House Anxiety High as NAFTA Vote Approaches

From the AT&T; cable-making plant in Phoenix to the parched southwestern landscape around Bisbee just north of the Mexican border, the pressure is building on Ed Pastor.

One of these days, the second-term House Democrat from Arizona is going to make a lot of important people unhappy: people who give money to political candidates and people who vote in congressional elections. Others will be pleased with him.

Pastor, a former high school teacher who gave up the certainty of the classroom for the vagaries of elective politics, is caught smack in the middle of the nationwide debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Like dozens of other members of Congress, he must choose between two politically unattractive alternatives.

Vote for the accord and risk losing the support of organized labor, which has contributed 20% of his campaign funds, and of environmentalists, who for nearly three decades sent his predecessor, Morris K. Udall, to Congress. Vote against it and alienate Latino voters--45% of his constituency--and business people counting on increased trade with Mexico.

Pastor’s predicament helps explain why the trade pact’s future in Congress remains so cloudy. Multiply his dilemma in congressional districts from Florida to Alaska, says political scientist Ross K. Baker of Rutgers University, and the result is “a really terminal case of fence-sitting.”

President Clinton, a vigorous promoter of the treaty, is confident that he has the support he needs in the Senate.

But the House is deeply divided--even the Democratic leadership is split over whether to support this central economic and foreign policy goal of the Democratic Administration.

Head counters believe that 120 House members, most of them Democrats, are still undecided, and it is they who are especially feeling the heat as the vote, scheduled as early as Nov. 17, approaches.

It is uncertain what impact the agreement will have on jobs, the environment and the overall economic picture in the United States, Mexico and Canada, the three participating nations.

Opponents express fears, very real to them, that the agreement’s removal of tariffs and other barriers to free trade would mean that Mexico’s lower wages and relaxed enforcement of labor and environmental standards would attract jobs now performed by blue-collar workers in the United States.

Supporters say that this picture is unrealistically bleak. They predict, instead, that removal of Mexican trade barriers--and increased production there of goods for sale in this country--would create an expanded market in Mexico for American products and an economic boom to pay for them.

And behind the fog of unresolved questions about the agreement’s long- and short-range impact lies a deeper anxiety fueled by the weakness of the recovery in the United States and the shifts taking place in the global economy at the end of the 20th Century.

The kind of pressure felt by House members varies from district to district. But it is almost uniformly intense.

In Democratic Rep. Jim Bacchus’ Florida coastal district, which includes Cape Canaveral, the aerospace and high-tech industries are solidly for the agreement.

“It would open up markets for their products. On paper, it would look like our district would have a net job gain,” says Brian Faith, Bacchus’ press secretary.

But what should Bacchus, who won a second term in 1992 with a margin of 3,539 votes, tell his other constituents, who depend on the district’s orange and grapefruit groves for their livelihood, and who fear that unprotected competition with Mexican citrus growers would force them out of business?

“That’s a legitimate concern, and we have to balance that,” Faith says.

All the way across the country, Rep. Norm Dicks, a Washington state Democrat, must struggle with similar pressure: on the one hand, from the aggressively free-trade Boeing Co., which supports the pact with Mexico and Canada, and on the other, from the politically active laborers whose unions--fearful that jobs will be sent south of the border--have stoutly opposed the pact.

In addition, an aide says, “the Sierra Club is very influential, and some of the other national environmental organizations that have had trouble with NAFTA are also big forces in the state. They will be influential.”

Here in southern Arizona, Pastor is finding out what most of his colleagues are discovering:

Proponents are quietly making their case on the basis of philosophical commitment to free trade and, more practically, on assumptions built around recent experience and economic models that greater international commerce means more jobs.

But opponents are applying direct pressure, reminding their allies in the Democratic majority, on whom the White House is counting, that they will remember how each member voted when the next election rolls around.

“What I’m seeing is that logic and intellectual reasoning are taking second place to raw politics,” says Bob Gonzalez of the Greater Tucson Economic Council, who recently visited Washington to lobby for the pact. “In talking to various congressmen, they’re telling us: ‘Look, intellectually I support NAFTA and other free trade issues. But I need to be reelected.’ It’s hard to argue with that.”

Given the nearly solid opposition to the agreement among Rust Belt Democrats--who are virtually united in their belief that the pact will cost jobs--and weak support in the 52-member California delegation, where the White House can count on only five of the 30 Democrats and about 17 of the 22 Republicans, supporters have little room to spare among undeclared members.

The fight comes down to anxiety over disappearing jobs versus hope for economic expansion, to intellectual arguments versus political muscle.

“The support is soft and the opposition is hard. A vote for it isn’t going to make or break you but a vote against it could break you,” says one senior congressional aide, so sensitive about the political ramifications that he does not want to be identified. His boss is an undecided member of Congress.

“There’s no real grass-roots support for this thing,” he says. “In talking to some of the business community, they say they’ll support it and send a letter. But is it a defining moment? No. . . . But you’ve got a lot of environmentalists, who are the most vocal, and labor too. They see blood on the water. They’re like sharks. They’re saying this is the one they can win on.”

None of that is comforting to a politician, such as Pastor.

“I have a difficult vote,” he says. “It’s one of those where it doesn’t matter how you vote. Someone’s going to be unhappy.”

Pastor, 50, spent 15 years on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors before handily winning the race to replace Udall.

In his brief time in Congress he has compiled a decidedly liberal voting record representing the Arizona district with the heaviest concentration of blue-collar workers and Latinos. But Arizona political observers agree that he is not an issue-oriented politician.

“Ed’s a real good get-along, go-along sort of guy, a good strong vote for the Democratic leadership who looks for the next golf game,” says one veteran of state politics in Phoenix. “He hasn’t staked out any issue area; he is more inclined to support his party or the unions.”

Which leaves the congressman, for the moment, up in the air, buffeted by the currents blowing from every direction.

He has heard, for example, angry voices such as that of Annie Rogers, who once earned as much as $28,000 a year making the spiral cords that connect a telephone and its handset at the sprawling AT&T; cable plant in Phoenix.

What’s wrong with increased business with Mexico?

“I got laid off because of it,” she says.

Now rehired, the 42-year-old widow supports herself and three children on a salary of $24,000 answering telephones as an AT&T; customer service representative. Much of the work she once did has been moved to Mexico.

“NAFTA,” she says, “does nothing for the American worker. It’s going to put money into corporate America and put the workers on the street. People with education will end up at McDonald’s.”

As for Pastor, or any other politician who favors the trade agreement, she says: “I wouldn’t support him and I would put the word out that labor’s not going to support someone who’s not going to support them on as big an issue as NAFTA.”

Several miles away in a downtown office building in Phoenix, John Badal sees it differently.

Badal is AT&T;’s Arizona director of government relations. His company’s business has expanded in recent years as Mexico has embarked on a six-year program valued at between $8 billion and $12 billion to modernize its communications system.

For the work, Mexico has left Swedish and French companies with which it had done business to use AT&T.; “We have received some extraordinary contracts,” Badal says. “It is our fear that if NAFTA is not signed, it would be taken as such an insult that they’d revert to previous providers.”

So AT&T; has joined with other businesses in the state to lobby Pastor and other members of Congress to vote for the trade pact.

In Bisbee, 10 miles north of the border, environmental activists such as Dick Kamp of the Border Ecology Project are focused on other issues: industrial and urban air pollution, open sewage ditches and contamination of ground water from unregulated agricultural spraying, hazardous waste dumping and “next-to-nonexistent workplace regulation.”

All, he says, may be undiminished by the trade pact despite the argument advanced by the Administration, and some environmentalists, that the agreement would provide greater environmental protection than any previous trade agreement. But most environmental activists have left little doubt about their views.

Throughout the district there is too the potential political impact of the Latino population, the largest in the state.

National polls suggest much stronger support for the trade pact among Latinos across the country than among non-Latinos.

“There is a growing unease and concern about whether the anti-NAFTA response is an anti-ethnic response and, the more that is raised, the more they’ll say NAFTA is good,” says Tom Volgy, a former Tucson mayor and now a professor of political science at the University of Arizona who ran against Pastor for the Democratic congressional nomination in a special election in 1991.

But, Volgy says, Latinos “are also worried about the loss of jobs and that makes life extremely difficult for a policy-maker, particularly a policy-maker (such as Pastor) who is Hispanic.”

At the moment, Pastor is giving strong signals that, in the end, he will vote for the agreement.

While opponents of the agreement have visited him several times, they have presented their case, he says, “from the perspective of jobs they think will leave the Rust Belt.”

“I represent a district in the Southwest,” he says, where arguments foreign to the Midwest are persuasive--such as the prospects for greater cross-border trade.

The agreement’s supporters say that they are just now beginning to make their case; that while Ross Perot, environmental groups affiliated with Ralph Nader and other opponents began their attack last spring, Clinton held back until supplemental agreements intended to add specific environmental and labor protections were negotiated.

But what is making the picture so muddy, says Charles Cook, a political analyst and editor of his own newsletter, is a dilemma in which real-life political expediency leads many to a vote against the agreement, but philosophical commitment to free trade leads many to favor the pact.

“The arguments against NAFTA are so much easier to understand. The story is more compelling. And the arguments for NAFTA require a leap of faith,” Cook says. “It’s more difficult for an average voter to sink his teeth into the pro-NAFTA argument than the anti-NAFTA argument.”

“The number of members (of Congress) who think long-term it’s the right thing to do is significantly higher than the number of members who are for it,” he says.

“In a time of recession, it’s very hard to sell any kind of controversial free trade agreement,” Cook adds. “The nicest thing you can say about it is it’s a good agreement with lousy timing.”