Bush Seeks to Put Asian Trade Trip in Best Light

The Bush Administration moved Friday to control damage from a presidential trip to Asia that produced few significant economic gains while turning into a painful demonstration of America’s competitive problems and Japan’s new willingness to defy U.S. demands.

Landing at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland after his 12-day travels, President Bush conceded that he “might have achieved more” on what he had cast as a mission to help the recession-plagued U.S. economy. But he asserted that it will produce dividends later in the form of increased jobs and business opportunities for Americans.

“I don’t think it’s a bust at all,” Bush declared.

Yet Bush has apparently drawn greater public attention to the economic problems bedeviling the country and virtually guaranteed that political opponents, in both parties, will continue to hammer away at his inability to protect American jobs.

As new unemployment figures were announced showing the U.S. jobless rate at its highest level in five years, White House Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner acknowledged that aides to Bush were “a little concerned” about negative assessments of the trip.

By all indications, the President will have a difficult time persuading Americans to view his trip in a positive light.

Beyond questions of presidential image, some critics suggested that Bush’s trip demonstrated a broad failure of American foreign policy in making the adjustment from Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union to the challenge of dealing with Japan’s growing economic power.

“Japan is the size of two Germanys. It’s the only place in the world that has real leverage over this country. And we don’t know what we’re doing,” said Chalmers Johnson, a UC San Diego specialist on Japan. “American economic thought is being shown to be as outdated and irrelevant as the Marxism-Leninism taught at Moscow University. (National Security Adviser) Brent Scowcroft sounds very much like Marie Antoinette talking about a lost world.”

Significantly, the trip also drew criticism from all sides of the rancorous political and economic debate over America’s trade policy.

Adherents of free trade and those who favor some form of U.S. government help or protection for American industries said they felt Bush’s mission to Japan had been a mistake. Free-traders felt the President had strayed too far down the road toward a policy of “managed trade,” while proponents of such a policy said Bush had accomplished very little.

“It’s a voodoo trade policy,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) “The Europeans finally arrived at the solution. They took action. What they decided to do was to say that there would be a limit of Japanese imports into Europe of 16% of their market until the year 2000. And the reason they did that is because they got fed up with the restrictions on European products that they were trying to sell in Japan.”

As the White House sought to muster a counterattack against the critics, what was to have been a routine arrival statement by Bush upon his homecoming Friday morning was transformed into an airport-Tarmac press conference. “We want to make sure that the positive aspects of the trip are being told,” Skinner told reporters after Bush had complained that “the coverage I read didn’t get much of that out there.”

The centerpiece of the trade mission was Japan’s commitment to a new goal, which has emerged gradually over the past several months, to add to its purchases of American auto parts by $10 billion over five years. In making his first specific claim about the gains generated by his trip, Bush asserted to reporters aboard Air Force One that the deal would result in 200,000 new American jobs over the next five years.

“I think there’s nobody suggesting anyone here is totally satisfied,” Bush said. “What I’m saying is that we’ve made dramatic progress and it will result in jobs for the American worker.”

In his long arrival statement, Bush argued that his trade mission should not be judged too harshly because it marked no more than a beginning. “When the time came, we took a major step forward. But it was only a step, one in a long process to open markets as open (as) our own.”

The speech served as Bush’s major statement outlining the mission’s achievements. Two other scheduled events, one in Tokyo and one in Washington, were scrapped after Bush fell ill Wednesday night. The President still looked tired and pale as he arrived in Washington, and his speech was for a time partly drowned out by the persistent whine of an alarm aboard Air Force One.

“This is the first effort,” said Charles Black, a senior adviser to the Bush campaign. “The average citizen understands things don’t happen overnight.”

But Clyde V. Prestowitz, a former Ronald Reagan Administration trade negotiator, said such promises of a new beginning sounded “like deja vu all over again. . . . I heard (former Commerce Secretary) Malcolm Baldrige say that, and I heard (former U.S. Trade Representative) Bill Brock say that.”

Prestowitz noted that under the agreement worked out in Tokyo, part of the increase in Japan’s purchases of U.S. auto parts will be the result of future increases in the number of cars to be produced by Japan’s transplant automobile factories in the United States.

After billing the Asia trip for weeks as one devoted largely to economic issues, Bush and his advisers came home Friday seeking to portray the trip as a mission devoted to issues broader than just “jobs, jobs, jobs.” While “the trade component got a lot of attention,” Skinner said, “This wasn’t just a trade mission, it was a trade-security mission.”

But some analysts contended that the reason Bush’s trip went so badly is that the security situation in Asia has changed with the end of the Cold War.

“What’s changing here is Japan’s reduced dependence on the United States,” Johnson said. “It is reduced in two ways. One, Japan no longer requires America’s nuclear umbrella against the Soviet Union. And two, with its new economic efforts in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, Japan has a reduced dependence on selling in the American market.”

Bush attempted to counter the attacks on his trip by contending that they were motivated by dangerous sentiments. “The ones that are sounding off the most are basically protectionists,” he said, using a label the White House has attached to some Democratic presidential candidates and to Republican challenger Patrick J. Buchanan.

But proponents of free trade seemed equally critical. “I think (the Bush Administration’s) efforts to help the auto industry will raise false expectations for other industries that they can do the same thing,” said William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute. “They can use the government to pressure other countries to make commitments to buy their products.”

The President seemed to put new distance between the White House and Detroit as his senior aides portrayed auto makers’ criticism as a desperate complaint. “The only concern was the auto industry,” spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said. “They’re our least competitive industry. They’re in trouble.”

Of the three auto executives who traveled to Japan with Bush, only Harold A. Poling of Ford returned to Washington with the presidential party. But as the White House sought to call attention to more favorable assessments of the trip, Poling did not join some of his fellow executives in praising the President.

Soon after his arrival home in Detroit on Friday, Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca said that Japan is “beating our brains in” and the United States must retaliate soon.

As for his health, Bush said Friday morning that he felt much better and had even eaten a bacon-and-eggs breakfast. “I almost went running today, but I thought, ‘Well, somebody would point out that was overdoing it,’ ” he said as he left Tokyo for the 12-hour flight home.

The President was to spend the weekend at Camp David resting and reviewing economic growth proposals to be included in his coming State of the Union address.

But with a contested Republican primary election in New Hampshire now just five weeks away, Bush’s attention will also turn quickly to politics. After spending 12 days in the Asian-Pacific area, he is to travel in the next 12 days to every region of the United States.

“The smartest thing the President can do is try to change the subject,” William Schneider, political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said Friday. “Everyone knows it wasn’t a wonderful trip, so shift the agenda to what he’s going to do about the economy--tax cut, health care. Build up some anticipation that he’ll do something about the economy. The best damage control is to change the subject.”

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this report.