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

 

Preface

In August 1992, I took leave of my position at Duke University to spend what I expected to be a year in Washington, D.C. I had won an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations, a program designed to take young scholars away from academia and expose them to the world of actual foreign policy making. Because my academic interests were in international negotiations, specifically the relationship between domestic politics and international processes, my hope was to find a perch close to the action for the biggest international negotiation going: the negotiation among the United States, Mexico, and Canada to reach a North American Free Trade Agreement, more commonly known as NAFTA.

The natural place to be was at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), the lead agency for international trade negotiations, where a number of previous Council fellows had worked. But by the summer of 1992, when I had to decide where to locate, the NAFTA negotiations appeared to be nearing the end, which meant that the next hot arena would likely be the Congress. I had not really considered working on the Hill, but I learned that Senator Bill Bradley was looking for a fellow to handle foreign policy matters and that he intended to be involved with NAFTA when it came to Capitol Hill. My colleagues warned me that being a fellow in a Senate office might not involve much actual contact with the senator and that there was no guarantee that Bradley, only the fourth ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, would actually be a pivotal player, but the prospect of working for Bill Bradley was alluring.

As a young man, I had played basketball—on a club team at Harvard and then for one year in a semi-pro league in England—hardly the level of Bradley's brilliant Princeton and NBA careers, but enough to feel some kinship. I had read John McPhee's homage to Bradley at Princeton, A Sense of Where You Are, and Bradley's autobiography of life in the NBA, Life on the Run. Later, I had admired Bradley's career in the Senate and, like many Americans, saw him as one of the most attractive political figures of our time. At Duke, I often assigned my politics classes the book Showdown at Gucci Gulch, an account of the 1986 tax reform effort in which Bradley plays a starring role. Bradley was a personal hero, and when I was offered the position, I could not turn it down.

Seeing one's hero up close is risky. Certainly few of the political heroes of my youth have held up well to close scrutiny. But my time with Bradley did nothing to diminish my admiration for him. He is demanding and sometimes intimidating, but he is also extraordinarily disciplined, principled, and intelligent. He is what he seems to be: a political figure less interested in the pursuit of power than in the uses of power for public good. The decision to work for Bradley did not cost me a hero, and, as it happened, I could not have chosen a better spot to observe the politics of NAFTA.

I came to Washington favoring NAFTA. I thought then and now that it was good policy, that it would produce economic benefits for the United States and few of the costs alleged by its critics, that on balance it would do more good than harm to the environment, and that it was important for U.S.-Mexican relations. Bradley was even more deeply committed. He had been interested in Mexico since his involvement with the Mexican debt crisis of the early 1980s. As was his style, he had systematically taught himself about Mexico: reading Mexican history, making annual trips to talk with a wide circle of Mexicans, and keeping abreast of the current political and economic scene in Mexico. He saw in NAFTA not just a sensible trade agreement but a historic opportunity, a unique chance to redefine U.S.-Mexican relations. He was determined not to let the opportunity pass.

From the moment I arrived that August, Bradley was deeply engaged with NAFTA. When candidate Clinton appeared to be wavering, Bradley talked at length with him, arguing that NAFTA was both good policy and good politics. When the process of negotiating side negotiations created a political vacuum of support in 1993, he thought of ways to lay the groundwork for the eventual campaign for NAFTA. When the side negotiations foundered, he intervened to help find common ground, eventually personally brokering some of the final deals. When Finance Committee Chairman Moynihan decided to oppose NAFTA, creating a leadership vacuum in the Senate, Bradley stepped forward as the de facto leader, forming a bipartisan group to make the case for NAFTA to his colleagues. And when at the end it became apparent that the vote in the House of Representatives was the key obstacle, Bradley did what he had done during the tax reform effort seven years earlier: he walked over to the House side of the Capitol to personally persuade undecided representatives.

Bradley's engagement thrust me into the middle of a political maelstrom. I quickly discovered that I was not only going to get to observe the politics of NAFTA, I was going to be a participant in them. In my first weeks, a memo I wrote on why Clinton should support NAFTA was faxed to Little Rock. As the side negotiations proceeded, I talked constantly with officials at the office of the United States Trade Representative; staffers on the Hill; environment, labor, and business lobbyists: and Mexican and Canadian officals, trying to assess where the pitfalls were and to suggest when and how Senator Bradley might need to intervene. With Amy Dunathan of Senator Chafee's office, I organized the ad hoc whip effort in the Senate, tracking the projected vote count, assembling profiles of undecided members, distributing information and arguments to other Senate offices, and coordinating with the White House and business community efforts. And I monitored the public politics of NAFTA, keeping on top of the press coverage and public opinion polls, assessing the nature of the larger political problem facing NAFTA as the congressional vote neared, and discussing with Senator Bradley and other NAFTA advocates strategies for solving it. By the end of my fellowship in August 1993, I was too deeply involved to leave and decided to continue through the fall, commuting weekly from Durham.

All this was heady stuff for an academic normally safely distant from events. To be in the East Room of the White House with Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush for the “kickoff” of the fall campaign for NAFTA was exhilarating. (I was standing in the back, squeezed against the wall.) To have the Senate vote count on my computer, to be receiving more phone calls than I could possibly return, to be in the middle of the biggest game in town were all very exciting. When NAFTA passed, I felt the kind of thrill I once got from winning a championship basketball game. I suspect Bradley felt much the same.

This book clearly grows out of my personal engagement with NAFTA, but I have tried not to write merely a personal account. My goal has been to write NAFTA's story, not mine. When I returned to Duke, I decided that I wanted to put my experience in a larger context, to understand as best I could the political process in which I had been a minor player. To that end, I assembled thousands of newspaper articles, hearing transcripts, press releases, reports, advertisements, and other documents about NAFTA, and interviewed nearly two hundred participants on both sides of the issue. Out of this I gained an even greater appreciation for the extraordinary complexity and richness of the politics of NAFTA, and I learned much that would have been helpful to me at the time. I also developed great respect for professional historians, who must take the innumerable fragments of history and try to make of them a story that is at once compelling and fair. I have tried to do this in telling the NAFTA story.

This book also reflects my personal experience in a second way, the experience of trying to live in two worlds—the academic and the political—and a desire to reconcile them. This is not an easy thing to do. At about the time I began work in Bill Bradley's office, I published an article in International Organization, a respected academic journal, that used highly abstract game theoretic techniques to make an argument about the relationship between domestic politics and international negotiations. Being understandably proud of the article, I gave a copy to one of my colleagues in the office. I never made that mistake again. The article, with its elegant and abstract economic illustrations, was paraded about to hoots of laughter, and became the source of good-natured joking for the rest of my time in Washington.

When I returned to academia and began thinking about writing a book, I found myself asking what of the academic literatures I knew might actually be useful to practitioners. What of my training had been useful to me? As I reflected on the reaction to my article, I came to the conclusion that my Hill colleagues were at least partly wrong. The kind of abstract spatial modeling that I had learned in graduate school from my mentor Howard Raiffa had, in fact, been quite useful to me as a political strategist. I found that thinking in this way often helped me to identify what was important, formulate useful questions, and think strategically. And although the language was foreign to practitioners, in truth the concepts were not too far from the intuitive understandings of experienced negotiators and lobbyists. But this kind of thinking was far from sufficient.

First, to understand what was going on and to operate in the political arena, I needed to know a lot about the institutional context in which I was working. I had to learn how Congress works, how its committees are structured and operate, what the “fast track” process really did, what informal rules governed interactions between senators, who talked to whom, and much more. I had to learn how the executive branch is organized to negotiate trade agreements and to deal with Congress, which agencies handled what, how they operated, and who really knew what was going on. And I had to learn about the political institutions and habits of Washington, who the lobbyists were and where they were coming from, which groups could cause trouble or give help, how information gets around, and much more. I left Washington with a renewed appreciation for the importance of political institutions.

Second, to make sense of what I was observing as the politics of NAFTA heated up, I had to recognize that this was not just about interests. Rational choice theories of politics are predicated on the assumption that individuals are motivated by interests. But how could I understand the extraordinary level of opposition to NAFTA—my meetings with angry union leaders, the burning of Bill Bradley in effigy by a chapter of United We Stand America, the shrill warnings that NAFTA would destroy the environment—in these terms? How could a trade agreement that would likely have only modest effects on the United States induce such vehement opposition? As I listened to the opposition, I came to see that it was not so much what NAFTA was that mattered, but what it symbolized. I found that thinking in terms of framing, narrative construction, and other sociological concepts not only helped explain what I observed, but suggested strategies for addressing the problem. I left Washington with a new appreciation for the importance of symbolic politics.

These reflections about what a political strategist needs to diagnose political problems and to prescribe political strategies are reflected in the analytic framework developed in this book. The framework draws on several literatures in political science, economics, and sociology. There is indeed quite a bit of academic literature of value for the practitioner. But the value comes from judicious application of multiple lenses, not from the pursuit of single theories about the way politics works.

I have received help from many quarters in writing this book. The Council on Foreign Relations provided me with an invaluable fellowship without which this would not have been possible. Mike Aho, then director of economic studies at the Council, and a former Bradley aide, involved me in a NAFTA study group supported by the Ford Foundation, which has generously supported the subsequent research for this book.

I am grateful to the many people with whom I worked in Washington, from whom I learned an enormous amount, and who consistently demonstrated generosity, patience, good humor, and professionalism. Among these were Bradley legislative directors Ken Apfel and later Trudy Vincent; Bradley aides Mike Dahl, Mark Schmitt, and John Depres; former aide Gina Depres; my interns, Greg Pogarsky and later Heather Miller; the staff of the Senate Finance Committee, particularly majority counsel Marsha Miller and her assistants Eric Biele and Debbie Lamb, and minority counsel Brad Figel; Senate staffers Amy Dunathan, Seth Brewster, Kevin Dempsey, and Bill Reinsche; and my counterpart in the House, Matsui aide Diane Sullivan; the tremendously professional and dedicated staff at the USTR, including Chip Roh, Bryan Samuel, Ira Shapiro, and Nancy Leamond; Bob Kyle at the National Security Council; and many individuals in the advocacy community with whom I interacted, including business strategists Sandy Masur, Ken Cole, and Gail Harrison, and environmental strategists Doug Siglin and Ken Berlin.

I am enormously grateful to the many people I interviewed, who without exception gave generously of their time and spoke with candor. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in the book come from these interviews. I am particularly indebted to Chip Roh, whose careful reading of the manuscript saved me from innumerable errors. I am also grateful to my colleagues at Duke, my department chairs Bruce Kuniholm and Phil Cook for their consistent encouragement, and especially to Jay Hamilton, Jim Miller, and Rob Sprinkle for their most helpful comments on early drafts. I am indebted to Mac Destler, George Downs, Peter Katzenstein, John Odell, and Carol Wise for their supportive comments and gentle criticisms. I thank also my terrific students at Duke, who heard much more than they wanted about the politics of NAFTA, two of whom—Jenny Schulstad and Michael Campbell—served as research assistants.

Finally, and most important, I am deeply grateful to my wife Mary Kay Delaney, and our three boys, Paul, Michael, and David, who together endured a move to Washington and back and many late nights thereafter with great good cheer. Mary Kay did much more than endure, however. Our conversations about her own work in the anthropology of education contributed enormously to my thinking about the usefulness of constructivist approaches to political analysis and to the nature of theory for practice.

Frederick W. Mayer
December 3, 1997

 

Interpreting NAFTA : The Science and Art of Political Analysis