Clinton, GOP Miscues Seen as Key to ‘Fast-Track’ Halt

It wasn’t supposed to happen.

Not since the late 1940s had a sitting president gone to Congress with a major free-trade proposal and failed to prevail. What’s more, the proposal in question was for the routine trade-negotiating authority that all presidents have had since 1974.

The tacit defeat of President Clinton’s bid for “fast-track” trade legislation was the result of a series of mishaps and gaffes, not the least of which involved some spectacular miscalculations by the White House and its Republican allies.

The result is Clinton’s biggest setback since health care reform and a message that America’s 50-year commitment to free trade is in jeopardy--just when the country’s economy is booming and more competitive than it has been in years.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” said Harald B. Malmgren, a Washington trade strategist who helped write the 1974 legislation that first gave U.S. presidents fast-track negotiating authority.

Jeffrey E. Garten, dean of the Yale School of Business and a former Commerce Department trade specialist, agreed. “This kind of authority ought to be permanent. It’s part-and-parcel of a president’s foreign policy arsenal and it ought to be available to all of them,” he said.

But this president failed to push the legislation when lawmakers might have passed it with ease. He also failed to make the necessary case for it with voters.

Then, Republican leaders, whose party majority supports free trade, overplayed their hand by demanding visible concessions from Clinton on pet GOP social issues in exchange for extra votes. Although the giveaways were modest, they only strengthened Democratic resistance.

The mistakes were exploited by the labor movement and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), a likely presidential candidate in 2000.

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“Life will go on, but I think the United States is in a diminished position internationally,” said Julius L. Katz, a former deputy U.S. trade representative who has had broad experience in negotiating with other countries. “Ultimately, this will have broad repercussions.”

Opponents of the fast-track bill agreed--but with a decidedly different perspective.

“The rejection of fast-track means we can now begin the forward-looking discussion of creating a policy that goes beyond the narrow interests of the largest corporations to promote environmental protection, safe food and fair wages,” said Lori Wallach, director of the Ralph Nader-affiliated Public Citizens Global Trade Watch, which worked hard to defeat the bill.

By many accounts, Clinton began sowing seeds for this week’s debacle with his 1993 push for implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico and formation of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization.

Ignoring NAFTA until it looked as though the lawmakers might not approve the pact, Clinton oversold it as a potential job-creation machine--making it easy for labor unions to discredit the accord.

Worse yet, Clinton never adequately touted NAFTA’s successes. As a result, it got no credit for keeping Mexico moving toward a free-market economy, something that Washington had been urging for years.

Indeed, for most of 1994, the president virtually ceded the trade debate to protectionists such as populists Patrick J. Buchanan and Ross Perot. The latter predicted blithely that NAFTA would produce “a giant sucking sound” as it pulled U.S. jobs into Mexico. That never happened, but the image stuck.

Clinton several times passed up opportunities to push fast-track renewal through Congress when lawmakers thought it would win approval. In 1993 and 1994, he declined to take the risk--or spend the political capital.

In 1994, the administration botched a halfhearted attempt at renewal--reneging on a deal cut with the House Ways and Means Committee. The next year, when Republicans took control of Congress, the administration made virtually no effort to get the fast-track legislation passed.

The most recent missed opportunity occurred last spring, when GOP leaders promised Clinton quick passage if he would send the bill to Capitol Hill. He demurred again, contending that it would only interfere with the effort to renew trade preferences for China.

The warning clouds for the latest failure began to gather months ago, when the AFL-CIO launched a million-dollar TV ad blitz against fast-track and threatened to defeat any lawmaker who supported the measure. Gephardt led his own attack on the legislation.

Despite such warning lights, Clinton appeared disinterested--and aloof. By his own admission, he failed to make the case for the bill, either to the public or to members of Congress, leaving the opposition of labor and environmentalists virtually unanswered.

By the time the president sent the legislation to Congress in mid-September, many Democrats were locked into opposition, partly in reaction to the threat from labor. Already distrustful of the president, they refused to rally to his side.

It also gave Republicans an opening to use the end-of-session frenzy as leverage in demanding concessions on a wide range of issues. With nowhere to turn but the GOP, Clinton started cutting deals with a vengeance.

But Republican leaders found that they could not muster enough votes to offset the Democratic opposition. “There are a lot of protectionists” among the new crop of Republicans, one GOP strategist conceded.

Clinton strategists said that they hope to try again--possibly with a scaled-back version of the fast-track bill--next spring, but analysts said there is no guarantee that Congress will be any more willing to pass the measure then.

The last time Congress refused to approve a presidential proposal for new trade authority was in 1947, when Harry S. Truman sought creation of a new “world trade organization.” As happened this week, lawmakers balked so badly that Truman had to abandon the effort.

That was not supposed to happen either, but Truman eventually got his way. In 1994, Congress finally approved U.S. entry into a new WTO, which replaced the “interim” organization that continued for 47 years after U.S. lawmakers refused to sanction the original version.

* QUEST NOT DEAD

Clinton says quest for trade authority isn’t over. A23