Bush Defends Trade Trip, Attacks ‘Prophets of Doom’

Taking to the road just 72 hours after returning from his grueling trip to Asia, President Bush on Monday defended the accomplishments of the trade mission and angrily told a major farm organization to ignore “those prophets of doom, those frantic politicians, who say we are a second-class power.”

“Don’t listen to all those gloom-sayers around this country saying that we are a nation in decline. We are, once again, the respected leader of the entire world. We are going to make the life of every single American better,” he said in a highly charged speech to the national convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

But Bush pointed to few specific accomplishments of the 12-day journey to Australia, Singapore, Korea and Japan. And a number of participants in the convention complained in interviews that he appeared to have achieved little to help American agriculture.

Indeed, Dean Kleckner, the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, plowed through a litany of complaints about Administration policies in a speech shortly before Bush arrived at the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium.

In the wake of criticism of the trip that began even before he left Japan last Friday, Bush sought to cast his critics, whom he did not name, as those who would run down the United States. The initial swell of criticism came mostly from congressional Democrats but also from some of the business executives who accompanied him to Asia. Also joining in the criticism has been conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, who is challenging Bush for the GOP presidential nomination.

Calling open markets “the key to our economic future,” Bush said:

“Empty-headed rhetoric won’t get us there. Hard work, savvy, experienced negotiation and confidence in ourselves will get us there--proud and strong. We won the Cold War, and we will win the competitive wars. We’ll do it on the merits and we are going to do it the American way--through grit, through determination and through quality.”

To those who said that he should not have taken the trip, Bush said bluntly: “They’re wrong.

“What I want to get is more fair access to the other guys’ markets--and that’s exactly what we got,” the President said. He acknowledged that the United States did not get everything it wanted. “But we made progress,” he said.

Still, his sales pitch, in what was officially a nonpartisan address but carried all the tenor of a political stemwinder, met with a skeptical audience.

Suggesting that Bush made the journey to enhance his political standing at a time when public opinion polls show less than 50% of American voters approve of the job he is doing, Donald Stephen, who farms 1,000 acres of wheat in Martinsville, Ill., said: “It was all window dressing and that sort of thing, because of the ratings. He was trying to make points and for me it didn’t work.”

“I don’t think he got too much, as far as agriculture is concerned,” said Larry Rutt, who raises wheat and sunflowers on 640 acres in Chappell, Neb. “I don’t think he got much of a door open for us.”

And Edwina Tavassoli, an accountant for the Missouri Farm Bureau in Jefferson City, said of Bush’s effort in Asia: “I don’t think we got any concessions at all. I thought he decided he had to do something for the economy and this was sort of a last-ditch effort.”

Nevertheless, Bush, animated in his delivery and making no mention of what the White House said was a stomach flu that caused him to vomit and faint during a dinner Wednesday in Tokyo, dished up the sort of free market approach that the farm group wanted to hear.

He criticized the European Community’s adherence to subsidies for farmers--a key issue that is holding up completion of a new world trade agreement.

“They stifle growth, burden the taxpayer, cost consumers and make industry less competitive,” he said. But he added: “I will not let American agriculture disarm unilaterally.

“We want to end export subsidies. But we will not do it until other nations do the same,” he said.

U.S. farmers actually benefit more from such subsidies than do their European and Japanese counterparts. According to Fortune magazine, the United States provides each American farmer with an average of $22,000 in annual production subsidies, compared to Japan’s $15,000 and the EC’s $12,000.

“Sooner or later, the EC must stop hiding behind its own iron curtain of protectionism,” Bush said.

While Bush and the farm organization see eye-to-eye on the desirability of opening global markets and ending tariffs to promote the sale of American agricultural products, Kleckner made it clear that his group has many differences with Bush.

Taking a hard line on the sensitive issue of wetlands protection, Kleckner complained about over-aggressive policies of the Environmental Protection Administration, seeming to call for even greater modifications than Bush himself has sought in once-stringent regulations. Revisions promoted by Vice President Dan Quayle in wetlands protections rules are now under consideration by the government during a period of public comment.

Similarly, Kleckner had strong words for Bush’s adherence to the 1990 budget agreement with Congress.

“Our government’s economic policy, if you could call it that, refuses to recognize the need to reduce spending,” he said. “We have developed a clear message to those who seek office in 1992. First, scrap the 1990 budget deal.

“We didn’t get a balanced budget from the budget deal. We all got snookered once again,” he said, calling for an examination of all government spending.