Clinton Links Free Trade, Jobs at Summit : Speech: President also lauds his own domestic economic policies.

President Clinton opened the first summit meeting of Western Hemisphere leaders in a generation Friday with a call for a new free-trade “partnership for prosperity”--plus a plea to U.S. voters to credit him with the creation of millions of new jobs.

In a speech to Florida political, business and civic figures before he plunged into talks with the leaders of 33 other countries, Clinton said the weekend’s giant meeting will cement a new kind of relationship between the United States and its newly democratic and prosperous neighbors to the south.

“History has given the peoples of the Americas a dazzling opportunity to build a community of nations committed to the values of liberty, progress and prosperity,” he said.

But he also delivered a fervent domestic political pitch, saying his economic policies are working better than most Americans realize--in part through the creation of free-trade areas like the one that will be this summit’s centerpiece.

“If we’re successful, the summit will lead to more jobs, opportunity and prosperity,” Clinton said. “If we act wisely, then we can make this new world work for us. Trade can be a benefit for our people.”

Seeking to link his economic diplomacy and his domestic agenda, the President noted that increased U.S. exports create high-wage jobs--and may even have begun to halt the 20-year stagnation in real wages that he has long decried.

“We hope that we are seeing the beginning of the end of a 20-year trend in stagnant wages, and the beginning of the restoration of the American dream by reaching out to the world,” he said.

“Every American worker in every part of the United States should be glad that we are here at the Summit of the Americas,” he added.

A Central American official at the summit said Latin governments understand Clinton’s need to pitch his message to a U.S. domestic audience.

“We saw the election returns just as you did,” he said.

Still, the President’s decision to scrap an initial draft of his speech, which concentrated on the advances of democracy in Latin America, and turn it into a domestic political message reflects a resolve in the White House to turn every occasion to Clinton’s most urgent priority: rehabilitating his appeal to voters who elected him in 1992 but turned away in 1994.

“This has been our message for a long time,” White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers said, “but it hasn’t been noticed. So he has to keep making the point.”

From a public-image standpoint, other officials noted, Clinton won’t have many opportunities during the summit to address domestic issues, since his appearances will be tied more closely to the meeting’s core agenda: free trade, democracy and economic development.

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Officials said they expect Clinton, as the summit host, to make two major announcements during the weekend: the leaders’ agreement to begin work toward an Americas Free Trade Area, to be in place by the year 2005, and an immediate invitation to Chile to join the United States, Mexico and Canada in the year-old North American Free Trade Agreement.

Chile is being allowed into NAFTA first because it is “further along with economic reform (and) with an open economy than other countries in the region,” Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown said. Chile was given a choice between joining NAFTA or negotiating a separate free-trade agreement, and it decided simply to adhere to the accord already in place, he said.

According to drafts of their expected declarations that have circulated widely, the summit leaders also plan to launch new cooperative efforts to curb drug trafficking and money laundering, protect the environment and promote human rights, education and health.

But Clinton barely mentioned those efforts in his speech, concentrating instead on selling the benefits of wider trade to a wary U.S. public.

The new, hemisphere-wide free-trade area could help create more than a million new jobs, he said--”good-paying jobs; on average, export-related jobs pay 17% more than average wages.”

White House officials distributed a fact sheet saying U.S. exports to Latin America accounted for 1.3 million jobs last year and produced a trade surplus of more than $4 billion.

Clinton’s comment that the 20-year period of stagnating real wages might be ending appeared to be something of a throwaway line. But it reflected his search for a new way to persuade voters that the economy has changed for the better under his Administration.

Asked about the long-term trend in wages, Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich said the picture was, in fact, mixed; well-educated workers are seeing their incomes increase while unskilled workers are seeing theirs decline, he said. Other economists dispute the idea that wages have been flat, saying total compensation has in fact increased over the last two decades.

The Summit of the Americas, as it is officially named, is the first gathering of the leaders of the Western Hemisphere since 1967, when then-President Lyndon B. Johnson traveled to a similar meeting in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

Clinton pointed out that in 1967, 10 of the nations of the Western Hemisphere lived under dictatorships of the left or right. Today, after the restoration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as Haiti’s elected president, every independent country in the hemisphere is democratic--with the sole exception of Communist-ruled Cuba, whose leader, Fidel Castro, was not invited.

In his speech at the Jackie Gleason Theater for the Performing Arts in Miami Beach--once the site of the rotund comedian’s television revue--Clinton drew his biggest applause from the Florida audience when he reaffirmed the U.S. policy of economic pressure on the Castro regime.

“We support the Cuban people’s desire for peaceful democratic change,” he said. “And we hope by the next time we have one of these summits . . . a democratic Cuba will take its place at the table of nations.”