NAFTA’S PERILOUS ROAD : The Vote Was Just a Taste--Now the Tough Part Lies Ahead

The North American Free Trade Agreement vote may be over, but the bloodshed isn’t. President Bill Clinton’s credibility has been saved, for the second time in six months, but when is he going to build it the old-fashioned way--by proposing legislation the American people want?

The U.S. economy and standard of living is already in trouble, and now we have to enter into a game of three-dimensional, three-nation economic chess. Meanwhile, U.S. politics has a new mega-issue: the frictions of North America, from Mexican sweatshops to Canadian ice floes, and the angst of making three economies into one. If the examples of Europe’s bitter 1992 European Community debates and Canada’s rejection of its pro-NAFTA government last month mean anything--the acrimony is only getting started.

Mexico is going to be infuriated by the United States, and vice versa. Canada may resolve its confusion by breaking up. Organized labor is a good bet to back a serious challenge to Clinton’s 1996 renomination. Ross Perot may not only run again, he may encourage Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader to join together on a fourth ticket to give anti-Establishment voters a second alternative. And Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, leader of the pro-NAFTA Republicans in the House, has just scored a big win for the Old Confederacy by repudiating the party’s Lincoln-era commitment to free Northern labor.

It almost didn’t happen. If NAFTA had lost on Wednesday in the House, the context would have been different. Clinton would have been badly embarrassed; organized labor would be trying to make things up and bury the hatchet, and anti-NAFTA forces would be reeling under charges of being responsible for worldwide crises in trade and the financial markets. Instead, we have a far different set of forces emerging.

For “North American” issues--relations among the United States, Mexico and Canada--are only now moving onto center stage, rather than exiting left in the wake of congressional NAFTA approval. These issues will get hotter, not cooler, as abstract debates turn into real legal and economic relationships.

Take the European Community as an example. The nations of Western Europe have been shifting from Economic Community to Common Market to something closer still for some 30 years. Only in 1992--as the ring bearers walked to the geopolitical altar--did most of the national electorates realize they didn’t actually trust each other. This summer, polls in Britain and Germany showed voters in both nations would have rejected Maastricht referendums if they were held--which the governments didn’t dare.

In Canada, the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney--which supported NAFTA and pushed it through Canada’s Parliament over the opposition’s objection--was wiped out in October’s elections. The new prime minister, Jean Chretien, says he wants to renegotiate NAFTA. It’s all not even close to ending; in fact, it’s only just beginning.

If jobs-worried Europe was dry tinder for one country’s economic distrust of another, North America is a box of gasoline-soaked rags. When the European Community decided to (slowly) admit Spain and Portugal, those nations’ wages were about half those in France. By contrast, Mexico’s current wage levels are only about one-tenth those of the United States. The idea that these two wage streams can be kept from finding a common level is implausible. No great economic power has ever set up a low-wage zone on its own border. We can only wait and see what happens.

But if it is a gamble for U.S. workers, it is also a gamble--a big one--for U.S. politicians. The Clinton Administration is completing a process that began 20 years ago: the Democratic Party’s estrangement from the values and concerns of working Americans. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, organized labor complained as the Democratic Party moved away from street-corner and American Legion-hall values to flirt with what conservatives labeled “acid, amnesty and abortion.” Now the process is being completed as Clinton rejects the AFL-CIO and working-class America to ally himself with multinational corporate and financial interests.

Labor leaders say they’ll get even--and they probably will. Of the Democrats elected to the White House since World War II, only John F. Kennedy avoided a renomination challenge. Harry S. Truman was beaten in the 1952 New Hampshire primary, and retired. Lyndon B. Johnson was almost beaten in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, and retired. Jimmy Carter fought off Edward M. Kennedy through the entire 1980 primary season, and then lost in November.

Remember that elements of organized labor helped Kennedy against Carter, and NAFTA has given them even more cause to oppose Clinton. Back in 1991, several labor leaders pushed AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland to have organized labor launch its own party. He didn’t then, and he almost certainly won’t now. But two names stand out as NAFTA opponents who might oppose Clinton in the 1996 Democratic primaries: former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. and New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.

There is even the possibility of some third-party activity in 1996. Jackson has been talking to dissident black Democrats in New York about a “Rainbow Party” for that state, and reports are growing that Jackson and Nader are talking about teaming up to mount a left-liberal fourth-party challenge in 1996.

As for the Republicans, they’re chuckling now--and with some cause--about the Democrats’ high rate of fratricide. The problem is that if more U.S. jobs head south, while more Mexican illegal immigrants head north, Americans will see NAFTA and the agreement’s GOP supporters as the same thing: failures. Save for Clinton, Republicans have been much more enthusiastic about NAFTA than Democrats--even though NAFTA strikes at the heart of the GOP’s heritage from Abraham Lincoln.

It’s ironic that Gingrich, the new House GOP leader, used to be a history teacher. Because he has led the GOP into a reversal of one of its proudest traditions. Back in the late 1850s, the new Republicans represented the rights of free Northern wage earners against the competition of slave labor in the South. Under Gingrich, the GOP has looked even farther south to find a new cheap and oppressed labor supply with which to undermine the rights of free Yankee wage earners. So does the wheel of politics turn.

For the moment, at least, Republicans and Democrats are also enjoying the evidence that the air has gone out of a certain small Texas billionaire’s balloon. Choruses of “Who’s afraid of the big, bad Ross?” have been heard all over Capitol Hill. Perot’s boasts, on Wednesday, that he and his troops would be riding after NAFTA supporters in next year’s congressional elections produced more snickers than sweats.

It’s hard to quarrel with the prevalent analysis: Perot’s mouth has gotten too big for his brain. His mishandling of his recent debate with Vice President Al Gore demonstrates he could equally flub the tactics and decisions of the next three years, when NAFTA’s progress or problems will be a central lead-in to the 1996 presidential election.

On the other hand, Perot’s bank account is big enough to support even his ambition. It’s worth remembering that, back in July, 1992, when Perot dropped out of the presidential race--after paranoid complaints about the Bush White House trying to mess up his daughter’s wedding--his ratings were lower than they are now. But Perot is a populist phoenix able to rise from multiple ashes. If NAFTA is as unpopular in the United States two years from now as it was in Canada just before October’s election, he’ll probably be able to do it again. If he does, a Perot with 45% national approval and 26% of the vote in three-way presidential trial heats will scare the same Washington politicos who now insist the Dallas rooster’s feathers have been plucked.

This brings us back to the new politics of North America. It sounds highfalutin and academic--but it’s not. The big issue is what happens to U.S. jobs and living standards. It’s also the second biggest issue. And the rest hardly matter.