Trade Still the Exception to Clinton’s Rule

In Bill Clinton’s long campaign to redirect the Democratic Party, international trade remains the bridge too far.

Although the battles have often been bruising and the support sometimes grudging, Clinton has been able to convince a majority of congressional Democrats to follow him as he has departed from traditional party orthodoxy on issues from the balanced budget to crime, educational testing and even welfare reform.

But as the House prepares to vote today on the president’s bid for expedited fast-track negotiating authority, Clinton is assured of opposition from a majority of Democrats--in all likelihood an overwhelming majority.

Though the advance vote counts remain razor-tight, Clinton still could squeeze out a victory with support from most House Republicans. But the prospect of a massive Democratic vote against Clinton shows both the limits of his effort to reorient the party--and the increased reliance of Democrats on organized labor, which is leading the drive against the trade measure.

When Democrats held a congressional majority, they attracted significantly more campaign contributions from business than from labor political action committees. But as business money has followed the GOP into the majority, labor has become the single largest source of PAC contributions to Democrats--and its voice has increased commensurately.

“Labor has obviously increased its influence in the Democratic Party since we’ve become the minority and the business community is either less engaged or less influential with us than ever before,” said one senior House Democrat.

Trade has always been a sore spot between Clinton and his party’s more liberal elements. In 1992, his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico helped prompt passionate opposition to his candidacy in the Democratic primaries from several industrial unions, particularly the United Auto Workers.

When Clinton completed the NAFTA agreement as president and submitted it to Congress in 1993, only half of Senate Democrats and just 40% of House Democrats voted to approve it.

Though Clinton has often been at odds with many congressional Democrats--especially in the House, which has been the stronghold of the party’s most liberal forces--the majority revolt against NAFTA remains very much the exception in his experience as president.

On each of the other signature votes measuring party support for his “New Democrat” centrist course, Clinton has been able to compel, convince or cajole a majority of Democrats to support him.

On today’s fast-track vote, though, administration and congressional vote-counters believe it virtually impossible that Clinton will attract even the 40% of House Democrats who backed NAFTA.

In fact, most observers believe that the best Clinton can hope for is support from about 50 Democrats. That would place Clinton’s support at 25% or less of the 205 House Democrats.

Two large factors and several secondary issues appear to explain Clinton’s predicament.

Perhaps the most important is the ferocious campaign against fast-track by organized labor, which has made the bill’s defeat its top legislative priority. “Labor is practicing the politics of intimidation either with outright threats or implied threats . . . that labor will withdraw any campaign support, either financial or otherwise,” to fast-track supporters, said California Rep. Calvin M. Dooley (D-Visalia), chairman of the New Democrat Coalition.

Labor officials deny threatening legislators. But they acknowledge that they have minced few words in making clear that unions will remember the vote when deciding how to allocate their resources next year. Those resources have become increasingly critical to Democrats, according to calculations by the Center for Responsive Politics.

In the 1994 election, when Democrats held the majority, their congressional candidates raised $67 million from business political action committees and $40 million from labor PACs. In the 1996 cycle, with the GOP in the majority, business contributions to Democrats plummeted to $44 million and labor’s increased to $45 million.

Translated to an individual level, Democrats who crossed labor to support NAFTA in 1993 believe that they received little support from business groups that backed the treaty, noted one senior administration official actively engaged in the search for votes. “A big part of this is the failure of Democrats to benefit from being pro-NAFTA,” said the official. “The basic Democratic calculation is ‘this is a bill for Republican constituencies--let them pass it, I’m going to vote with my friends.’ ”

For Clinton, a second large hurdle is public opinion. On his other key confrontations with the party base, Clinton generally had public opinion firmly on his side. But polling shows much more public hesitance about trade deals that accelerate America’s integration into the world economy.

Even Clinton’s allies believe that he set back his cause by focusing his fast-track lobbying effort on quiet deal-making with legislators rather than on a broad outreach campaign to sell average Americans on the value of expanding trade. He has been hurt as well by a hangover of disappointment over NAFTA, whose implementation has coincided with a collapse in the Mexican economy, revelations of widespread corruption in its government and growing concern about its role as a source of drug smuggling.

Finally, Republicans tightened the vise by insisting on fast-track language that curtailed Clinton’s authority to pursue labor and environmental agreements key to expanding Democratic support.

In the long run, few observers believe that today’s Democratic uprising foreshadows a broader revolt against the direction Clinton has set for the party.

But today’s vote could have greater implications for Clinton’s trade agenda, which has been central to his vision of foreign policy.

The strong statement of resistance from Democrats could make Clinton think twice about pursuing an aggressive trade agenda--even if he wins the authority to do so. “If they are trying to get a Democratic Congress elected in 1998 and Al Gore in 2000 . . . it seems to me that any kind of creative initiatives on trade would have been hard in that environment anyway,” said Bruce Stokes, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“And given these deep divisions in the party, it becomes even less likely.”