculations relate to the possible use of an issue in the member's next election. Since the position of attentive, organized interests is relatively well known, the problem is to estimate the likely stance of normally inattentive, unorganized publics. So far, the theory is largely consistent with Arnold. The theory departs from Arnold in five ways, however.

First, public opinion, current or potential, is only loosely connected to real policy effects. When the policy stakes are relatively low for individuals and policy effects are difficult to predict, policy preferences, if any, are less likely to be driven by cost-benefit calculations. To the extent that the general public forms preferences in these circumstances, those preferences will depend primarily on symbolically constructed understandings. Interpreters can shape opinion for publics with whom they have credibility.

Second, members of Congress estimate potential political impacts on (normally) inattentive publics based on ad hoc sampling of current opinion and on imagining the symbolic potential in the hands of a political opponent. Members ask whether the vote might be used to paint them as, for example, “soft on crime,” to demonstrate “flip-flopping,” to allege a “sellout to special interests,” or other such damaging framings. The task is to estimate the potential for a negative story.

Third, members' conceptions of current and potential public opinion can be and are manipulated by interpreters. Because members must rely on imperfect measures of current opinion—who shows up at the town hall meeting, the volume of mail for and against, the number of phone calls—and because of the inherent difficulty of anticipating how a story might play in the future, members are susceptible to plausible trial runs of the negative story.

Fourth, members care about the effects of policy at all times, not just when the political forces are balanced against each other. The greater the perceived policy stakes, the less important political considerations become. Members can and do vote against their political interests, even when those are reasonably clear to them. The relative mix of policy and politics varies considerably by member.

Fifth, members' estimates of policy consequences, which inform both their policy preferences and (to some degree at least) their calculation of political consequence, may or may not be accurate, and will reflect, in part, the way in which the issue is framed for them, not just for their constituents. Interpreters, therefore, may influence member preferences directly by influencing the meaning of an issue for members and indirectly by shaping meanings for constituents.

 

Diagnosis and Strategy

The theoretical framework developed above can be used to diagnose the problem faced by NAFTA's advocates in September 1993. That diagnosis suggests possible points of leverage for influencing members of Congress, which in turn suggests possible strategies.

Part of the problem did reside in Congress, particularly with the arcane institutions and processes that had to be followed for the NAFTA bill to become law. Part of the problem did have to do with concentrated economic interests opposed to NAFTA. But to a great extent NAFTA's real problem lay outside the traditional domain of trade politics, in the normally inattentive publics now attending quite closely to this unusual trade event.

At its core the problem for members of Congress was the perceived electoral consequence of a vote for NAFTA. Members did not have a hard time imagining how the issue might be used against them. Their encounters at town hall meetings in August and earlier in the year had demonstrated the form of the story that would be spun. In the next election, NAFTA would be associated with each job lost in the member's district, as well as with all that had already been lost. Members would be accused of selling out to corporate interests and foreign agents, of selling American sovereignty, of undermining environmental laws, and other charges. From what they could sense from their sampling of mail, phone calls, and personal contacts back in the district, their constituents were willing to believe these stories.

The theory sketched out earlier suggests some of the factors underlying this situation (and the potential points of strategic leverage for solving the problem). First, public opinion was not based on the real effects of NAFTA but on how it was being interpreted by normally inattentive publics, in large measure in response to the way in which its negative interpreters—Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, et al.—had spun the story. Second, members of Congress understood the state of public opinion and estimated the future shape of it very imperfectly. Their interpretations had been successfully manipulated by the packed town hall meetings, the flood of anti-NAFTA postcards, the volume of phone calls, and the absence of countervailing manipulation from the other side. Third, members' policy assessments were themselves only loosely connected to facts and analysis and had been strongly influenced by the negative framings provided by various interpreters (and by constituents with whom they communicated).

This diagnosis suggests the dimensions of a possible strategy. One dimension would involve managing the institutions of Congress, keeping the implementing bill out of unfavorable committees, working it through the trade committees, and using the rules of Congress to compel a vote. A second would involve dealing with particularly strong special interests, assessing the magnitude of the threat they posed, identifying what they wanted, and bargaining for their support. In the case of the sugar and citrus deals, this meant renegotiating parts of the international agreement. Another aspect of the strategy would require mobilization of those concentrated interests with a stake in supporting NAFTA. Most of the strategy, however, would need to address the larger public opinion problem.

First, if public opinion was not a direct manifestation of the actual policy implications of NAFTA but rather of its symbolic meaning as interpreted by NAFTA's opponents, public opinion could be changed. Change would require that NAFTA be reframed by a positive message, one that told a story about why NAFTA was good and why it was the right thing to do, and it would also demand a plan for communicating that message to the public through credible interpreters.

Second, to the extent that members' understandings of actual and potential public attitudes had been distorted by opposition tactics, what was needed was a grassroots campaign to alter members' perceptions. The campaign would need to generate postcards and phone calls, as well as persuade supporters to go to town hall meetings and drop by members' offices. Even more importantly, supporters would need to ease members' apprehension about future public opinion by providing them with language to defuse the opposition.

Third, to the extent that members' policy views did matter, what was needed was a campaign of persuasion that both changed the direction of views and raised the perceived policy stakes. Many members were concerned about the real consequences of NAFTA. As the results of the political calculus approached a draw, policy concerns might matter more. The bigger the perceived policy stakes, too, the less important political considerations would become in members' calculations. A strategy to change members' views would involve both provision of information and argument by individuals whose policy judgment the member trusted.

If the diagnosis was correct, these were the strategic levers available to NAFTA's advocates. The question is how well they actually understood the problem and devised strategies appropriate to it.

 

Diagnosis and Strategy in the Event

To what extent did NAFTA's advocates diagnose their problem in ways similar to that suggested by the theory? To what extent did the strategies used correspond the diagnosis? The record suggests that although the diagnosis was slow in coming, a critical core of strategists ultimately evaluated the situation with reasonable accuracy, and although the strategy was never totally coherent, the campaign put together by NAFTA's advocates was generally consistent with the diagnosis.

NAFTA's proponents only gradually came to realize the nature of the political problem they faced. The realization came earlier for some than for others, and an important part of the story concerns the efforts by individuals to persuade the key decision makers in the Clinton administration and the business lobby of what they were up against. From the beginning of the year, Senator Bradley, for instance, was counseling that this was not trade politics as usual, that instead this was a political campaign that needed a public message and a grassroots strategy. Media consultants Frances O'Brien and Paige Gardner fought hard to convince the business community that this was a different kind of problem requiring a different kind of solution. Inside the administration, Bill Daley urged the president to take the case for NAFTA to the public, convinced that this step was necessary and that public opinion could be turned around if the right themes were struck.

By September, the network of strategists in and out of the administration had come to a near consensus about their situation. Of course they would undertake traditional lobbying, and take care of particular interests wherever they could, as they would in a usual trade politics situation. Moreover, the trade experts would have to make sure that the institutional obstacles were overcome. But the real problem was in the apprehension felt by members of Congress about the political danger of a vote for NAFTA. The challenge was to convince members that a vote for NAFTA was not political suicide, perhaps even to raise the possibility that a vote against NAFTA could have political costs. Then, having neutralized the political problem, the strategists had to persuade members that NAFTA was the right thing to do.

The strategy they adopted conformed with this assessment. It was a strategy conducted on many fronts, loosely coordinated through the daily meetings of the core strategy group in the White House and through constant communication with business, other pro-NAFTA groups, and the pro-NAFTA strategists on Capitol Hill. It involved managing the policy making process of putting together an implementing bill. It involved striking deals with members and the interests they represented. But mostly it involved reducing the political pressure on members by changing public opinion, members' perceptions of public opinion (particularly how opinion might affect the next election), and members' beliefs about NAFTA.

To change public perceptions, NAFTA's advocates sought to tell a different story about the meaning of NAFTA. First, the story sought to combat the jobs issue by making it a matter of international competitiveness, thus reconfiguring the “us” and “them” in the economic parable. This was not the United States versus Mexico, it was North America versus Japan and Europe. Second, NAFTA was a foreign policy matter of overriding national interest, a historic opportunity to serve our interests by strengthening our neighbor. If we miss this opportunity, the problems in Mexico will get worse. Third, an attempt to spin the opposition, the vote on NAFTA was a test of the American character. If we defeat NAFTA we show that we are afraid to compete, afraid to embrace change. These messages were conveyed by credible interpreters—Bill Clinton, Lee Iococca, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Bradley among them—in television commercials, public speeches, talk show appearances, and op ed articles.

Altering members' perceptions of public opinion entailed designing a business-funded, targeted grassroots campaign to demonstrate political support for NAFTA in key districts. Here the object was not so much to change public opinion as it was to change members' perceptions of public opinion in their districts. The business consultants worked with local businesses to generate phone calls and postcards and to persuade people to go to town meetings. To help members anticipate how NAFTA might play in the future, the business community ran many commercials primarily in the Washington area. The purpose was to create the illusion that these commercials were running back in the home district so that members might imagine how their constituents were reacting to the messages and how they might react in the future. Of course, the significance of the Gore-Perot debate was not that so many people watched it and changed their minds but that it demonstrated to members how they might combat Perot on this issue in the future. The debate dramatically reduced the estimate of the threat from Perot on this issue in the next election.

The campaign for NAFTA was not only intended to alter the political calculus of members, however. It also attempted to alter their policy beliefs. Some members had firmly fixed views about NAFTA, either positive or negative, and some undecided members were almost exclusively concerned about politics. But a substantial number of legislators cared about the policy consequences and were struggling to make sense of this bewildering issue.

To persuade these members, the strategists first needed intelligence: How was the member thinking about the issue? With assessment in hand, NAFTA's proponents could then devise a strategy to change those policy perceptions. In some cases, the focus was simply on providing information. If a member had an incorrect understanding of the phaseout period for certain tariffs, or of the status of U.S. environmental laws, or of the procedure for invoking trade sanctions in a labor dispute, or any other aspect of the agreement, the administration would assemble and dispatch a brief rebutting the misconceptions. In other cases, the essence of communication was less factual rebuttal than signaling by credible individuals. If a member displayed a general concern about NAFTA's effects on jobs, the environment, immigration, drug trafficking, or other broad issues, individuals with credibility on those issues were detailed to convey the message. On jobs, Secretary of Labor Reich and President Clinton himself had considerable personal credibility (at least with Democrats). On the environment, the message might be conveyed by Vice President Gore or by a representative of one of the pro-NAFTA environmental organizations. On drugs, Attorney General Janet Reno or “drug czar” Lee Brown might meet with the member. If the concern was with human rights in Mexico, former president Jimmy Carter might call.

Much of the persuasion effort, however, entailed reframing the story of NAFTA for members in much the same way as for citizens. What the president said to undecided members in private did not differ substantially from his public rhetoric. The arguments that Al Gore used with such great effect against Ross Perot in their debate were the same arguments he would make to members when they were in the Oval Office. When Bill Bradley spoke to other members about NAFTA, he spoke about its strategic importance and its historic significance.

 

The Effectiveness of Strategy

Did the strategies work? This is not an easy question to answer. True, NAFTA won, but to the extent that any of these strategies were effective, the outcome was multiply determined. Moreover, statements by members about what influenced their vote should be taken with a grain of salt, since members have an incentive to downplay the importance of political calculation in their decisions. We must rely, therefore, on the insights of the experienced insiders who saw the process up close. The evidence, admittedly, is imperfect, but it suggests that the strategies worked.

The administration and the Hill strategists managed to cobble together a bill and navigate it through committees to a vote, although the process was ragged at times. The accommodations for sugar, citrus, and vegetable interests appeared to have secured a few needed votes, although some of those members may have been posturing to extract as much as possible from the administration. And the campaign to change the broader political climate for NAFTA appears to have accomplished its goal.

Public attitudes changed dramatically in the last few weeks of the campaign. This can be seen not only in the percentages favoring NAFTA in the polls, but in attitudes about the key dimensions of opinion that the public campaign sought to influence. By November, the jobs issue had been transformed to the point that a majority of Americans believed more jobs would be created than lost. The foreign policy implications of NAFTA were much more salient in voters' minds, with a majority believing that defeat of NAFTA would hurt the president's ability to conduct foreign policy. Moreover, Perot's stock had fallen precipitously. What exactly caused these swings is impossible to know, but it is certainly plausible to assume that the barrage of positive messages had their effect.

Did members' perceptions of public opinion change? Certainly, members' experience of public sentiment changed dramatically, almost certainly more dramatically than the actual change in public opinion. Mail that once ran 20 to 1 against NAFTA was almost evenly balanced by November. Delegations of supporters came by the office. NAFTA advocates started appearing at town hall meetings. How did members read this change? The best evidence here is what members were saying at the time, in private, to other members and others with whom they had contact. According to the whip organizations, members felt considerably less pressure by the end of the fall than they had at the beginning, or more accurately they felt countervailing pressure from the pro-NAFTA forces.

Did members' anticipation of future public opinion change? This question is hard to answer, but one suggestive fact is the hunger members demonstrated for pro-NAFTA messages that would work in their encounters with constituents, and another is the way in which effective messages seemed to buoy their confidence. The close connection between the Perot-Gore debate and the flurry of announcements in favor of NAFTA is also noteworthy. Many, perhaps most, who announced support for NAFTA in the next week would have done so anyway, but Washington insiders watching the debate knew instinctively that the game was up, not because public opinion would change or because members' assessments of public opinion would change, but fundamentally because the debate transformed how members imagined NAFTA playing in their next campaign. Now they knew how to combat Perot.

Did members change their policy views? Most did not, of course, but many appeared to have been persuaded. The extraordinary market for information stands as evidence here: This was not just a matter of the administration pressing information on members; many policy-oriented members actively demanded information from the administration and from their staffs. Members spent hours in discussion with each other, with trusted advisors, and with advocates. All this consumption might, of course, have amounted to little, but the insider judgment was that many members really did not know what they thought of NAFTA at the beginning of the fall, and their policy decisions were affected by information and persuasive argumentation. In the rhetoric that members used to describe their reasons for supporting NAFTA, one could hear echoes of the framings provided to them by the campaign for NAFTA. We should not be so quick to dismiss the statements of members that they voted for, or against, NAFTA because of what they believed it would do.

 

Conclusions

To diagnose NAFTA's problems in the fall of 1993 requires thinking across levels and modes of politics. What is needed is a framework that allows us to assess the nature of Congressional institutions, interest group politics, and symbolic constructions in the broader public; understand the complex interrelationships among them; and most importantly, identify the possible points of leverage in this system.

In the event, of course, the challenge was not just to diagnose the problem but also to devise strategy. Political analysts, thinking in ways similar to the framework developed in this chapter, diagnosed the problem with reasonable accuracy and devised strategies that made a difference.

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Endnotes

Note 1: Peter Behr, “Clinton Team's Lobbying Campaign Tries to Turn Corner on NAFTA,” Washington Post, 11 October 1993, A14.  Back.

Note 2: NBC–Wall Street Journal poll, September 1993.  Back.

Note 3: “Press Conference with Vice President Al Gore, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) and Representatives of Environmental Groups,” Federal News Service, 15 September 1993.  Back.

Note 4: “ABC World News Tonight,” ABC, 8 November 1993.  Back.

Note 5: John Harwood and Jackie Calmes, “Freshman House Democrats Feel Special Bind as Labor Applies Pressure for Anti-NAFTA Votes,” Wall Street Journal, 25 October 1993, A22.  Back.

Note 6: Ibid.  Back.

Note 7: Edward Walsh, “In Anti-NAFTA Push, Perot Builds Support Among Clinton Backers,” Washington Post, 19 September 1993, A8.  Back.

Note 8: Greg Borowski, “Lansing Rally: Perot and Riegle Blast NAFTA, Use Each Other,” Lansing State Journal, 20 September 1993, 1.  Back.

Note 9: “Perot Criticized for Trade Stand,” Chicago Sun-Times, 2 October 1993, 12.  Back.

Note 10: Gary Wisby, “Perot Crowd Disappoints Organizers,” Chicago Sun Times, 3 October 1993, 4.  Back.

Note 11: Chart, USA-Today, 11 October 1993, 2A.  Back.

Note 12: John W. Mashek, “GOP Senator Lashes Out at Perot, Says Billionaire Is Threat to Party,” Boston Globe, 10 September 1993, 7.  Back.

Note 13: J. William Middendorf, Jr., “Conservatives' Misguided Cases Against NAFTA,” The Washington Times, 15 Novemnber 1993, A19.  Back.

Note 14: “House Whip Says Votes near to Defeat NAFTA,” Reuters Business Report, 26 October 1993, 7.  Back.

Note 15: “News Conference with Representative David Bonior (D-Mi) Concerning NAFTA House Radio & TV Gallery,” Federal News Service, 26 October 1993.  Back.

Note 16: Keith Bradsher, “U.S. Says Chretien Will Not Undo NAFTA,” New York Times, 27 October 1993, A10.  Back.

Note 17: A year later, faced with almost precisely the same choice on the implementing bill for the Uruguay Round of the GATT, Hollings held the bill in the Commerce committee, forcing Congress into a rare post-election session.  Back.

Note 18: Mikey Kantor, Testimony Before the House Ways and Means Committee, 11 March 1993.  Back.

Note 19: “NAFTA: Bentsen Says NAFTA's $2.5 Billion Direct Cost Won't Be Offset by Taxes,” BNA International Trade Daily, 16 September 1993.  Back.

Note 20: Mark Z. Barabak, “One Ex-Opponent, Three Latino Groups Give Backing to NAFTA,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, 28 October 1993, A10.  Back.

Note 21: Hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Environmental Side Agreements of NAFTA, 19 October 1993.  Back.

Note 22: Mickey Kantor, Testimony Before the House Ways and Means Committee, 19 October 1993.  Back.

Note 23: Douglas Jell, “President Begins a Lobbying Blitz for Trade Accord” New York Times, 9 November 1993, A1.  Back.

Note 24: Thomas B. Edsall, “Are Labor Tactics on NAFTA Real Threats or ‘Tough Love’?” Washington Post, 16 November 1993, A24.  Back.

Note 25: “Labor Reacts to Criticism by Clinton On NAFTA Efforts,” BNA Daily Labor Report, 9 November 1993.  Back.

Note 26: “Crossfire,” CNN, 5 November 1993.  Back.

Note 27: “Nightline,” ABC, 11 November 1993.  Back.

Note 28: “Larry King Live,” CNN, 9 November 1993.  Back.

Note 29: ABC News poll, 9 November 1993.  Back.

Note 30: “Nightline,” ABC, 11 November 1993.  Back.

Note 31: NBC–Wall Street Journal poll, conducted 14–15 November 1993, released 16 November 1993.  Back.

Note 32: James Welsh, “Sugar Sours on NAFTA: LA Group Says it Can Kill Treaty,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 2 November 1993, D1.  Back.

Note 33: Kenneth J. Cooper, “NAFTA Split Parties, Crossed Political Lines,” Washington Post, 18 November 1993, A1.  Back.

Note 34: George Graham, “Trade Pact Vote Hanging in the Balance: Arm-twisting on NAFTA Will Go on to the Last Minute Before the U.S. Congress Decides,” Financial Times, 15 November 1993, 4.  Back.

Note 35: See Helen V. Milner, Resisting Protectionism.  Back.

Note 36: See for example Richard Fenno, Congressmen in Committees; John W. Kingdon, Congressman's Voting Decisions.  Back.

Note 37: See, especially, John W. Kingdon, Congressman's Voting Decisions.  Back.

Note 38: R. Douglas Arnold, The Logic of Congressional Action, pp. 14–15.  Back.

Note 39: This distinction was originally made in V. O. Key, Public Opinion.  Back.

Note 40: R. Douglas Arnold, Logic of Congressional Action, 28.  Back.

Note 41: Ibid., 69.  Back.

Note 42: Ibid., 70.  Back.

Note 43: Ibid., 84.  Back.

Note 44: Joseph P. Kalt and Mark A. Zupan, “The Apparent Ideological Behavior of Legislators.”  Back.

 

Interpreting NAFTA : The Science and Art of Political Analysis