Clinton Maps an Uphill Battle for Trade Pact

President Clinton and his advisers, aware that their efforts to sell the three-way trade agreement with Mexico and Canada have fallen short, are cranking up a sales strategy intended to transform a potential trade policy clunker into a sleek vehicle of economic renewal.

It will be no small chore.

With his White House staff divided and the opposition remarkably unified, Clinton must convince a wary Congress that the North American Free Trade Agreement, in the words of one observer, represents nothing less than a “21st Century Monroe Doctrine.”

Just as James Monroe expanded the nation’s strategic horizons in 1823 by declaring the entire hemisphere off-limits to European encroachment, Administration officials hope to characterize the trade pact as a mutually beneficial compact that will help three neighbors compete with an increasingly powerful European Common Market.

The Administration’s marketing campaign will begin in earnest this week. Clinton is scheduled to kick things off in a White House ceremony Tuesday by signing two side agreements designed to protect workers and the environment.

Administration officials had planned to follow up by staging several high-profile, out-of-town appearances by the President. But those events apparently will be scrubbed, victims of a hastily arranged Middle East peace ceremony today and growing pressure to unveil the Administration’s health care proposals. The White House also has invited all five living past Presidents to take part in the initial activities, although it is not clear how many will show up.

To reinforce the President’s message, half a dozen Cabinet members will be dispatched across the country, part of a concerted effort to soothe regional fears about the potential upheaval that could occur when protective tariffs disappear.

The mission, said one White House official, is to call attention to the benefits the agreement would bestow on specific communities. Administration officials want to emphasize the points they think will draw strong support to counter the fierce opposition from communities that would be hard hit by the agreement. It is primarily a damage-control strategy, based on the assumption that interest in the debate will be limited primarily to those constituencies most likely to be immediately and directly affected, such as border states.

“What we’ve got to do is to begin to pull together some of the Administration pieces into a coordinated organization and get a message out there to the members (of Congress) and the public about the value of NAFTA,” said William Daley, a Chicago lawyer and Illinois political operative brought into the Administration to run the campaign.

The accord, the Administration will argue, is not the job-killer that its opponents say it is. As tariffs and other trade barriers between the three countries are gradually eliminated, any job losses within industries that benefit from protectionist policies will be dwarfed by a broad-based expansion of employment and commerce, they contend.

The pain inflicted on the few, in other words, will be more than offset by the prosperity bestowed on the many.

The emerging White House strategy, officials said, will seek to overwhelm high-profile opponents with sheer volume: Former presidents, governors, business executives and mainstream environmentalists will provide a steady drumbeat of messages accentuating the job-creating possibilities of the agreement.

Clinton and his lieutenants will try to search out about 75 members of Congress, now neutral or opposed to the pact, who can be brought around to the Administration’s side. While the precise breakdown remains in flux, with opponents picking off some lawmakers who once expressed lukewarm support and backers whispering the names of potential converts, it appears that the matter will be decided by a few votes. And the outcome will not be certain for several months.

The opposition has assembled a seemingly unlikely--but extremely broad--coalition. It has united such diverse political bedfellows as Ralph Nader and Ross Perot; AFL-CIO leader Lane Kirkland, and conservative activist Patrick J. Buchanan, who sought the GOP presidential nomination last year.

“The American people are somewhat confused,” observed House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), a congressional powerbroker who has lined up with the Administration to help sell the agreement.

The problem, according to supporters, is that the nation’s willingness to lower barriers to outside competition is greatest when Americans feel relatively secure about the economy and their own financial affairs. Protectionist sentiments tend to rise when the economy sours and the future seems uncertain.

With the country still struggling to mount a vigorous recovery, and with many corporations still shedding thousands of employees, the suggestion that the trade pact could cause even more job losses may resonate more loudly than it would during boom times.

“Is this going to reverse the 75,000 layoffs at Xerox or the 10,000 at Kodak?” asked a senior Republican who has advised the White House on political matters. “No!”

NAFTA, he said, should not be presented to the American public as a foreign policy issue, a national security matter or as a form of foreign aid for a needy neighbor. None of those are priority concerns at a time of economic uncertainty.

Rather, he said, it must be presented as a matter of “job security and income security,” based on the prospect that it would create a new, growing and increasingly middle-class market in Mexico for products made in the United States.

For Clinton, a successful resolution of the debate may prove critical to ending his first year in office on a positive note. The trade agreement is supposed to be ratified by the legislatures of all three countries by the end of the year and slippage could prove fatal. The other key issue that Clinton will deal with this autumn, health care reform, will remain unsettled well into next year.

The White House clearly sees the downside of losing, said a Democratic adviser with close ties to senior Administration officials.

At the same time, he added, the regional trade pact offers a real upside: Ratification would not only demonstrate Clinton’s leadership in general, it also would show that a Democratic President can successfully take on organized labor and other important elements in the party’s traditional coalition--and Perot too. The Texas billionaire has sought to rally grass-roots opposition to the pact.

Perhaps even more important in an era of public disgust with Washington gridlock, a victory would demonstrate to the doubters that Clinton has the ability to meld disparate elements in the capital into a bipartisan coalition that can support a major presidential initiative. It could place the President back where he worked so hard to be during the 1992 election campaign: at the political center.

Whether the Republicans will let him do that is a matter of some conjecture.

Joining the fight for the trade pact gives them “a place at the supper table,” in the words of former Rep. Bill Frenzel (R-Minn.), who has taken a temporary position as a special adviser to Clinton to help direct the NAFTA campaign. Part of the job, he said, is to convince fellow Republicans that the President is fully committed to the agreement.

But support for the pact also puts the Republicans in the position of bailing out a Democratic President with the crucial and potentially politically unpopular votes that his own party would not provide. Some are making clear their unwillingness to do that.

Some Republican lawmakers support the agreement but “don’t want to do the White House any favors if it’s going to cause them any grief,” said a well-placed GOP congressional source. “It would be nice for the President to get out there and take some grief himself. A little bit of leadership would go a long way with Republicans.”

As a crucial round of hearings begins in the House and Senate this week, said Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona, a Republican aggressively championing the trade agreement, “there’s good news and bad news” for the Administration.

“The good news is we’ve advanced the ball to the five-yard line,” he said. “The bad news is it’s our five-yard line.”

In other words, Clinton has a long way to go before he can score a victory.

Why is the Administration so far behind?

For one, Clinton was distracted early in the year by such issues as gays in the military, his failed economic stimulus proposal and personnel problems. Then, during the summer, he focused on winning passage of his budget.

The lack of attention gave rise to fears among the pact’s supporters that Clinton’s commitment was soft. Not the case, said a White House official.

“If he wasn’t committed to it, there would have been a dozen ways to duck out by now. . . . Nobody here thinks we could or should let this quietly die,” the official said.

But the limited attention devoted to the trade agreement by the White House also gave its opponents an open field, allowing them to define the pact as one that, above all, would hasten the flow of U.S. manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

Now the President must redefine the plan in politically acceptable terms and make clear his own commitment to it.

“The way it should be sold is this: For the first time we’re paying attention to our own back yard,” said a Republican political communication specialist who was close to the George Bush Administration.

“There is a European Economic Community. We are building our own economic community,” he said.

After Tuesday’s signing ceremony, Clinton’s immediate participation will be limited, while Daley directs a White House “war room” that will coordinate the communication strategy and congressional contacts, along with efforts by Cabinet members, supportive governors and business groups to build support.

The President is expected to take a more visible role after the initial flurry of events related to the unveiling of his health care initiative and later in the autumn when the House and Senate are closer to voting on legislation implementing the pact. The votes are not likely until late November or December.

Times staff writer David Lauter contributed to this story.